History Of Astronomy And Neptune
...and tomorrow. Basic things, such as how the universe was suspected to be started or who Ptolemy and Galileo were and what they did are just things that need to be known to fully understand what is happening in the world around you. These things are what you need to know, if you're a scientists, to a grocery shop bagger.
Ptolemy was a Greek man who became the man to set the future for astronomy. He was the third of the Alexandrian men, this group of scientists and mathematicians taught Alexander and his generals themselves. Living around 150 A.D., and being one of the Alexandrian men, he had access to knowledge no one at the time had. From the information that he had access to, and the framework that Aristotle provided, Ptolemy was able to make a mathematical model of the universe. Certain faults and glitches in the current model grew Ptolemy confused and angry. Using his own current knowledge and applying Euclid's geometry to the universe's model he created the Ptolemaic system. In the Ptolemaic system, the model had the planets rotating around the Earth which is known as a different. Technically, in the model, the planets weren't revolving around an Earth than was centered, but more of an Earth that was off-centered, which is known as eccentric. To solve the current problem of why the planets speed up and slow down, Ptolemy insisted that the planets do not travel at a set rate, but more of a rate that changes at will. He then brought up the point that the planets do travel at an set rate, but only at the equant. The equant was a center point at which at that point, planets would seem to be traveling at an equal and uniform rate. There was still a small problem, retrograde motion. Retrograde motion is when a celestial object moves opposite to most other celestial objects around it. To explain this, he proposed that the planets move along a sub-orbit, in this...
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