, serving to eclipse the Hearth-Fire so that we never look God in the face, so to speak. The concepts of number, harmony, and music all influenced the Pythagoreans to invent this fully realized version of the concentric celestial orbits, which resonate with "the music of the spheres."Thus, by a roundabout way the early Greek philosophers were reaching the Aristotelian view of the universe. The atomists Leucippus and Democritus in the generation preceding Socrates refined the various pre-Pythagorean views of space: there is a drum-shaped earth, condensation is the falling-together of atoms, and centrifugal force helps keep the earth and bodies of fire in place. After them, however, Socrates' pupil Plato and Plato's pupil Aristotle reflected upon Pythagorean harmony and spheres and a geocentric system. Their many works analyze, refute, discuss, and expand on their predecessors; two of the passages representative of their views on astronomy are found in Plato's Timaeus and Aristotle's De Caelo. Having discovered a theory of the solar, or rather, geo- system that accounted for all visible phenomenon (and was, moreover, aesthetically pleasing), subsequent astronomers and philosophers fine-tuned the idea for their particular fields. The philosophers dwelt on harmony, cycle, and a new scheme of the divine; the mathematicians, a description of heaven in the marvelous language of geometry which was nowhere else in the physical world more eloquently expressed. Sophisticated three-dimensional moving systems were worked out by various geometers to account for observed inconsistencies in their basic theory. It would take many centuries before anyone had accurate enough observations to realize that the theory could not account for all data. By then, people would have even more difficulty letting go of their clockwork, geocentric, "divinely subsidized" universe than the Greeks, who had placed their version of a Bible, the Homeric and Hesiodic myth-cy...
