
The Legacy of Ptolemy’s Almagest
Initial Conditions: A Physics History Podcast
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Copernicus' Almagest
Ptolemy combined astronomical observations and Aristotelian philosophy to create a complex geocentric model of the universe. Nicholas Copernicus proposed a heliocentric model in the mid 1500s, but just thought about it in a different way. There was no calculation or no observation you could do at that time to decide which one was real. And so Copernicus' book kind of didn't upset anyone until Galileo comes along.
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