| Thomas Digges | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1546 Wootton, Kent, England |
| Died | 24 August 1595 (aged 49) London, England |
| Residence | 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]
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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.
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.
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: