Danny Robb traces how our perception of the moon evolved from a mythological entity to a real place that has been scientifically explored and mapped. He recounts through centuries of observation and technological advancements, revealing how our relationship with the Moon has shifted dramatically.
With the Moon now appearing more like a tangible place and potential destination every day, popular culture climbed on board. The novelist Jules Verne began describing trips to the Moon, and movies from the French film industry depicted a lunar landing.
Greek scholars applied mathematical analysis to the Moon, but they also began to theorise about physical mechanisms for the motions of the planets. To the philosopher Aristotle, the Moon was embedded in a giant sphere with the other planets and the stars. Earth sat at the centre of these nested spheres, which moved around Earth. These spheres were composed of a fifth element, aether, and they were incapable of any sort of change. Even if they were somehow worlds in themselves, in the Aristotelian model, the Moon and its sphere were an impenetrable barrier between our world and the celestial realm. The universe was literally divided into the sublunary and the superlunary.