- Thomas Digges
-
Thomas Digges Born 1546
Wootton, Kent, EnglandDied 24 August 1595 (aged 49)
London, EnglandResidence England Nationality English Fields Astronomer and Mathematician Known for Heliocentrism Sir Thomas Digges (1546 – 24 August 1595) was an English mathematician and astronomer. He was the first to expound the Copernican system in English but discarded the notion of a fixed shell of immoveable stars to postulate infinitely many stars at varying distances;[1] he was also first to postulate the "dark night sky paradox".[2]
Contents
Life
Thomas was the son of Leonard Digges, the mathematician and surveyor. After the death of his father, Thomas grew up under the guardianship of John Dee, a typical Renaissance natural philosopher.
Digges served as a Member of Parliament for Wallingford and also had a military career as a Muster-Master General to the English forces from 1586 to 1594 during the war with the Spanish Netherlands.
Thomas Digges married Anne, daughter of Warham St Leger;[3] and was the father of Sir Dudley Digges (1583–1639), politician and statesman, and Leonard Digges (1588–1635), poet.
Work
Thomas attempted to determine the parallax of the 1572 supernova observed by Tycho Brahe, and concluded it had to be beyond the orbit of the Moon. This contradicted the accepted view of the universe, according to which no change could take place among the fixed stars.
In 1576, he published a new edition of his father's perpetual almanac, A Prognostication everlasting. The text written by Leonard Digges for the third edition of 1556 was left unchanged, but Thomas added new material in several appendices. The most important of these was A Perfit Description of the Caelestiall Orbes according to the most aunciente doctrine of the Pythagoreans, latelye revived by Copernicus and by Geometricall Demonstrations approved. Contrary to the Ptolemaic cosmology of the original book by his father, the appendix featured a detailed discussion of the controversial and still poorly known Copernican heliocentric model of the Universe. This was the first publication of that model in English, and a milestone in the popularisation of science.
An illustration of the Copernican universe from Thomas Digges' book
For the most part, the appendix was a loose translation into English of chapters from Copernicus' book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Thomas Digges went further than Copernicus, however, by proposing that the universe is infinite, containing infinitely many stars, and may have been the first person to do so. According to Harrison:
"Copernicus had said little or nothing about what lay beyond the sphere of fixed stars. Digges's original contribution to cosmology consisted of dismantling the starry sphere, and scattering the stars throughout endless space."[4]
"By grafting endless space onto the Copernican system and scattering the stars throughout this endless space, Digges pioneered... the idea of an unlimited universe filled with the mingling rays of countless stars."[5]
An illustration of the Copernican universe can be seen at right. The outer inscription on the map reads:
- "This orb of stars fixed infinitely up extends itself in altitude spherically, and therefore immovable the palace of felicity garnished with perpetual shining glorious lights innumerable, far excelling over [the] sun both in quantity and quality the very court of celestial angels, devoid of grief and replenished with perfect endless joy, the habitacle for the elect."
Footnotes
- ^ Stephen Johnston, ‘Digges, Thomas (c.1546–1595)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
- ^ Jim Al-Khalili, Everything and Nothing - 1. Everything, BBC Four, 9:00PM Mon, 21 Mar 2011
- ^
"St. Leger, Warham". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900. - ^ Harrison (1987), p. 35.
- ^ Harrison (1987), p. 37.
References
- Text of the Perfit Description:
- Francis R. Johnson and Sanford V. Larkey, "Thomas Digges, the Copernican System and the idea of the Infinity of the Universe in 1576," Huntington Library Bulletin 5 (1934): 69-117.
- Edward Robert Harrison (1987) Darkness at Night. Harvard Univ. Press: 211-17. An abridgement of the preceding.
- Gribbin, John, 2002. Science : A History. Penguin.
- Francis R. Johnson, Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England: A Study of the English Scientific Writings from 1500 to 1645, Johns Hopkins Press, 1937.
- Martin Kugler, Astronomy in Elizabethan England, 1558 to 1585: John Dee, Thomas Digges, and Giordano Bruno, Montpellier: Université Paul Valéry, 1982.
- Brian Vickers (ed.), Occult & Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. ISBN 0-521-25879-0
External links
Categories:- 1546 births
- 1595 deaths
- Astronomers
- English astronomers
- People of the Tudor period
- Members of the pre-1707 Parliament of England
- 16th-century mathematicians
- 16th-century astronomers
- 16th-century English people
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