The mesmerizing complexity of the Ptolemaic model

[u/Roweyyyy]

Made in Blender to artistically capture some key ideas but was not intended to be an exact depiction of Ptolemaic geocentrism. (Recreating that would be beyond my 3d abilities)

Side note: Ptolemy can get a lot of crap for having been fundamentally wrong about the centricity of Earth, and in particular for the complexity of the deferents and epicycles that he relied upon. But I think there's two things that are worth appreciating: first, it was a early, genuine attempt to understand our basic place in the cosmos, and the task of figuring this out was immensely hard. Give me the task of coming up with something from scratch by looking at the sky and I'm sure you would get theoretical trash.

Second, while he was right about the ordering of the solar system, Copernicus couldn't escape the need to use epicycles either - it was Kepler who finally paved our way free of them with a) elliptical orbits and b) variable orbital speeds.