How the Scientists of the 1960’s Turned the Moon into a Place | Aeon Essays
“In the Islamic empires and in Europe, the Aristotelian notion gained hold over the scholarly worldview. The Greek astronomer Ptolemy and others tried their best to modify this model to get better predictions of the motion of celestial objects. The more they did this, the more complex their suggested mechanisms became. The Moon was largely treated as one component of a complex geometry problem. Then, in the 17th century, European astronomers broke free from Aristotle’s grip, and laid the theoretical foundations for the Moon to become a place.”