ABSTRACT
The earliest of the descriptions of the physical universe, as propounded by Aristotle and Ptolemy, used symmetry as the basis with the idea of earth being at the center with planets and stars distributed over sets of concentric spheres around the earth. Eleven centuries later, Copernicus rectified the error through his heliocentric theory, which still retained symmetry partly through the laws of Kepler and Newton, which emphasized the motion of planets around the sun to be elliptic orbits, slight variations of circular symmetry. The circular symmetry, also called rotational symmetry, implied by these ideas indeed forms a basis for most of the developments that happened throughout the last four centuries in the description of nature through the language of physics.
