16. Placing Earth at the center of the Universe, geocentricism remained the dominant theory of astronomy for thousands of years until being challenged by Copernicus in the sixteenth century
Found in pre-Socratic philosophy and proposed by Anaximander, the geocentric model of the Universe offers a description of the planetary system placing the Earth at the center and the Sun, Moon, stars, and other planets surrounding and orbiting our celestial body. With stars appearing to be fixed, rotating once each day upon an axis through the geographic poles of the Earth, for ancient observers it appeared entirely rational to conclude these objects were the ones moving and not the seemingly static Earth. Becoming mainstream scientific theory by the fourth century BCE, supported by both Aristotle and Plato, in contrast to popular mythology geocentrism was historically combined with concepts of a spherical Earth.
Developing into the Ptolemaic system, offering minor alterations and clarifications, some of the earliest suggestions of dissent stemmed from Islamic astronomers during the 10th century CE. Seriously challenged for the first time in the Common Era with the publication of On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres by Copernicus in 1543, the Polish scientist instead proposed the Earth and other planets instead rotated around the Sun. Gradually crumbling under the ever-increasing weight of empirical evidence, the development of the telescope in 1609 and observations made by Galileo in the early 17th century eviscerated remaining support for the archaic interpretation of the cosmos.