October 6, 2017
AST 123
Homework #1
1. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes all originated in the Greek colony Miletus. Their intellectual thinking could have been contributed to the education they had. Miletus was a very wealthy city at the time. They people living there didn’t have to worry about money for food or housing so they could spend it on getting a good education, which was rather rare at the time. Other Greek colonies didn’t have enough money to build good education programs or systems, so no one had the resources that the people in Miletus had. With their education, these three philosophers were able to better articulate their theories and had the resources to make them public. Another reason for their thinking could have been that they all influenced each other. It wasn’t considered normal at the time to be thinking so intellectually, but if there were other people around them thinking as such, or people they had read about, they might …show more content…
To the knowledge of the general public at this time, the earth was stationary. Makes perfect sense because we, inhabitants of Earth, don’t feel any movement therefore it must be stationary, right? That was the truth at the time until Cusa introduced the idea of Relative Motion. In order to understand motion or movement we need a frame of reference and a coordinate system with an origin. As Galileo later stated, if the earth is rotating at a constant velocity, to us, it is the same as it not moving at all. The idea of relative motion, paired with the idea that the sun is actually the center of the universe explained the odd pattern of the orbit of Mars, and other patterns in the sky such as the brightness/phases of Venus. No model could explain these patterns without having the Earth move, and this concept couldn’t be accepted by the public until relative motion was