Gerald James Whitrow on Infinity

“In the Timaeus Plato had expounded a theory that outside the universe, which he regarded as bounded and spherical, there was an infinite empty space.”

“During the Middle Ages the universe was regarded as finite, with the earth at its centre. The idea was abandoned during the Scientific Renaissance, and the universe came to be pictured as an indefinitely large number of stars scattered throughout infinite Euclidean space. This conception appeared to be a necessary consequence of the theory of gravitation; for, as Newton pointed out, a finite material universe in infinite space would tend to concentrate in one massive lump.”