Since the dawn of Science mankind has been almost obsessive in it’s study of celestial bodies. What began with the Babylonians as a means of interpreting divine omens later became, under the Greeks and Arabs, an intensive and mathematically rigorous scientific discipline. Astronomy was the first of the sciences and, fundamentally, it was built on a single and supremely important principle: The Cosmos.

Cosmos is an ancient Greek word which signifies the orderly structure of the heavens. To the Greeks, and to those who came after, describing the universe as a “cosmos” meant describing it as an organised and mathematical place where things happened according to predictable and geometrically beautiful rules. Astronomers and cosmographers revelled in the aesthetic beauty and harmony of the heavens in many of their diagrams and models such as the following depiction from Cellarius’ Harmonia Macrocosmica:

A drawing of the Geocentric model of the cosmos from Harmonia Macrocosmica by Andreas Cellarius, 1660

Over the centuries Astronomy has changed dramatically. In fact, the movement from the geocentric to the heliocentric astronomical model, often called the Copernican revolution, is deemed by many as the most significant shift in the history of science. In spite of all this change, however, the basic concept of an organised universe, of a cosmos, was never challenged.

This theory was more than just axiomatic, it was also expressed in the sentiments of many scientists up until the twentieth century who, like their scientific and artistic forbearers, took pleasure in the apparent order and unity of nature. The great Albert Einstein is sometimes quoted for mentioning his belief in Spinoza’s god of mathematical order:

“My views are near those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order [of the universe] which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly.”

Spanning from the ancient Greeks to the twentieth century, the idea of an orderly and harmonious cosmos has provided a bedrock for scientific thought. It provided scientists with a basis for believing in predictability and periodicity, in solubility and mathematization. In fact, the cosmic principle of structure and organisation was so widely believed that, to most scientists, it was so obvious that it seemed trite. But in the last century, something changed.