> it's embarrassing to have modern-day epicycles Why are "epicycles" embarrassing? "Epicycles" worked fine for a very long time. They are predictive. And ac

> it's embarrassing to have modern-day epicycles Why are "epicycles" embarrassing? "Epicycles" worked fine for a very long time. They are predictive. And accurate! And can be translated to a physical compuation mechanism (see: Antikythera mechanism). In addition, "epicycles" are a manifestation of Fourier decomposition, which is a perfectly fine mathematical tool. The errors are due to the fact that reality isn't purely mathematical. "Epicycles" were quite fine until we got both 1) much better clocks and 2) much better astronomical observations. People forget that physics was in pretty close to this same state about 150 years ago (roughly) right before quantum mechanics. Physics was pretty much buttoned down except for that really strange Black Body Radiation problem (Ultraviolet Catastrophe), but they'd have that sorted in a couple of years. Certainly no later than 1900--the end of the century. No big deal. HAH! We know how that turned out.