Target Article by Margolis on Cognitive Illusion
Howard Margolis
Harris School Public Policy Studies
University of Chicago
1155 E60th Street
Chicago IL 60637
773-702-0867
773-702-0926 (fax)
http://www.harrisschool.uchicago.edu/Tycho.html
[email protected]
Abstract
This target article reports a case in which for a very
long time the very best experts (Tycho and Kepler 400 years ago,
Thomas Kuhn and many others in recent decades) have suffered an
easily corrected illusion. It provides a striking counterexample to
claims that cognitive illusions can be reasonably treated merely as
effects that clever experimenters can elicit from naive or poorly
motivated subjects, but otherwise as not really illusions. The
present illusion is based on an apparent collision between the
spheres of Mars and the sun in the "Tychonic" alternative to
Copernicus in the early 17th Century. The perception of a collision
permanently disappears when Tycho's own diagram is presented in a
novel way. The illusion appears to come from an unconscious (hence
not consciously noticed) mental rotation which is consistent with
everyday habits of mind but flatly incompatible with the logic of
the situation. This then produces the failure of even the very best
experts to notice that what they are seeing in Tycho's diagram is
something that is not there. However, once a person sees the cutout
described in the article move (i.e., once the rotation becomes a
physical rotation, not a mental rotation), the illusion disappears
permanently. The present target article is the expanded version of
a shorter summary that appeared in Nature (Margolis 1998); this
fuller version is published in Psycoloquy so as to elicit Open Peer
Commentary, to which the author will respond.
Keywords
blindsight, cognitive illusion, mental image, persuasion,
psychology of science.
I. INTRODUCTION
1. For two decades now cognitive illusions have been a focus of lively
debate. Does the work led by Wason (1977) and by Kahneman & Tversky
(1982) provide deep insight into the fallibility of human reason? Or
(taking the opposite extreme) does such work mostly show only how far
clever experimenters can trick naive subjects? For more carefully
framed and nuanced versions of these arguments see Cohen (1981) and
Gigerenzer (1996).
2. We will show evidence for a cognitive illusion of 400 years standing.
In the early 17th Century, the main alternative to Copernicus was not
Ptolemy but a compromise system proposed by Tycho Brahe. In this
"Tychonic" system, the planets move relative to the sun exactly as
Copernicus proposed, but the Earth remains fixed while the sun moves
around it. Tycho's system seemed to embrace the elegance of Copernicus
yet avoided his heresies. In the Tychonic system, however, the orbits
of the sun and Mars intersected, and from that it seemed obvious that
Tycho's system was inconsistent with the traditional view that the sun
and planets are carried around the heavens by solid spheres.
3. The connection between Tycho's system and the cognitive debate is
that the putative collision in Tycho's system turns out to be an
illusion which has deceived the very best of experts for 400 years.
From Kepler (1609) in Tycho's time to Kuhn (1957), Swerdlow (1996) and
many others in our own, there has been no dissent (see End Note A).
Yet the fact that the collision is only an illusion can be shown almost
instantly, using nothing more than Tycho's own diagram.
4. The episode therefore provides a remarkable illustration of how far
a cognitive illusion can actually influence significant beliefs. This
case can hardly be dismissed as merely providing entertainment for
academic psychologists, or as a trick psychologists that play on their
subjects, or as in some other way merely an artifact of experimental
procedures. Here we have real people, indeed very famous people, the
most expert in their field, dealing with a matter which they take very
seriously, who are mistaken over a period of 400 years. And in seeing
how this happened and how little it takes to correct the illusion, we
can also learn a sobering lesson about how far mere logic can be
counted on to change belief when entrenched intuitions go against it.
II. THE RIVAL SYSTEMS
5. To set the stage a bit of history is needed. Figures 1, 2, and 3
show the systems of the world that were in significant contention circa
1600.
ftp://coglit.psy.soton.ac.uk/pub/psycoloquy/1998.volume.9/Pictures/margolis.fig1.html
ftp://coglit.psy.soton.ac.uk/pub/psycoloquy/1998.volume.9/Pictures/margolis.fig2.html
ftp://coglit.psy.soton.ac.uk/pub/psycoloquy/1998.volume.9/Pictures/margolis.fig3.html
Figure 1 shows a part of Ptolemy's system of nested spheres,
which had survived essentially unchallenged for 1400 years. His system
is an astonishing jewel in the history of science. It worked about as
well as it was possible for a system to work given the limitations of
astronomy before the telescope. Until Kepler, even the Copernican
proposal (Figure 2), and more trivially, the Tychonic one as well
(Figure 3), had the relation to Ptolemy that one way of seeing a
reversible figure has to its alternative: They provided radically
different ways of seeing what, in terms of technical astronomy, was
exactly the same thing (see End Note B).
6. In Ptolemy's setup, the space between the moon and the fixed stars
was filled by six "spheres" like the one in Figure 1 (taken from a
leading 15th Century text; reproduced in Swerdlow 1996). Nested one
inside the other, there is one such sphere for each of the five visible
planets, and the sixth for the sun. Within each sphere was a "deferent"
(the white annulus in Figure 1), which rotated in place relative to the
Earth. Inside the deferent, an epicycle rotated in place relative to
the deferent, with the epicycle carrying the heavenly object. Note that
nothing in this system moves at all relative to the object containing
it. The deferent rotates in place, as was deemed natural for an eternal
object in the heavens. The epicycle rotates in place inside the
deferent. The actual planet merely sits, just inside the perimeter of
the epicycle.
7. The relative sizes of the deferent and epicycle that will yield
correct predictions can be determined from a few well-chosen
observations. Ptolemy did all that, and then derived what were for 14
centuries believed to be real cosmic distances by making each
successive deferent thick enough to contain its epicycle, with no
overlaps and no gaps. The rotation of the deferent interacting with the
rotation of its epicycle yielded the looping motions an astronomer
could observe in the heavens. A possibility pointed out by Ptolemy was
that Figure 1 could be inverted to yield identical planetary motion
from a model in which what had been the epicycle and radius to the
center of the epicycle were interchanged. This inverted setup is shown
in Figure 1', which will play a substantial role in the subsequent
discussion.
ftp://coglit.psy.soton.ac.uk/pub/psycoloquy/1998.volume.9/Pictures/margolis.fig1.html
8. Figure 4 is Kepler's (1609) illustration of the geocentric path of
Mars over the years 1580-1597.
ftp://coglit.psy.soton.ac.uk/pub/psycoloquy/1998.volume.9/Pictures/margolis.fig4.html
For Kepler, what he called the "pretzel-shaped" orbits
of geocentric planets, and further complications beyond that, showed
why a sensible person would believe Copernicus. If Mars did indeed
follow the path in Kepler's diagram, however, and if the Earth was
indeed motionless at its center, and if the additional conditions were
met, then what one saw from the Earth would be exactly what a
Copernican would expect. Why God should prefer this contraption would
be a deep mystery, but before the telescope, Ptolemy's system, or
Tycho's (which generates the same pretzel-shaped orbits), was
observationally indistinguishable from the Copernican system.
9. The sun also was carried on an epicycle. This was too small to
produce loops in the sun's path, but just large enough to provide the
acceleration during northern winters (and slowing during northern
summers) which our calendar reflects by making February several days
shorter than August. Copernicus retained that solar epicycle (and many
other secondary features of the Ptolemaic view), but his proposal
turned the major epicycles of Ptolemy's planets into mere reflections
of a single, startling orbit of the Earth itself. Half a century later,
Tycho proposed the compromise which is the focus of the discussion
here. In his alternative (Figure 3), the planets move in Copernican
orbits relative to the sun, but it is the sun and those orbits that go
round the Earth, not the Earth which is thrown into the heavens to
orbit the sun. So in place of the path of the Earth around the sun in
the Copernican diagram, Tycho showed a circuit of the sun around the
Earth.
III. CORRECTING THE ILLUSION
10. If the planets are carried by solid spheres, then could the
Tychonic system work? For 400 years it seemed obvious to everyone who
wrote on the matter that there must be a collision between the orbits
of the sun and Mars. No detailed argument was ever made, for no
detailed argument was ever seen as necessary. From just noticing the
intersection of the orbits in the Tychonic diagram, the collision
seemed obvious.
11. That apparent collision turns out to be the illusion advertised in
the title of this paper. A reader who will take a moment to make the
cutout provided by Figure 5 will find that whereas the intersection (of
course) remains, the collision disappears.
ftp://coglit.psy.soton.ac.uk/pub/psycoloquy/1998.volume.9/Pictures/margolis.fig5.html
In a world of solid spheres a solid object rotating in place (relative
to what contains it) must carry each planet on its path around the sun.
