Epicycles Sentence Examples

In his Dialogo dei massimi sistemi, printed not less than thirteen years after the last of the three laws had been given to the world, the epicycles by which Copernicus, adhering to the ancient postulate of uniform circular motion, had endeavoured to reduce to theory the irregularities of the planetary movements, were neither expressly adopted nor expressly rejected; and the conclusion seems inevitable that this grave defection from the cause of progress was due to his perhaps unconscious reluctance to accept discoveries which he had not originated.

It looks too inelegant, too fragile - too much like epicycles.

Lastly, in astronomy he is credited by Ptolemy with an explanation of the motion of the planets by a system of epicycles; he also made reseafches in the lunar theory, for which he is said to have been called Epsilon (e).