"Shape of the cosmos"
Watching the sky, you can see the Sun, moon, planets and stars moving above Earth. It is very intuitive to imagine that you are standing still and the objects you are observing are moving above you and this was the view taken by geocentric models of the cosmos. A Greek model, which was dominant in many parts of the world for hundreds of years, had a spherical Earth at the centre of the universe, with the other heavenly bodies orbiting in perfect circles. This talk will outline problems and challenges to this model, and the developments which followed, through the theory of Copernicus, mathematical treatments by Kepler and Newton and questions of what drives planetary motion.
1. Get the talk
Views: 845 (downloads + YouTube views)
Subscribe to the History of Maths and x video podcast via 
RSS or 
to get this and future videos.
Download video of talk (M4V, 70MB; 28 mins) (alternative file format: MP4, 34MB; 28 mins).
2. Get the article
An article on this topic, "Shape of the cosmos" by Peter Rowlett appears in issue 11 of iSquared Magazine on pages 23-27. Find out more about the magazine and how to subscribe, buy the current issue or back copies of previous issues at the iSquared Magazine shop.
3. Get the companion audio podcast
The companion audio podcast extends the topic of the talk and article, covering Einstein's relativity.
Download companion audio podcast episode to this talk & article from the Travels in a Mathematical World podcast.
Learn more on the about page and by reading the Frequently Asked Questions.