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Apr 18, 2022 · Philolaus (l. c. 470 to c. 385 BCE) was a Pythagorean philosopher who claimed that fire was the first cause of existence and heat the underlying source of human life. He is best known for his pyrocentric model of the universe, which replaced Earth as the center of the solar system with a central fire, around which all else revolved.
- Joshua J. Mark
Sep 15, 2003 · Philolaus’ astronomical system is famous as the first to move the earth from the center of the universe and make it an orbiting planet instead. Copernicus referred to Philolaus as his precursor in the preface to his De Revolutionibus (see Kahn 2001, 26 for references).
The system. In the Pythagorean view, the universe is an ordered unit. Beginning from the middle, the universe expands outward around a central point, implying a spherical nature. In Philolaus’s view, for the universe to be formed, the "limiters" and "unlimited" must harmonize and be fitted together.
According to Stobaeus, Philolaus did away with the ideas of fixed direction in space and developed one of the first non-geocentric views of the universe and in his new way of thinking, the universe revolved around a hypothetical astronomical object he called the Central Fire.
Philolaus was a student of the celebrated number theory of Pythagoras, who stressed the importance of numerical groupings. He was particularly interested in the properties inherent in the decad, the sum of the first four numbers.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Copernican heliocentrism is the astronomical model developed by Nicolaus Copernicus and published in 1543. This model positioned the Sun at the center of the Universe, motionless, with Earth and the other planets orbiting around it in circular paths, modified by epicycles, and at uniform speeds.
Philolaus supposed the Sun to be a disk of glass which reflects the light of the universe. He made the lunar month consist of 29½ days, the lunar year of 354, and the solar year of 365½ days. His ideas about the nature of the Earth's place in the cosmos influenced Aristarchus of Samos.