So the orbit of Mars in Tycho's diagram will be a rotating solid object
carrying Mars around the sun. But the path of the sun in Figure 3 does
not carry anything. It only marks the mathematical path of the center
of all the epicycles as the entire region between the Earth/moon and
the fixed stars proceeds through its annual rotation. Mars could no
more collide with that mathematical locus than a ship could collide
with the equator.
12. Figure 5 separates Tycho's diagram into two components. The cutout
(Figure 5a) contains everything that shares in the sun's annual motion
and nothing else. The template (Figure 5b) is what is left after
removing the cutout. Cut apart a copy of Figures 5a & 5b; fold Figure
5a to bisect the black circular region in its center. Cut the black
center out and trim away the remaining black on the periphery, unfold
the cutout and center its hole over the Earth/moon region at the center
of the template. Turning the cutout produces the Tychonic orbit of the
sun, accompanied (as Tycho and observations require) by the orbits of
the planets.
13. In a Copernican world the annual component of each planet's motion
is only a reflection of the Earth's actual orbit around the sun. For
Ptolemy, since the Earth does not move, each planet must have an actual
annual motion, but every astronomer who had access to Ptolemy's book
could learn how to invert the annual component of the Ptolemaic models
for the outer planets so that each would not merely track the apparent
motion of the sun but would exactly coincide with that motion. No
Ptolemaic astronomer seems actually to have done that, but when it is
done, all the annual motions in Ptolemy's system are reduced to a
single common motion. All the epicycles can then be carried within a
single large deferent providing that single motion. If, in addition,
the models are rescaled to set the radius of the annual component for
each planet to equal the Earth/sun radius, then you have the Tychonic
system. The cutout provided by Figure 5a is a perfectly adequate model
(on a scale of about 1 to a trillion) of the single Tychonic deferent
that results. On the other hand, if the models are inverted but not
rescaled, this yields the alternative arrangement of Figure 1'. But on
either the Tychonic or what I have called (Margolis, 1993) the
"inverted Ptolemaic" arrangement, that single sphere of course cannot
collide with itself.
IV. HOW THE CUTOUT WAS PRODUCED
14. Yet on the record of four centuries it is extremely difficult to
come to realize that there is no collision in a solid spheres version
of Tycho's system. So there is a psychological puzzle here, and an
interesting one. Until you see the cutout move (but not after that),
when you look at Tycho's diagram it is very hard to escape seeing a
collision that is not there. When you see the cutout move, the
collision disappears, although you are only seeing what you thought you
already understood perfectly well: that in Tycho's system the sun and
the planetary orbits must move together in an annual rotation around
the Earth. You still (of course) see an intersection between the orbits
of Mars and the sun, but it is now obvious that the intersection does
not entail a collision, for even in a world of solid spheres, one of
the intersecting paths (that of the sun) is only a mathematical locus,
not a "bumpable" object.
15. Trying to persuade people who have not seen the cutout that the
collision they so plainly sense is not really there is like trying to
persuade someone, merely by a logical argument, that the two lines in
the Muller-Lyer illusion (Figure 6) are the same length.
ftp://coglit.psy.soton.ac.uk/pub/psycoloquy/1998.volume.9/Pictures/margolis.fig6.html
Our eyes tell us that the argument must be wrong, and it is only after
we see a physical demonstration (first drawing two equal lines and then
adding the arrows) that it becomes obvious that our very clear
intuition is an illusion. Especially for individuals who are expert in
this Tychonic matter -- people who are understandably very confident
that they could not be grossly wrong about something they know so well
-- the only efficient way to make the logical point is to construct the
moving model of the Tychonic motions (Figure 5) and actually make it
move.
16. The cutout emerged from just such a discussion. While visiting
Harvard on another matter, I called Owen Gingerich, a leading expert on
renaissance astronomy, and asked him to sit through my argument about
Tycho's illusion one more time. Not too happily, I think, but cordially
nevertheless, he invited me over. After a while, when I thought he was
perhaps halfway persuaded, Gingerich recalled a new toy he had in his
desk. It was a sort of draftsman's compass he had picked up a week
earlier at a clearance sale in a book store in Iowa where he had gone
to give a talk. This compass had a little knife where you would expect
a little pencil, so instead of drawing circles, it would cut them.
Gingerich proposed that we might settle the matter by actually cutting
up a copy of Tycho's diagram. So for a few minutes, two professors in
their 60's happily carried out this trivial grade-school project. The
startled look on Gingerich's face when the cutout was moved told me
right away that I at last had a way to make this simple argument
convincing. This was four years after I first discussed the argument in
print (Margolis 1993) and six after I first began my sporadic but never
entirely abandoned effort to persuade historians of its validity.
