ABSTRACT
For thousands of years, humanity did not recognize the existence of the solar system. They believed, in general, Earth to be stationary and at the center of the universe, whereas ethereal objects moved through the sky. Initially, Greek philosopher Aristarchus had speculated on a heliocentric reordering of the cosmos [1], but Nicolaus Copernicus was the first to develop a mathematically predictive heliocentric system [2]. His successors, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton, developed further speculations that led to the gradual acceptance of the idea that Earth moves around the Sun and that the planets are controlled by the same physical laws that governed Earth. Figure 1.1 shows Andreas Cellarius’s illustration of the Copernican system, from the Harmonia Macrocosmica (1660).
