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| 'Celestial Spheres' |
The celestial spheres, or sometimes
called celestial orbs, were the fundamental foundation of the cosmological
models developed by Plato and many others many, many moons ago… At one time, it was believed that the fixed stars never
changed their positions relative to each another…therefore, it was argued by
many that they must be on the surface of a single starry sphere…in so-called modern
thought, the orbits of the planets are seen as the paths that those planets take
through mostly empty space...those ancient and medieval thinkers, however,
considered the celestial orbs to be thick spheres of rarefied matter…matter
that rested one within the other…each one of these orbs were thought to be in complete
contact with the sphere above it and the sphere below it…C. S. Lewis said "Because
the medieval universe is finite, it has a shape, the perfect spherical shape,
containing within itself an ordered variety...."The spheres ... present us
with an object in which the mind can nest, overwhelming in its greatness but
satisfying in its harmony”… By combining this
nested sphere model with their own somewhat primitive astronomical
observations, the old scholars gradually calculated what became accepted estimates
at the time for the distances to the Sun (about 4 million miles), to the other
planets, and even to the edge of the universe, which they estimated to be close
to 73 million miles…the nested sphere model's distances to the Sun and planets
differ quite drastically from modern measurements of these distances, and the
size of the universe is now thought to be inconceivably large and maybe even
infinite.