V. EXPLAINING THE ILLUSION
17. Why is the illusion so stubborn without the cutout yet so easily
resolved with it? Note that the illusion cannot be induced just by the
intersection between the orbits of Mars and the sun. After all, there
is also an intersection between the orbit of the sun and those of Venus
and Mercury, but no one immediately sees a collision in either of these
logically equivalent situations (see End Note C). So another answer is
required that does not turn on the mere existence of an intersection.
It is not hard to see what that answer might be.
18. What creates the illusion is that our experience in the world is
overwhelmingly that little things circle big things, as flies circle a
dish of food. We do not see big things circling smaller things, and
indeed centrifugal forces make that physically difficult. In Tycho's
scheme, however, the orbit of the sun is the rotating center of orbits
(the inverted Ptolemaic orbits of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) that are
bigger than itself. In the Muller-Lyer illusion, our solidly entrenched
experience with seeing things in perspective allows the "arrow"
distance cues to distort our ordinarily reliable perception. It is a
similar reflection of entrenched mental habits that when someone who
has not yet seen the cutout move tries to envision the Tychonic
motions, they are not seen moving as they logically should.
19. Although we know perfectly well that what must move to match
observations is the entire system (the sun and all the orbits), what we
sense during this mental rotation is apparently something different:
the smaller orbits (Venus and Mercury) move with the sun as they
should, whereas the larger orbits (Mars, Jupiter, Saturn), illogically,
stay put, creating a powerful intuitive sense that a collision must
occur. It is only after you see the cutout move that you readily
discern that the Tychonic solar system would be carried by rotation of
the entire region of the cutout. So now you see the motion as big
carrying small rather than small carrying big, and the illusion
accordingly disappears.
20. This suggests an odd psychological possibility. People seeing the
illusory collision commonly think they are envisioning how the Tychonic
system moves, but this can't be conscious mental imagery, of the sort
that anyone who uses mathematics will be familiar with, where a person
can "see" what will change in a diagram when parameters change. The
imagery can't be conscious because if conscious imagery showed us what
I just described (with the sun carrying the orbits of Venus and Mercury
but the larger orbits staying in place), it would be obvious that it
was mistaken. Confronted with a direct contradiction between what we
know makes sense and what we seem to see, we would soon come to realize
that there was no such collision, perhaps as quickly as we see it when
the cutout is rotated. But the mental rotation is not consciously
"seen," only felt.
21. What appears to be occurring is a kind of "imagery blindsight":
blindsight with respect to the mental rotation of Tycho's system. The
only cases in which we could notice such entirely-in-the-head
blindsight would be when the blindsight was illusory. Only then could
it become apparent that somehow, in the back of our mind, something is
being seen that should not really be there. For a more detailed
discussion of blindsight see Weiskrantz (1986).
VI. EXPLAINING THE HISTORY
22. How could the Tychonic illusion have gone unchallenged for such a
very long time? Accounting for this calls for some consideration of
affect. For Muller-Lyer, there would be natural illusions that were
responses to cues in ambiguous conditions which prompt responses
resembling what is going on in rudimentary form in the Muller-Lyer
diagram (e.g., Margolis, 1987, Figure 7.1.) Occasionally, however, we
would encounter unmistakable evidence that we had seen things wrong.
This overt conflict arouses curiosity, or distress, or perhaps only
amusement, any of which might prompt inquiry and checking. An alert
psychologist noticing such a thing could make use of it, as Muller-
Lyer famously did, and as (in the realm of cognitive rather than
perceptual illusions) Wason and Kahneman & Tversky have so often done.
23. Yet even without an overt rivalry to prompt affect, if we are
motivated to wish X true, this will prompt a visceral response that
pushes us to look harder to see whether somehow X might indeed be true.
On the other hand, suppose affect is aversive: for example, because
"everyone knows" Tycho was right, why waste time taking seriously an
argument that he was wrong? Then it is wanting to escape that
aversiveness that is much more easily prompted. There will be little
inclination to check, much less actively doubt, anything that comes to
mind as a plausible dismissal of what you know is wrong.
24. This makes much more sense, however, for us (or for an early
Copernican like Kepler) than for geocentric astronomers circa 1600, for
whom Tycho's system was an extremely serious matter. Seeing through
Tycho's illusion is ultimately so simple that some explanation is
needed of how he, and all other astronomers who abandoned Ptolemy for
Tycho's system, could have missed it.
