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The Geoheliocentric Mathematical Hypothesis in Sixteenth-Century Planetary Theory*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Christine Schofield
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Extract

It has become generally accepted that the earliest geoheliocentric representation of the planets' motions in which the majority of the planets orbited about the Sun appeared in 1588. For in this year the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe announced his discovery of a new system of the world, in which Sun and Moon moved about the Earth, and the five planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn performed their motions about the Sun. Yet the accompanying figure, which depicts a planetary arrangement in general identical with that of Tycho, occurs in a manuscript prepared at least a year before Tycho's publication of his system. Moreover, the author of the manuscript derived this representation of the planets' motions not from Tycho, but rather from Copernicus. The aim of this paper is to show that as a result of the work of Copernicus, a number of sixteenth-century mathematicians produced treatments of the planetary motions similar to the system proposed by Tycho in 1588.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 2 , Issue 4 , December 1965 , pp. 291 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1965

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References

1 Rothmann, Christopher, Astronomia, in qua hypotheses Ptolemaicae ex hypothesibus Copernici corriguntur et supplentur: el imprimis intellectus et usus tabularum Prutenicarum declaratur et demonstratur. Murhardsche Bibliotek der Stadt Kassel, Ms. astron. 11, 9.Google Scholar

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6 Loc.cit.

7 Johnson, Francis R., “Astronomical Textbooks in the Sixteenth Century”, Science, Medicine and History (2 vols., London, 1953), i, 285.Google Scholar

8 See reference (1) above.

9 Brahe, Tycho, Opera Omnia, ed. Dreyer, J. L. E. (15 vols. Copenhagen, 1913–1929), vi, 118–119.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., vi, 119.

11 The original manuscript, accompanied by one copy, is at the Biblioteca Centrale, Florence. A more complete copy may be found in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

12 Viète, , original MS., 158.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., 2.

14 Ibid., 97.

* Reference to the ellipse had been made earlier in the particular case of the planet Mercury. The similarity to an ellipse of the curve described by the centre of this planet's epicycle was noted by the Islamic writer of the eleventh century. Azarquiel. Georg Peurbach, whose planetary theory was almost entirely dependent upon Islamic sources, described this curve in the fifteenth century as “a kind of oval”. See Hartner, Willy, “The Mercury Horoscope of Marcantonio Michiel of Venice”, Vistas in Astronomy, ed. Beer, Arthur (London and New York, 1955), i, 118.Google Scholar

15 Tycho, . op. cit., vi, 178–179.Google Scholar