> It was in fact Kepler who was much closer to a correct model, but he wasn’t a polemical of a writer so he didn’t have as much influence and legend as Galileo.
By the end of the 1600s most people were using Kepler, not necessarily because they thought it actually matched reality (there was no way to verify one way or the other), but rather because the math was easier: no more epicycles!
Copernicus/Galileo still needed them:
> The Copernican model replaced Ptolemy's equant circles with more epicycles. 1,500 years of Ptolemy's model help create a more accurate estimate of the planets motions for Copernicus.[24] This is the main reason that Copernicus' system had even more epicycles than Ptolemy's. The more epicycles proved to have more accurate measurements of how the planets were truly positioned, "although not enough to get excited about".[25]
By the end of the 1600s most people were using Kepler, not necessarily because they thought it actually matched reality (there was no way to verify one way or the other), but rather because the math was easier: no more epicycles!
Copernicus/Galileo still needed them:
> The Copernican model replaced Ptolemy's equant circles with more epicycles. 1,500 years of Ptolemy's model help create a more accurate estimate of the planets motions for Copernicus.[24] This is the main reason that Copernicus' system had even more epicycles than Ptolemy's. The more epicycles proved to have more accurate measurements of how the planets were truly positioned, "although not enough to get excited about".[25]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_heliocentrism#Coper...