25. The explanation I want to suggest is that astronomers in Tycho's
time had apparently moved far more to the Copernican view than they
themselves consciously recognized, so that those who consciously
believed the Earth did not move were nevertheless tacitly committed to
the Copernican way of seeing the world. Indeed, is it psychologically
plausible that astronomers would carry around in their heads a sense of
how the planets move like that of the pretzel-shaped orbits of Figure 4
when a simple circle would yield exactly the same observations if the
world were Copernican? (see End Note D)
VII. TYCHO'S ILLUSION AND UNCONSCIOUS BELIEF
26. There is another case that seems to reveal an odd inattention to
how the Tychonic system actually works. Accounts of Galileo and the
Pope (Urban VIII) have routinely claimed that Galileo ignored the
Tychonic system in his Dialogue, often criticizing Galileo for
concealing from his readers the system that (as such writers see it)
the Copernicans could not beat. A sufficiently careless reading of the
Dialogue could support that view, but it is a puzzle how a careful
reader could fail to notice that what Galileo always refers to as the
"Ptolemaic system" is in fact not Ptolemaic but Tychonic. Throughout
the book, Galileo calls the geocentric alternative Ptolemaic. But at
each of the few points where he explicitly mentions features that could
distinguish between the Ptolemaic and Tychonic versions of geocentric
astronomy, Galileo's "Ptolemaic" system turns out to be Tychonic.
Given Galileo's circumstances, it is not hard to suggest a reason for
this odd treatment: it allowed him to avoid any frontal attack on what
was by then the system of the Church's own astronomers. That, in turn,
is at least relevant (and in fact seems to me central) to understanding
both the Pope's approval of the book before it was published, and his
eventual fierce belief that he had been tricked. Galileo explicitly
(and in several different places) specifies his "Ptolemaic" system as
one in which the planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) go
round the sun. But no writer discussing the Dialogue seems to have
noticed that such language unambiguously identifies the geocentric
system Galileo has in mind as Tycho's, not Ptolemy's. For details see
Margolis (1991).
27. So there is somehow a blind spot here with respect to how Tycho's
system works. This is revealed by yet another Tychonic illusion, one
with a much more direct bearing on the argument here. The literature
uniformly reports that Tycho's system preserves nearly all the
advantages of Copernicus over Ptolemy without abandoning a fixed Earth.
(It rarely mentions that the disadvantage that remains is a whopper:
the Tychonic orbits are still pretzel-shaped: the orbit Kepler shows in
Figure 4 fits both Ptolemy and Tycho.) Abandoning Ptolemy is completely
unnecessary to gain those advantages, however, since they have nothing
whatever to do with the heliocentric orbits of the Tychonic planets.
Any advantages come only from inverting the outer planets, which is not
an innovation of Tycho at all, since Ptolemy himself had pointed out
that possibility. The resulting "inverted Ptolemaic" system (invert the
outer planets but do not rescale to make them heliocentric) would have
all the purported advantages of Tycho's system while preserving the
Ptolemaic distances. Yet for 1400 years no one showed any interest in
that. For a more detailed discussion, see Margolis (1993), pp. 117-29.
28. So why should Tycho's arrangement be so attractive circa 1600 that
after 1400 years Ptolemy simply faded away without any noticeable
fight? I don't believe any credible logic for this can be found.
Rather, astronomers who were consciously opposed to the Copernican idea
revealed a powerful preference for a scheme whose only actual merit
(relative to an inverted Ptolemaic scheme) is that it looks more or
less Copernican! This preference is like that of experimental subjects
subliminally exposed to a bit of music, who then report that they like
that (consciously) unfamiliar music better than really unfamiliar music
(Zajonc 1980). Such an astronomer could find -- and a fortiori a
Copernican then or now could find -- a decided preference for the
Tychonic system over the Ptolemaic one without any need at all to think
about how the Tychonic system actually works.
29. The Ptolemaic system, which reigned for 1400 years, ended without
even a whimper. By 1610, both Kepler and Galileo were treating Tycho as
the man to beat, and Ptolemy as scarcely worth discussing (Margolis
1991). No evidence has survived of anything like a serious debate over
why it would make sense for a geocentric astronomer to abandon 1400
years of tradition for Tycho's alternative. Ptolemy simply faded away.
