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Before Copernicus
People regarded the world as the center of the
universe, everything revolved around the world. And people were masters
of the universe. This train of thought is called the: geocentric
system.
It was first systematized by Aristotle and later elaborated by Ptolemy
in the 2nd century. It was a cosmological system that placed the Earth
at the center of the universe, with the heavenly bodies circling around
it. Ptolemy revealed that each planet traveled on the circumference
of a small circle (epicycle) whose center traveled along a large circular
path (deferent) about the Earth at a steady speed. Thus Ptolemy was
able to explain the motions of the heavenly bodies about the Earth
more effectively than his predecessors. As a result, Ptolemy's work
dominated the field of astronomy until Copernicus brought forth his
idea of heliocentrism.
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