Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 8, 2025
Of the seventy odd circles or epicycles required by the latest form of the Ptolemaic system, Copernicus succeeded in dispensing with rather more than half, but he still required thirty-four, which was the exact number assumed before the time of Aristotle.
It is a simple theory that circular motion is the most perfect, and that the planets being the most perfect bodies must move with the most perfect motion; but so many epicycles must be introduced to explain apparent exceptions that the modern astronomical hypothesis, however more complex in statement, is on the whole welcomed as a simplification.
Just as these same lights were weaving in the darkness of the room more cycles and epicycles than ever Ptolemy and the Arabs observed as they watched the motions of the planets, Tafi's voice made itself heard, shriller than ever, what with a cold in the head and what with annoyance. "Buffalmacco! Buffalmacco, I say!" screamed the old fellow, coughing and spitting, "get up, I say!
I had suddenly been cut adrift from matter: all that was material of me was there upon earth, whirling away through space, held to the earth by gravitation, partaking of the earth-inertia, moving in its wreath of epicycles round the sun, and with the sun and the planets on their vast march through space.
But it is no insignificant sidelight on the history of this circle and this period to recall that the subversive theories of Copernicus, far as even he was from anticipating how a Kepler and a Newton should one day shatter the "Crystalline Spheres," and relegate to the dustheap of antiquity the "Epicycles," to which he still clung, had their only generous hearing from influential churchmen of Rome.
They explained the doctrine of the sphere and the apparent motions of the planets, but they had no instruments capable of measuring angular distances. The ingenious epicycles of Ptolemy prepared the way for the elliptic orbits and laws of Kepler, which, in turn, conducted Newton to the discovery of the laws of gravitation the grandest scientific discovery in the annals of our race.
But he combined, with this determination, a theory of epicycles and eccentrics, which modern astronomy discards. It was, however, a great thing to conceive of the earth as a solid sphere, and reduce the phenomena of the heavenly bodies to uniform motions in of circular orbits. Ind.
Astronomers who went on the Ptolemaic theory managed to provide a very fair description of the actual phenomena of the heavens; but the solid result of their labors was not lost when the Copernican system took its place; and incalculable advantages followed from casting aside the old cumbrous machinery of cycles and epicycles in favor of the simpler conceptions of the new doctrine.
We may well believe that the clear-seeing Aristarchus would look askance at such a complex system of imaginary machinery. But Hipparchus, pre-eminently an observer rather than a theorizer, seems to have been content to accept the theory of epicycles as he found it, though his studies added to its complexities; and Hipparchus was the dominant scientific personality of his century.
He adopted the theory of epicycles and eccentrics, a geometrical conception for the purpose of resolving the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies on the principle of circular movement. He also undertook to make a catalogue of the stars by the method of alineations that is, by indicating those that are in the same apparent straight line. The number of stars so catalogued was 1,080.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking