An imaginary circle surrounding the earth, in whose periphery either the heavenly body or the center of the heavenly body's epicycle was supposed to be carried round.
He preferred and adopted the principle of the epicycle as more probable to his mind, because it ordered the system of the heavens with more symmetry and with a more intimate dependence with reference to the center of the universe.
Epicycle upon epicycle of subsidiary hypothesis will have to be invoked to give to the discrepant terms a temporary appearance of squaring with each other; but at last even this resource will fail.
If it can be observed, it proves the Affirmative; but if it cannot be observed, it doth not convince the Negative, but only proves that the Semidiameter of the Earths Epicycle is so small as not to make any discernable Parallax.
This epicycle was a deviation from the limit to which philosophy had been ultimately brought by Kant; and at that point I took it up again afterwards, to carry it further.
An instance of such an epicycle is the philosophy started by Fichte and Schelling, and crowned by Hegel's caricature of it.
Indeed, it is remarkable that he introduced an epicycle which was not considered necessary by Ptolemy in order to represent the inequalities in the motions of the planets around the sun.
Later, I turn the lunar heaven until I bring the center of the lunar epicycle to the same level.
To correct for these irregularities Copernicus introduced epicycle on epicycle in the lunar orbit.
The moon moves on anepicycle centred on a second epicycle, itself centred on a deferent, excentric to the earth.
But Copernicus remarked that he could also use anepicycle for this purpose, or that he could use both an excentric and an epicycle for each planet, and so bring theory still closer into accord with observation.
He also discovered other lunar equalities, and wanted to add another epicycle to the moon's orbit, but he feared that these would soon become unmanageable if further observations showed more new inequalities.
The attempt to explain the moon's motion by supposing her to move in an epicycle was hopelessly wrong.
The eighth sphere had neither deferent nor epicycle but to it were attached the fixed stars.
For the epicycle is a sphere which changes place in the circumference of the large sphere.
We have an instance of such an epicyclein the philosophy of Fichte and Schelling, crowned by Hegel's caricature of it.
This epicycle issued from the limit to which philosophy had been finally brought by Kant, where I myself took it up again later to carry it further.
But still there would be smaller errors going through their own period, and these, again, would have to be met by imagining that the first epicycle carried a second, and it might be that the second carried a third, and so on.
Any complexity introduced by superposing one epicycle upon another seemed preferable to abandoning this great fundamental principle of the perfect uniformity of the actings of Nature.
This he called the evection, and introduced another epicycle to represent it.
He considered it as established by his theory, that the centre E of the planet's epicycle (see fig.
Thus, the angle adp, measuring the motion of the planet in its epicycle, would be equal to DEd, the angle described by the centre of the epicycle in the deferent.
For instance, if the planet was supposed to be at A when the centre of the epicycle was at D, its position, when the centre of the epicycle had removed to d, would be at p, found by drawing dp parallel to DA.
In the inferior planets, it was even thought necessary to give to the plane of the epicycle two oscillatory motions on axes at right angles to each other.
If it were made to move according to the same law, so that when the centre of the epicycle reached E, the planet should be at F, taking the angle BEF equal to BSA, it has been shewn (p.
In this epicycle he was not supposed to revolve, but to librate, or move up and down in its diameter.
The planet P revolved in the circumference of the little epicycle, in the same direction with the centre of the great epicycle in the circumference of the deferent, but with a double angular velocity.
An epicycle in addition to the hypocycle was introduced into Mercury's orbit.
Tycho Brahe, excellent astronomer as he was, kept as we saw to the epicycle theory.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "epicycle" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
