[Tom Bishop]

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.

[markjo]

If epicycles are a bad thing in heliocentric astronomy, then why would they be a good thing in geocentric astronomy?

[AATW]

Epicycles are simply "a small circle whose centre moves round the circumference of a larger one".
Of course astronomy still uses epicycles because that's how the universe works. The earth orbits around the sun, and the moon orbits around the earth.
On a larger scale the sun orbits the galactic centre.

The mistake in astronomy pre-Copernicas was to think that everything revolved around the earth. When planets were observed in retrograde motion epicycles were added to attempt to correct that. It's not that epicycles themselves are wrong, it's just that they chose the wrong ones. And they did that because:

Geocentrism lasted so long because priests and philosophers decided that the Earth’s placement in time and space had implications for its spiritual importance. That made accepting heliocentrism anathema on a deeper level than science, which is the reason so many smart people toiled to preserve something whose falsity was increasingly obvious for centuries

That's a quote from one of your articles above, Tom.

You say "The models of Astronomy are still in the stone age", but they demonstrably work. They're not perfect by any means, but they've got us to the moon, they've got probes to all the other planets. They enable us to make predictions on all kinds of astronomical events. There's a lunar eclipse on Sunday. You can find out where and when to see it at your location, you can then make an observation and compare that to the prediction.

Now all you have to do is use your flat earth model to make your own prediction, see how well it compares with the predictions made using mainstream astronomy and you can see how well it matches up with the observations. Then we can talk about which model better matches the reality. Good luck! You've got a few days before Sunday so you can post your predictions here if you like, showing your workings.

[markjo]

Epicycles are simply "a small circle whose centre moves round the circumference of a larger one".
Of course astronomy still uses epicycles because that's how the universe works. The earth orbits around the sun, and the moon orbits around the earth.
On a larger scale the sun orbits the galactic centre.

In the articles Tom cited, the authors are using epicycles as a metaphor for adding complexity in order to make a theory work.  Sometimes it’s a good thing and sometimes it isn’t.  Apparently Tom thinks that adding complexity to FE is a good thing, but a bad thing for RE.

It also seems that Tom doesn’t think that the 3 body problem applies to FE for some odd reason or other.