# Quote — Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe

> Aristarchos of Samos... was able to use to figure out... the distance between the Earth and the Sun. His conclusion... the Sun was about twenty times farther... than the Moon and therefore twenty times bigger than the Moon. In other words, the Sun was... over five times bigger than the Earth in diameter. This insight prompted Aristarchos to propose the heliocentric hypothesis long before Nicolaus Copernicus... It turned out to be quite difficult to tell precisely when the Moon was 50% illuminated, and the correct Sun-Moon angle... isn't 87 degrees but about 89.85 degrees... This makes... the Sun... almost twenty times further away... and about 109 times larger than the Earth... [T]his wasn't corrected until almost two thousand years later, so when Copernicus came along... the overall scale of his Solar System model was about twenty times too small...

- Author: [Max Tegmark](https://www.leafyquotes.com/max-tegmark.md)
- Book: [Our Mathematical Universe](https://www.leafyquotes.com/max-tegmark/our-mathematical-universe.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Tegmark#Our_Mathematical_Universe:_My_Quest_for_the_Ultimate_Nature_of_Reality_(2014)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/max-tegmark/our-mathematical-universe/aristarchos-of-samos

## More from this book

> The very fabric of our physical world, space itself, could be a purely mathematical object in the sense that its only intrinsic properties are mathematical... as dimensionality, and topology.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/max-tegmark/our-mathematical-universe/the-very-fabric.md)

> In 1814... Joseph von Fraunhofer invented... a spectrograph, which let him separate white light into into a rainbow of colors... He discovered mysterious dark lines in the rainbow... and... the detailed positions of these lines... depended on what the light source was made of, constituting a kind of spectral fingerprint. During the following decades such spectra were measured and catalogued for many... substances. ...Sensationally, the spectrum of sunlight revealed that the Sun... contained elements... such as . Moreover... it revealed that stars are made of roughly the same mixture of gases as the Sun! This clinched it in favor of Bruno: stars are distant suns...

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/max-tegmark/our-mathematical-universe/in-1814-joseph.md)

> But I’ve suddenly changed my mind and turned more optimistic about our cosmic significance. Why? Because I’ve come to believe that advanced evolved life is very rare, yet has huge future potential, making our place in space and time remarkably significant.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/max-tegmark/our-mathematical-universe/but-ive-suddenly.md)