The Misinformation of the Classical Philosophers

The ancients concluded that celestial bodies had to be composed of a different kind of matter. They did not surmise, nor could they probably have surmised, that with the invention of the telescope, the heavenly bodies would give us knowledge of their mutability beyond anything we can know through common experience. Galileo's use of the telescope and his discovery of the moons of Jupiter led to Kepler’s assertion by Kepler that the matter of the heavenly bodies is exactly the same as the matter of bodies on Earth. This in turn laid the groundwork for Newton's formulation of a celestial mechanics,. In which the same laws of motion apply without qualification to all bodies wherever they are in the physical universe