Talk:Primum Mobile

message: Why has the article been categorised under "early scientific cosmologies" and "history of science stubs"? The scientific method began in 17th century England. The only sciences to have existed before then were formal (mathematics and logic), not natural.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.45.127.138 (talk • contribs) 22:57, 11 May 2007
Is there any way to put this into more laymans terms? Seems quite a bit confusing... or maybe thats because it's just a stub...  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.11.32.42 (talk) 00:00, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: Please pardon me for the premature closure of this merge disussion.  As it stands, I see three possible outcomes:
# Status quo remains due to the notability of this subject separate and distinct from the concept of "the unmoved mover", or
# a merge takes place per this discussion, because the subject, "Primum Mobile" is a separate and distinct entity from the unmoved mover, and yet is only notable enough to warrant a subsection of its own in the other article, but not notable enough to warrant its own article, or
# it is found that Primum Mobile is not in any way independent of the unmoved mover, in which case it barely warrants honorable mention in the other article and should be reduced to a redirect with no actual merge having taken place.
I had assumed that status quo had been saved by the apparent lack of interest and participation in this discussion.  Andrew Lancaster, you appear to see option 3 above as the best outcome.  Others in the discussion choose option 1 or 2.  Since there does not appear to be a consensus for options 2 or 3, continuing this discussion might be like kicking a dead horse.  I am not an expert; however, I have in the past read about these subjects and remember that the Mobile was indeed very different from the unmoved mover itself.  Whether or not the subject of the Mobile warrants its own article is beyond my expertise, so I will have to leave it to you involved editors to resolve this.  I'll put it on my watchlist and check in from time to time, and while Andrew Lancaster is correct that there is no deadline for these discussions (other than they should go on for at least a week), when they get to be several months old without any evident interest, then we can expect someone to ramble by and close it. – Paine Ellsworth CLIMAX! 18:59, 3 November 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Very understandable, so no problem of course. I would add a remark to one issue in your explanation: consensus is not our only concern on Wikipedia, or at least not just "local consensus" on one article. There is a strong community consensus that Wikipedia should not create any type of alternate reality that makes us a source of ideas not already found in good sources. One crude version of this community-wide consensus is the rule of thumb that when someone for a source verifying something which is not obvious, a source should be given or else the not obvious assertion can be removed. The article split/merge we are discussing is at the same time (at least until now) effectively based on just such a non obvious assertion, and I am asking for a source.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:29, 4 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possible outcomes 

message: I think Andrew Lancaster is laboring under a misapprehension here. Above, he has said, "Primum mobile is just a Latin term for ... the entity which moves other entities, but is not itself moved by anything else", but this is incorrect. The primum mobile is "moved by anything else" (the term means "first movable", not "first mover"); in fact, it is is in some sense moved more than anything else. It is the physical entity that rotates once per day and imparts its motion to all the celestial spheres beneath it; it is directly moved by the unmoved mover rather than itself being the unmoved mover. After looking again at Aristotle and other sources, I believe it's fairly clear that Aristotle identified it with the sphere of fixed stars; however, either Ptolemy or his epigones first felt the need to posit a moving sphere beyond that of the fixed stars, since a uniform circular rotation of that sphere could not account for the precession of the eqinoxes—this further sphere is what became known as the primum mobile. Its existence (if not all the details of its relationship to the other celestial spheres) was widely accepted by natural philosophers during the Middle Ages; and mention of it even found its way into imaginative works, such as Dante's Comedy and the Canterbury Tales, where Chaucer apostrophizes it as the "first moeving cruel firmament / With thy diurnal sweigh that crowdest ay / And hurlest al from Est til Occident / That naturelly wolde holde another way".
Most of the foregoing is essentially what Machine Elf said in his last comment above, but Andrew Lancaster does not seem to have absorbed it. I just fail to see how this clearly defined concept, quite different from that of an unmoved mover, does not merit an article, nor how it could be profitably merged into Unmoved mover. Deor (talk) 20:20, 3 November 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I am not sure Machine Elf would understand himself as saying exactly this. (Maybe he can chip in.) I have no disagreement with what you say about Ptolemy and post Ptolemy, but my concern is that (a) we seem to be wrongly reporting the source of the concept before Ptolemy and (b) as I think Machine Elf agreed, there are aspects of the history of the idea where the two concepts are not always possible to explain separately. Whatever we end up doing, we should in any case please get some real sources? We can not for example be basing a claim that Aristotle did NOT invent something by quoting a passage from Dante?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:36, 4 November 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Some contributors are not aware that Wikipedia no longer boasts of striving for "verifiability, not truth".  That phrase has been stricken from policies and guidelines.  This encyclopedia strives for "verifiable truth", otherwise known as "facts".  A fact is a verifiable truth, so a source from a work of fiction would have to be held as dubious at best.  Fiction writers are not necessarily restricted to facts; they are restricted only to what their readers will believe and accept to be possible.  The irony is that verifiable truth does not have that restriction – hence the axiom that "truth can be stranger than fiction".  Reliable sources for this article should not be difficult to find.  Good fortune to all of you! – Paine Ellsworth CLIMAX! 16:37, 4 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Continuing discussion

message: The first sentence of this article translates "primum mobile" as "first moved," but I think that that's incorrect. "Mobile" is not a past (passive) participle. I'm pretty sure that it is the nominative neuter singular of the adjective "mobilis," which translates as "mobile" or "moving" or maybe, as Deor said on 3 November 2013, "movable." I'm no Latin scholar, though, so I leave it for someone who knows the language better than I do to chime in or make the change. 74.71.76.34 (talk) 06:51, 19 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: That's quite correct; “moved” is simply a mistranslation. “Movable”, “mover”, and “moving” are alternatives in use and do the job. I'll edit accordingly. Desde la Torre (talk) 21:14, 27 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Translation of "primum mobile"?