Copernicus New Astronomy

In pre copernican cosmology, we often find proposals that seem to be purely mathematical constructions with an unclear relationship to what is physically going on out in the heavens. Ptolemy's equence would be a prime example. It may seem clear from what we've learned in this episode that pernicus did not intend his system to be taken in that sense. He gets into natural philosophical questions like the motion of the elements,. worries about problems like parallax and so on. So obviously he did not just mean that the math works better if you imagine the earth going around the sun. But for initial readers, that impression was undermined by an unsigned address to the read added