Abstract

DOES the sun travel around the earth or does the earth travel around the sun? Our limited objective in this article is to see how one seventeenth century thinker of note, thinking on the topic previous to the publication of Newton’s Principia, answered this question and why he gave the answer that he did. Our procedure will be to set out the views of Copernicus’ important predecessors, the view of Copernicus, the view of Hooke, and then to place these views in their wider historical context.