"The language... as to the Moon's movements and the Epicyclic Theory... settled later on by Ptolemy... deserve careful examination... Astronomy had... become... technical and mathematical, sharply distinguished from general physical enquiry. Even Hipparchus... "though he loved truth above everything," yet was not versed in "natural science," and was content to explain the motions of the heavenly bodies by an hypothesis mathematically consistent, without care for its physical truth... Take the case of the Moon. Ptolemy was content to "save the phenomena"... by a system which admirably accounted for her very complex movements, but which involved the consequence that her distance from us at the nearest must he half that at the farthest, and her angular diameter therefore double!"
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Arthur Octavius Prickard, Introductory Note to his translation of Plutarch, The Face which appears on the Orb of the Moon (1911), pp. 11-12. Ref: with respect to Hipparchus, Theon of Alexandria and Ptolemy, see J. L. E. Dreyer, History of the Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler (1906) p. 165.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Saving_the_appearances
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Saving the appearances
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