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Epictetus comments on The Galileo affair: who was on the side of rationality? - Less Wrong
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But if you're going to use epicycles anyway, why prefer Copernicus to Ptolemy?
Fewer epicycles means easier calculations. Still, it isn't clear why you should prefer the Copernican system to the Tychonic (the other major contender in Galileo's time) when evaluating based on some mix of accuracy and ease of calculation (if your goal is to know "where Saturn would be on a given date").
Going by wiki, Copernicus' system had more epicycles.
Whoops, you're right. It seems as though Copernicus dropped an equant at the cost of adding even more epicycles. Hardly an unambiguously preferable trade-off.
According to Koestler (The Sleepwalkers) Copernicus just hated Ptolemy's "eccentrics" because a good Platonist God does not do ugly assymetrical work like that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle