Astronomers had been keeping records in early Babylonia since the
19th century Before the Common Era, (History of Babylon), and the Chinese have been keeping records of the
stars since at least 3000 BCE, and probably for a lot longer than that. (Ancient Chinese Astronomy) And though
we may not have intact records from other ancient cultures, we can be fairly certain they weren’t ignoring the stars,
either. And they all concluded the same thing: The earth is in the center of the Universe. And why not?
After all, if you watch the stars for very long at all, that’s exactly what they do – they go in circles around
the earth, and so does the moon and the sun... more or less. It’s the planets that are... a bit more problematic.
All these things circling the earth even got more confusing when early astronomers and philosophers began
questioning just exactly how that all worked. Enter Plato who came on the scene around four hundred years before the
birth of Christ. (Plato)
Plato, seemingly determined to make things more confusing than they already were, felt “...that the
world was constructed with geometric simplicity and elegance....” He believed that the circle was the simplest
form of uniform motion, and if something were going to repeat itself endlessly, which the universe seemed to be doing, then
the best way to do it had to be a circle – a perfect circle. (Fowler)
But
there were just two small problems with that idea. One, the earth, as those of us who didn’t attend public school
in Texas, Kansas, or Mississippi know, is not in the center of the universe, and two, nothing in space
goes in a perfect circle, much less the planets’ orbits of the sun. And that’s were epicycles come in.
Early astronomers knew that the planets were not the same as stars from just about forever. The planets
move faster than the stars around them, they are often brighter, and they do this funky thing called retrograde motion.
That’s when we pass a planet in orbit, or that planet passes us. It happens more often than one might think.
What the planet appears to do when that happens, over the course of several evenings, is to slow down, stop, then go the opposite
direction before slowing down, stopping once again, and then going back in the direction it was originally heading.
(Strobel) Think about passing another car on the highway, but you don’t realize you’re moving, too.
That sort of thing would mess with even the best models, much less a model where the only path possible
was a perfect circle, and a model of the Universe is exactly what Plato challenged his colleagues to make, which is a lot
easier than doing it yourself. And they did!
Of course, they also came up
with some pretty crazy stuff as well, such as was envisioned by Eratosthenes and Aristarchus around the 3rd Century
BCE, (Size of the Earth...) who came up with the idea that it was the sun that stayed put and that the earth, while
rotating on its axis once every 24 hours, went around the sun. (Fowler) Now who’s going to believe that?
Though Plato first came up with the idea of an epicycle, it was Ptolemy in the 2nd Century
CE who perfected the epicycle, building on the earlier work of others, most notably Hipparchus, who developed trigonometry
just to figure all this out. By having a planet orbiting a point on a circle that orbits the point on another circle,
which, if necessary, could be orbiting a point on even another circle, and so on, Ptolemy came up with an ingenious model
of the solar system (and ostensibly, the Universe) – and the geometry to back it – that actually worked.
He was able to prove, mathematically, that the earth was, indeed, at the center of the Universe. And all of these circles
on top of circles were called epicycles. (Fowler)
Epicycles (Fowler)
And then along came the Catholic church, and not long after that, syncretism: The blending
of pagan and Christian traditions. In a pea pod, it was the attempt of early Christian theologians (among others) to
make everything that clearly had nothing to do with Christianity a part of the Christian tradition. (Botkin) To
these theologians, it made perfect sense that if we are God’s primary creation, then we should be smack dab in the center
of everything. And, if God is going to make something, then it wouldn’t be anything less than perfect. And
nothing was more perfect than a circle.
And so Ptolemy’s model of the universe
with all of its epicycles became part of the dogma of the Catholic church. In other words, it became the word of God
that the earth was in the center of the Universe. (The History of Dogmatic Thought) And there it stayed until
1543, when Copernicus published The Revolution of the Celestial Spheres, in which he suggested that it was the
sun that stayed put and the earth that did the loop-to-loops. (Wudka) Copernicus was wise enough, though, not
to directly challenge the Catholic Church, but instead presented his ideas as just a theoretical way of understanding the
universe. Galileo, on the other hand, believed he could convince the church that it was wrong. After all, the
Pope was one of his buddies, and it had been over a century since Copernicus had publically introduced the idea. That
friendship (though a bit strained) was probably the only thing that kept Galileo from being killed for heresy, that, and he
renounced his theories, more or less. (Loy)
But the dogma had been let out of the
kennel, so to speak. The world was clearly round, as attested to by Columbus and other early explorers, and everybody
who tested Galileo’s theories with his newly improved telescope could clearly see that he was correct. The world
could no longer return to believing it was in the center of the Universe. Of course, the Catholic Church was a bit slower,
not removing Galileo’s book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World
Systems, from their index of banned books until 1835, and not officially admitting that they were wrong until 1979.
(Loy)
To me, Epicycles have come to represent how easy it is to prove that something is true when
you believe it already is before, or even if, you ever go looking for proof. As well, they represent how hard it is
to change those beliefs which are clearly not right, especially when those beliefs have gotten entangled with religion. Epicycles
are nothing more than a clockwork orange – a beautiful mechanism that does nothing. (Burgess) But yet they
remain.
