Firmament divided

[Terrance]

http://www.sentex.net/~tcc/fsearch.html

The enormity of the impact the demise of the old Ptolemaic cosmology and
new
discoveries in astronomy were having upon man's thought during the early
seventeenth
century was expressed by English poet John Donne (1572-1631), in these
lines from
Anniversaries - An Anatomy of the World (1611):  

                    And new philosophy calls all in doubt,  
                    The element of fire is quite put out;  
                    The sun is lost, and th' earth, and no man's wit  
                    Can well direct him where to look for it....  
                    'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.  


Gone? Chaos? Isn't it a bit early for chaos? Not really. 
How about Atoms and Atomic Time. Nothing new at all. The Greeks had that
one too.