A. Where the word "firmament" comes from?

B. Who discovered that the earth is spherical?

C. Who was the author of the system that gave Earth the condition of the center of the universe?  

Text for reading

278. Chapter VI - Space and time - many definitions of space have been given; the main is the space that separates two bodies. From this certain sophists deduced that where there is no body there is no space.[1]

279. We all know what space is and I wish only to affirm that it is infiniteness so that in our subsequent studies there will be no barrier opposing the investigation of our objective.

280. Time, like space, is a self-defining word. One can get a more exact idea of it by relating it to the infinite whole. Time is the sequence of things. It is connected to eternity in the same way things are connected to the infinity.

281. Time is but a relative measure of the sequence of transitory things; eternity is not susceptible to any kind of measure from the standpoint of duration; there is neither beginning nor end: for eternity the present is all there is. If centuries of centuries are less than one second in relation to eternity, what is to be said about the duration of human life!

282. Matter - At first glance, nothing seems so deeply varied, so essentially different, as diverse substances that comprise the world. Among the objects that Art or Nature passes before us daily, are there any two that show a perfect identity, or even a parity of composition? Among the atmospheric gases and a vein of gold, and between aqueous molecule of a cloud and the mineral forming the bone framework of the globe! What diversity between the chemical fabric of varied plants that adorn the plant kingdom and the no less numerous representatives of animals on Earth!

283. However, we can establish as an absolute principle that all substances, known and unknown, no matter how dissimilar they may seem, whether from the inner constitution or from the through the prism of their reciprocal actions, are in fact just in different ways that the matter presents itself; nothing more than varieties in which it transforms under the direction of the innumerable forces that govern it.

284. Chemistry, whose progress was so quick since my time, when its adherents still relegated to the secret field of magic; is a new science that can rightly be considered as being an offspring of the era of the observer, because it is solely based far more solidly on the experimental than their older siblings. Chemistry, I say, made good sport of the four primitive elements that ancients agreed to recognize in nature; it showed that the element “earth” is no more than a combination of an infinitely varied diversity of substances; that air and water are also decomposable and are products of a certain number of equivalents of gas; the fire, far from being a main element per se, is also only a state of matter resulting from the universal movement to which it is submitted and from a perceptible or latent combustion.

285. In return, chemistry discovered a considerable number of previously unknown principles which seemed to use certain combinations to form the different substances and the various bodies that chemistry studied, and which acted simultaneously, according to certain laws and certain proportions, in the processes taking place in the great laboratory of Nature. Chemistry labeled such principles of simple bodies, thereby indicating that regarded them as primitive and indecomposable, and that no operation to date, could reduce them to relatively simpler fractions than themselves.

286. However, where human perception stops, even aided by the most sensitive tools, the work of Nature continues. There, where the common folk take appearance for reality, where the professional lifts the veil and perceives the beginning of things, the eyes of those who are able to grasp the mode of action of Nature see in the constitutive materials of the world only the one primitive, simple cosmic matter, which became diversified in certain regions at the time of their origin, and which was divided up into interdependent bodies possessing a life of their own only to become disassemble one day by their decomposition in the receptacle of the extension of space.

287. There are questions that we ourselves - spirits who love science - would know how to probe, and about which we offer nothing but more or less conjectural personal opinions. Regarding such questions, I will either keep it silent or justify my way of viewing them; however this particular question is not one of them. Therefore to those who would be tempted to see my words only a bold theory, I will say: examine, if possible, the multiplicity of the operations in nature and you will recognize that, if we do not accept the unity of matter, it will be impossible to explain not only the suns and globes, but, without going so far, the germination of a seed in the ground or the production of an insect.

288. If we observe such great diversity in matter, it is because there were an unlimited number of forces that presided over its transformations, and since the conditions under which they are produced, the varied number the combinations of matter could only be unlimited.

289. Thus, whether the substance being considered belongs to the fluids per se, i.e. the imponderable bodies, or whether it is dressed in the ordinary character and properties of matter, then in the whole universe there is only one single primitive substance: the cosmos or cosmic matter of uranographers.

290. Laws and forces - If one of these unknown beings that spend their ephemeral existence in the depths of the darkest regions of the ocean; if one of those multi-stomached creatures, those nereids – those lowly microscopic creatures that do not know anything about nature except ichthyophagous fish and underwater forests – were to suddenly receive the gift of intelligence, the ability to study its world and to establish on its assessments an extensive conjectural reasoning process regarding the universality of things, what idea would make about the living nature that develops in the middle its environment and about the terrestrial world that escapes the field of its observations?

291. If now, by some marvelous effect of its new ability, this same being managed to rise from their eternal darkness to reach the surface of the ocean not far from the lush shores of an island of splendid vegetation, Sun-drenched fertile - the dispenser of beneficial warmth – what would its opinion be about its previously-formed theory about universal creation? A theory that it would immediately scrap in light of a broader evaluation, although still relatively as incomplete as the first? Such, O humans, it the picture of your entire speculative science.  

Answers to Proposed Questions

A. Where the word "firmament" comes from?

Originally the earth was thought to be a flat, circular surface, like a millstone, stretching out of sight in the horizontal direction. Hence the expression still in use: go to the ends of the earth. Unaware of its edges, depth, interior and lower face.

The sky, appearing to be in concave shape, the common belief was seen as a real canopy, whose lower edges rested on earth and marked out its boundaries; it was a wide dome filling with sky. Without any notion of infinite or space - incapable of even conceiving of it – people imagined that this canopy was made of solid matter, hence the name firmament, which and survived the belief, meaning: firm, resistant (from the Latin firmamentum, derived form firmus and from Greek herma, hermatos, firm, support, prop, support point). (Genesis, Ch. V, items 2 and 3)

B. Who discovered that the earth is spherical?

Around 600 BC Thales of Miletus (Asia Minor) discovered the sphericity of the Earth, the tilt of the axis and the cause of eclipses. (Genesis, Ch. V, item 10)

C. Who was the author of the system that gave Earth the condition of the center of the universe?

Ptolemy was one of the most distinguished men of the School of Alexandria, who wrote around 140 A.D., a system that could be described as mixed, which bore his name and which for nearly fifteen centuries, was the one who the civilized world adopted. According to the Ptolemaic system, the earth would be a sphere placed at the center of the universe. (Genesis, Ch. V, item 11)