7.13 Rievaulx
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Even in the times of the ancient Greeks the thinkers were optimists trying to understand the universe.  One of them, Anangoras, deduced from a large meteorite which fell in Greece in 467 BC that the sun was a mass of molten iron.  He also interpreted eclipses correctly, and had the idea that heavenly bodies were formed by condensation from a chaotic whirling mass.  All this is very close to modern ideas, as was the explanation of the heavens as a sphere with either the earth or th sun as its centre.
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