Hi
I always assumed that Archimedes had rejected/dismissed Aristarchus’s heliocentric model and favored, like most scientists/naturalists of the day, the geocentric model . I recently came across websites casting doubt on that notion, and claiming that it is not certain at all that Archimedes dismissed the heliocentric model. Are these arguments suggesting the latter spurious? Does Archimedes specifically state that he rejected the heliocentric model? What are respected mainstream scholars arguing now?
Archimedes’ writings show no exclusive stance on the helio- vs geocentrist debate. However his favorable mention of Aristarchus (and his efforts to improve Aristarchus’ model) imply that he accepted heliocentrism at least as a possibility. There’s a 22-page paper (“Having a knack for the non-intuitive: Aristarchus’s heliocentrism through Archimedes’s geocentrism” by Jean Christianidis, Dimitris Dialetis and Kostas Gavroglu) which explores this very question in great detail.
[off-topic] I’ve not provided a link to the “Having a knack” paper because the Google hits I see are behind a registration-wall or paywall. I have an academia.edu account — free IIRC — which I think provides the paper for free. Another Google hit will sell you the paper for $36. Out of curiosity: How much of that $36 goes to the paper’s authors?
One of Archimedes’ more famous works was the Sand Reckoner, in which he calculated how many grains of sand it would take to fill the entire Universe. He must therefore have had some clear notion of what he considered the bounds of the Universe, which would probably imply what he considered the center. Does anyone know what he said there?
Probably none, and they might even have needed to pay to get it published. Or, rather, whoever wrote their grant had to pay.
This is where he mentions Aristarchus’ theory — and indeed the main reason Aristarchus’ heliocentrism is so famous — and bases his calculation on it, though deriving a radius for the universe (or rather the “sphere of the fixed stars”) different from Aristarchus’. I’d think that the unobservability of parallax would provide a lower bound on that radius, but both Aristarchus and Archimedes seem to use some mystic derivation for that radius as a multiple of the distance from Earth to Sun, which they also get wrong.