Quotes About Aristarchus

History of science is a relay race, my painter friend. Copernicus took over his flag from Aristarchus, from Cicero, from Plutarch; and Galileo took that flag over from Copernicus.

Aristarchus's observations led him to propose a completely new model of the universe and solar system, based on the hypothesis that the planets revolved around the sun and that the earth itself revolved every twenty-four hours around its axis. Aristarchus was also a formidable mathematician, who made calculations of the distance from the earth to the sun and the diameter of the sun based on solar eclipses.

Aristarchus suspected that this was the case and believed that the stars we see in the night sky are actually nothing more than distant suns.

What the Greek called Kosmos was the image of a world that is not continuous but complete. Inevitably, then, the Greek man himself was not a series but a term. What his philosophers occasionally told him on the subject they had heard, not experienced, and what a few brilliant minds in the Asiatic-Greek cities (such as Hipparchus and Aristarchus) discovered was rejected alike by the Stoic and by the Aristotelian, and outside a small professional circle not even noticed.

Soon the whole city was in disarray. They rushed together into the theatre, dragging with them Gaius and Aristarchus, Paulís traveling companions from Macedonia.