Central Fire

An astronomical system positing that the Earth, Moon, Sun and planets revolve around an unseen "Central Fire" was developed in the 5th century BC and has been attributed to the Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus, a version based on Stobaeus account, who betrays a tendency to confound the dogmas of the early Ionian philosophers, and he occasionally mixes up Platonism with Pythagoreanism. Brewer (1894, page 2293) mentioned Pythagoras thought that the sun is a movable sphere in the centre of the universe, and that all the planets revolve round it.

The system has been called "the first coherent system in which celestial bodies move in circles", anticipating Copernicus in moving "the earth from the center of the cosmos [and] making it a planet". Although its concepts of a Central Fire distinct from the Sun, and a nonexistent "Counter-Earth" were erroneous, the system contained the insight that "the apparent motion of the heavenly bodies" was (in large part) due to "the real motion of the observer". How much of the system was intended to explain observed phenomena and how much was based on myth and religion is disputed.

Philolaus (ca. 470 to ca. 385 BC) was a follower of the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Pythagoras of Samos, and who according to August Böckh (1819), who cites Nicomachus, was the successor of Pythagoras. Pythagoras developed a school of philosophy that was both dominated by mathematics and "profoundly mystical" and is famous for developing the Pythagorean theorem. Philolaus himself has been called one of "the three most prominent figures in the Pythagorean tradition" and "the outstanding figure in the Pythagorean school", who may have been the first "to commit pythagorean doctrine to writing". Because of questions about the reliability of ancient non-primary documents, scholars are not absolutely certain that Philolaus developed the astronomical system based on the Central Fire, but they do believe that either he, or someone else in the late 5th century BC, did create it.

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