That seamless transition has been rationalized by casual reference to
the purported (but in fact nonexistent) advantages of Tycho over
Ptolemy. But it seems highly implausible that such casually defended,
indeed unexamined claims could have been persuasive without some
subliminal attachment to the Copernican way of seeing the world.
Unsurprisingly, a Copernican like Kepler had that entrenched in his
head. But so apparently did non-Copernicans, even though conscious
belief remained explicitly anti-Copernican.
30. There is a further bit of evidence. For the Tychonic illusion
itself is contingent on seeing the Tychonic diagram from a Copernican,
not a Ptolemaic, perspective. From a Copernican perspective, it is
natural to see the path of the sun around the Earth as replacing the
path of the Earth around the sun. Starting from that, the tacit
misperception of the motions is prompted by the big-on-small effect
described earlier. But a person starting from a Ptolemaic perspective
would see a motion, not like that of the Copernican Figure 2, but like
that of the inverted Ptolemaic Figure 1', with the motion carrying the
orbits and the sun together. For details, see Margolis 1993, chapter 8.
Even Copernicans like us readily see this when confronted with the
motion of the cutout. That we have trouble seeing what really happens
in the Tychonic system without that help is easily explained by the
fact that it is a Copernican sense that guides our intuition. But that
astronomers who were resisting Copernicus circa 1600 would suffer the
same illusion hardly makes sense unless those astronomers were somehow
committed to the Copernican way of seeing the heavens despite their
contrary conscious beliefs.
31. Who would be naive enough to suppose that today we are less
vulnerable to illusions (but different ones, of course) than were our
predecessors in Tycho's time, or that we would be more able (especially
when motivated by adverse visceral prompting) to allow mere logic to
challenge comfortable intuitions?
VIII. PERSONAL NOTE
32. How I came to notice the illusion itself fits the argument just
sketched. Writing a "Ptolemaic tutorial" for my 1993 book I wanted to
take readers through the exercise of inverting Ptolemy's model for the
outer planets, rescaling the planetary orbits, and thus obtaining the
Tychonic system. Working that through, I noticed what I have here
argued a contemporary of Tycho's would notice if he started from
Ptolemy, rather than Copernicus (see End Note E).
33. There was for me an idiosyncratic but clear motivation to follow up
any glimmer of doubt about Tycho's collision. In my 1987 book I had
already argued, on other grounds, that by the late 16th Century
astronomers' habits of mind must have shifted quite a way towards
seeing things as Copernicus saw them. I nevertheless accepted and
repeated the usual collision story (as I also accepted and repeated the
usual story of Galileo ignoring the Tychonic system). But the second
time around, given that motivation and the serendipitous occasion to
see things from the Ptolemaic side, I managed to avoid missing the
opportunity again.
ENDNOTES
A. For Kepler, see Chapter 1 of his Astronomia Nova (1609). For Kuhn,
see the discussion of the Tychonic system in his Copernican Revolution
(Harvard, 1957), pp. 205-6. For Swerdlow (1996), pp. 211-2.
B. This accounts for the dismissive view of Copernicus sometimes
encountered in appraisals by writers who focus narrowly on Copernicus
as a technical astronomer. Two influential exemplars are Neugebauer
(1983) and Price (1958).
C. Kuhn (1957) noticed this possibility. In contrast to the Mars
problem, however, this is "merely" a logical point, never an immediate
intuition. If there is a problem with Mars, then indeed logically
there should also be a problem with Venus and Mercury. Tycho, however,
and nearly everyone since who has commented on the collision, was not
troubled by that at all. In any case, when the main illusion is
corrected the secondary one vanishes as well.
D. But aren't planetary orbits really ellipses? And didn't Copernicus
use various secondary epicycles? The answer to both questions is yes:
indeed the secondary epicycles of the latter were intended to take
account of the ellipses of the former. These have consequences that are
essential for calculating exact motions. But a flawless diagram of the
elliptical orbit of Mars is indistinguishable to the eye from a simple
circle.
E. Inverting a schematic Ptolemaic diagram is the usual way of showing
readers the mathematical equivalence of the Ptolemaic and Copernican
systems. This schematic shows the path of the center of the epicycle,
but not the solid deferent that contains that path shown in the 15th
Century Figure 1. Inverting that schematic is not enough to correct the
illusion. What is required is to invert the "solid spheres" (Figure 1'),
which then explicitly reveals the full deferent carrying the epicycle
within it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to Psycoloquy's Assistant Editor, Marcus Munafo', who did a
good deal of work on the figures, made the links, and finalized the
text, Abstracts and Rationale.
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