I recently came across this quote by Stephan Wolfram:
https://www.edge.org/conversation/stephen_wolfram-computation-all-the-way-down"One of the important moments in the history of physics was Copernicus' efforts in the 1500s. People like Ptolemy had all these schemes for computing positions of planets based on epicycles, with the assumption that Earth was the center of the universe and you could compute all these positions of planets. It was a pretty accurate way of doing predictions. In fact, the humorous thing is that people say epicycles were bad news, but if you look at how we compute positions of things in the modern world, we are mathematically using the equivalent of 10,000 epicycles."
This observation that astronomy is based on epicycles is also echoed on our wiki page:
Astronomical Prediction Based on Patterns.
This is further evidence that modern astronomy still relies heavily on epicyclic methods. It is an embarrassment to humanity that modern astronomy is using epicycles, despite that epicycles are a classic example of a "wrong" way of doing science.
Jovono - Epicycles of thought"What are epicycles? If you imagine an object orbiting another, you will of course model that as an ellipse. The problem is that if you think the planets are orbiting the Earth and they are actually orbiting another object, say the Sun, over time you will have observations that fail to fit that model. Rather than treat these deviations as disconfirming evidence of geocentrism, blinded by religious dogma, astronomers added mathematical complications to their models of planetary orbits starting with Apollonius in the 3rd Century BCE. These modifications were called epicycles, and they were very convenient for the committed geocentrist — when the model broke down, an astronomer would just add a new epicycle and create an even more convoluted view of the heavens that could last for a little longer.
The importance of epicycles is not the (interesting) history of science but the fact that they describe a common intellectual pattern. We engage in epicycles all the time to preserve something that we want to believe is true, regardless of whether it actually is."
The fact that epicycles are still being used bolsters the reality of the
Three Body Problem and demonstrates the weakness of astronomy. The egregious use of epicycles shows that much of what is presented as settled science in astronomy may be closer to an elaborate illusion. The models of Astronomy are still in the stone age, composed of obtuse math to describe observations, and never really fundamentally matured.