sublunary world

In the case of Brahe’s observations of the nova and the 1577 comet the data was an absence of diurnal parallax, the phenomenon that needed to be explained was that these new bodies were in the supralunary and not the sublunary world, and the immediate theoretical conclusion that resulted was that there was change in the heavens.

The mathematization of the sublunary world begins not with Galileo but with Alberti, not in the seventeenth century but in the fifteenth.

He was the closest thing the medieval world had to what we would call a scientist; however, he assumed that mathematics could be employed to interpret the heavens but not the sublunary world, and he had no notion of the experimental method.

The sublunary world, the world this side of the moon, is the world of generation and corruption—the rest of the universe has existed unchanging from all eternity.

In the Middle Ages the heavens had been compared to clockwork; now the same principle of regularity was, it was claimed, to be discovered in the sublunary world.