Epicycles and Geocentrism

Everybody believed it because of science.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_model#Ptolemaic_mod...E:The important takeaway:"It has been determined, in fact, that the Copernican, Ptolemaic and even the Tychonic models provided identical results to identical inputs. They are computationally equivalent. It wasn't until Kepler demonstrated a

Epicycles wasn't a theory, it was a model. It did not try to explain why the planets moved in the sky as they did, it only predicted where they'd be. Neither, for that matter, were copernican or keplerian mechanics theories. They too required unending tweaking because they also were only approximations of what was actually happening. For the first few centuries after heliocentrism was proposed, it gave worse results, and demanded more tweaking. What really won people over was that the

Great example:“ Ptolemy and his astronomical ancestors explained these “retrograde” motions with the extra loops you see in the map above called “epicycles.” By the 15th century astronomers had accumulated centuries of meticulous measurements and incorporated them into complex orbital paths, matching their observations. Learning these models and taking enough measurements to improve one of them took an entire lifetime of monastic devotion to studying the stars. The burden of knowledge was imm

I think the answer is precisely the realization that heliocentrism is a convenient framework for specifying the correct relationships. If one formulated their geocentrism-with-epicycles model to be precisely equivalent to heliocentrism in all physically observable details, just with Earth as the origin to their coordinate system, and acknowledged this equivalence, then that would be perfectly correct as well, albeit unduly cumbersomely framed. But the useful thing is that insight, that what happ

Sure, and they also used a geocentric model of the solar system. Should we weigh our certainty of the truth of the heliocentric model the same as they weighed the truth of the geocentric model despite our vastly superior scientific methodology and body of evidence?

Well, there is the case of Aristarchus who came up with the heliocentric model of the solar system about 1800 years or so before Copernicus. His model was rejected because of experimental evidence -- the theory predicted stellar parallax which observation at the time could not detect! (Of course, we can detect it now that telescopes have been invented -- the stars are just so much farther away than anyone could have possibly believed at the time.)

Epicycles provided better predictions than heliocentric system until Newton.

The same thing that stopped the addition of epicycles to the geocentric model of the solar system: a better theory that explains the observations more naturally.

examine this statement in more detail. consider that this discovery is only a few centuries old, was controversial at the time, and that astronomy had been practiced all over the world for thousands of years under the incorrect Geocentric Model because that model is deeply intuitive as well as explanatory up to a point.the level of precision and rigor, backed by advanced instruments and mathematics, needed to disprove the Geocentric Model is really quite high. you have taken your own educatio

Copernicus is a bad example. He proposed a heliocentric system based on vibes. Actual progress required decades of cutting-edge precision measurements by Brahe and then analysis by Kepler. Objections to heliocentrism were on scientific grounds which were resolved by the discovery of inertia, Airy disks, and stellar aberration.