Aristarchus of Samos was one such astronomer. Unfortunately, the idea was far too radical to be accepted. The religious principles at the time of antiquity were rooted in the notion the sun revolved around the earth. Also, the work of Aristotle was very influential during the era and he professed the notion that any and all objects move towards the center of the earth.
How he was able to come up with such a theory is not completely known. The reason is much of his work has been lost. Sadly, a great deal of the work of many of the ancient astronomers and mathematicians is long gone.
The fall of Greece and the later fall of Rome and its sacking saw a great deal of the records lost or ruined. We do know of the heliocentric model of Aristarchus due to its reference in the work The Sand Reckoner by another famous name from antiquity, Archimedes of Syracuse Born circa B.
Based on what we know of the man, records indicate Aristarchus employed many modern geometric methods in formulas designed to measure celestial bodies.
He also came up with an overestimation of the distance between the moon and the earth. The figures in which he offered were not outrageously erroneous. However, his was incredibly off with his measurement of the distance between the moon and the sun. In any case, Aristarchus's attempt to measure solar and lunar distance had a far greater influence on his successors than did his heliocentric theory. The standard work on Aristarchus is Sir Thomas L.
Heath, Aristarchus of Samos, the Ancient Copernicus ; reprinted, A chapter on Aristarchus appears in J. All rights reserved. Heliocentric System Though Aristarchus is known to have written on problems of vision, light, and color, his primary work was in astronomy, specifically on the interrelations of the sun, moon, and earth.
Relative Sizes of the Sun and Moon In his treatise On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon, using Euclid's laws of proportions, Aristarchus seeks to define the limits of the ratios of the sizes and distances of the sun, moon, and earth to each other. Influence of Aristarchus Aristarchus is often called the "Copernicus of antiquity. Both these estimates were an order of magnitude too small, but the fault was in Aristarchus's lack of accurate instruments rather than in his correct method of reasoning.
The diagram shows an argument used by Aristarchus. He knew that the moon shines by reflected sunlight, so he argued, if one measured the angle between the moon and sun when the moon is exactly half illuminated then one could compute the ratio of their distances. Of course, we have translated this into modern notation for Aristarchus did not use degrees nor had trigonometry been invented so he did not have the sine function at his disposal. However this is in effect the calculation he made, correct in principle yet almost impossibly difficult to observe in practice since determining the moment at which half illumination of the moon occurs can only be very inaccurately found.
References show. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica. T L Heath, Aristarchus of Samos. The ancient Copernicus : Reprint of the original New York, Berlin-Heidelberg-New York, Storia Sci. M Gabriel, Les theories heliocentriques dans l'antiquite grecque, Ciel et terre : bulletin de la Societe belge d'astronomie et revue populaire d'astronomie, de meteorologie et de physique du globe , - O Gingerich, Did Copernicus owe a debt to Aristarchus?
M Milankovitch, Aristarchos und Apollonios. Das heliozentrische und das geozentrische Weltsystem des klassischen Altertums, Acad. Serbe Sci. O Neugebauer, Archimedes and Aristarchus, Isis 34 , 4 - 6. Aristarchos and Copernicus, Isis 33 , -
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