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As early as Plato, philosophers considered the heavens to be moved by immaterial agents. Plato believed the cause to be a world-soul, created according to mathematical principles, which governed the daily motion of the heavens (the motion of the Same) and the opposed motions of the planets along the zodiac (the motion of the Different). [12]
In Greek antiquity the ideas of celestial spheres and rings first appeared in the cosmology of Anaximander in the early 6th century BC. [7] In his cosmology both the Sun and Moon are circular open vents in tubular rings of fire enclosed in tubes of condensed air; these rings constitute the rims of rotating chariot-like wheels pivoting on the Earth at their centre.
The fifth element (i.e. Platonic solid) was the dodecahedron, whose faces are not triangular, and which was taken to represent the shape of the Universe as a whole, possibly because of all the elements it most approximates a sphere, which Timaeus has already noted was the shape into which God had formed the Universe.
Among the Platonic solids, either the dodecahedron or the icosahedron may be seen as the best approximation to the sphere. The icosahedron has the largest number of faces and the largest dihedral angle, it hugs its inscribed sphere the most tightly, and its surface area to volume ratio is closest to that of a sphere of the same size (i.e ...
If the edge length of a regular dodecahedron is , the radius of a circumscribed sphere (one that touches the regular dodecahedron at all vertices), the radius of an inscribed sphere (tangent to each of the regular dodecahedron's faces), and the midradius (one that touches the middle of each edge) are: [21] =, =, =. Given a regular dodecahedron ...
Johannes Kepler's first major astronomical work, Mysterium Cosmographicum (The Cosmographic Mystery), was the second published defence of the Copernican system.Kepler claimed to have had an epiphany on July 19, 1595, while teaching in Graz, demonstrating the periodic conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in the zodiac: he realized that regular polygons bound one inscribed and one circumscribed ...
Euclid's Elements defined the Platonic solids and solved the problem of finding the ratio of the circumscribed sphere's diameter to the edge length. [33] Following their identification with the elements by Plato, Johannes Kepler in his Harmonices Mundi sketched each of them, in particular, the regular icosahedron. [ 34 ]
The Platonic solids and Archimedean solids have ideal versions, with the same combinatorial structure as their more familiar Euclidean versions. Several uniform hyperbolic honeycombs divide hyperbolic space into cells of these shapes, much like the familiar division of Euclidean space into cubes.