California Italian Studies

The future is usually conceived of spatially only as metaphor. However, in Aristotelian physics, the zone beyond the moon was supposed to be comprised of a different matter, the quintessence, to that comprising the Earth. This was incorruptible and unchanging, and obeyed different laws of physics. Galileo’s observations of random, changing, and unpredictable marks on the surface of the Sun in 1611 were understood by his adversaries and him as fundamentally destroying the Aristotelian division between sub- and supra-lunary matter and physics. He offered a version of the cosmos where mutability, generation and corruption were omnipresent, where the future was everywhere.