Ptolemy, Copernicus and Kepler

Ptolemy
Ptolemy was a Greek geographer and astronomer/astrologer who probably lived and
worked in Alexandria in Egypt from approx. 87 -150 AD. (six hundred years after the
original flowering of Greek math and philosophy)
Ptolemy was the author of two important scientific treatises. One is the astronomical
treatise that is now known as the Almagest ("The Great Treatise"). It was preserved, like
most of Classical Greek science, in Arabic manuscripts and only made available in Latin
translation in the 12th Century.
In this work, one of the most influential books of Antiquity, Ptolemy compiled the
astronomical knowledge of the ancient Greek and Babylonian world; he relied mainly on
the work of Hipparchus of three centuries earlier. Ptolemy formulated a geocentric model
of the solar system which remained the generally accepted model in the Western and
Arab worlds until it was superseded by the heliocentric solar system of Copernicus.
Perfect motion should be in circles, so the stars and planets, being heavenly objects,
moved in circles. However, to account for the complicated motion of the planets, which
appear to periodically loop back upon themselves, epicycles had to be introduced so that
the planets moved in circles upon circles about the fixed Earth.

Copernicus
Around 1514, Copernicus distributed a little book, not printed but hand written, to a few
of his friends who knew that he was the author even though no author is named on the
title page. This book, usually called the Little Commentary, set out Copernicus's theory of
a universe with the sun at its centre. The Little Commentary is a fascinating document. It
contains seven axioms which Copernicus gives, not in the sense that they are self-evident,
but in the sense that he will base his conclusions on these axioms and nothing else
What are the axioms? Let us state them:
1.
2.
3.
4.

There is no one centre in the universe.

The Earth's centre is not the centre of the universe.
The centre of the universe is near the sun.
The distance from the Earth to the sun is imperceptible compared with the
distance to the stars.
5. The rotation of the Earth accounts for the apparent daily rotation of the stars.
6. The apparent annual cycle of movements of the sun is caused by the Earth
revolving round it.
7. The apparent retrograde motion of the planets is caused by the motion of the
Earth from which one observes.

Copernicus believed, as all before had believed that heavenly bodies travelled in perfect
circles (they travel in ellipses) so he need to think of complex corrections to explain
actual observations.

Kepler
Kepler (1600's) used existing observational databases to formulate the Laws of Planetary
Motion which correct the problems of epicycles in the heliocentric theory by using
ellipses instead of circles for orbits of the planets.
This is a key mathematical formulation because the reason Copernicus' heliocentric
model has to use epicycles is due to the fact that he assumed perfectly circular orbits.
With the use of ellipses, the heliocentric model eliminates the need for epicycles and
deferents. It describes the motion of the planets simply and perfectly.

Ptolemy

Copernicus

Kepler