A bit of praise for Ptolemy's integrity, however, is that he didn't fudge the equant circle issue (I am not sure whether others maybe knew about it previously, actually). That was really the monkey wrench in the whole theory, and without that, probably we would still be geocentric. It would have been really tempting just to sweep that little discrepancy under the carpet, as an irrelevant detail.
In fact, I think often authors have experiments which contradict their results, but they just don't mention them, with the reasoning that they don't have to explain the entire world in one paper. It is hard to determine whether this is okay or not, but I guess it probably depends on how glaring/obvious the discrepancy is... Jacob Keller On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 8:34 AM, Ed Pozharski <epozh...@umaryland.edu> wrote: > On Thu, 2011-08-11 at 14:33 -0600, Maia Cherney wrote: >> Even great scientists sometimes published papers >> with wrong analysis. > > Absolutely (although I am not sure how high crimes and misdemeanors of > Henry VIII absolve more petty criminals of responsibility): > > http://www.amazon.com/Claudius-Ptolemy-Professor-Robert-Newton/dp/0801819903 > > >From the review published by TIME: > > "At least one scientist has come to Ptolemy's defense. Astronomer and > Science Historian Owen Gingerich of Harvard admits that the Syntaxis > contains "some remarkably fishy numbers." But he is convinced that any > deception was honestly motivated, and that Ptolemy, like many a > modern-day scientist, merely chose to publish the data that best > supported his theories." > > http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,919182,00.html > > Time to Retract The Almagest! I never liked being in the center of the > Universe anyway, given the possibility of inward gravitational > collapse :) > > -- > "Hurry up before we all come back to our senses!" > Julian, King of Lemurs > -- ******************************************* Jacob Pearson Keller Northwestern University Medical Scientist Training Program cel: 773.608.9185 email: j-kell...@northwestern.edu *******************************************
