Mean motions in Ptolemy's \texit{Planetary hypotheses} (Q1039930): Difference between revisions

The feature for which Ptolemy's work Planetary Hypotheses is probably best known to differ from the earlier Almagest may be its attempted determination of true relative and absolute distances of the planets. The present article investigates another difference, namely the one concerning the numerical parameters of the planetary models. Ptolemy himself says to have corrected his models on many points ``on the basis of more prolonged comparisons of observations''. Duke investigates the nature of the changes to the mean motions and the associated epoch values in technical detail (those for the moon and the five true planets, the solar parameters are not changed). Ptolemy is quoted for promising to set out the ``simple and unmixed periods, out of which the particular, complex ones arise; [the former] were obtained by us as approximations to the restitutions computed for the correction''. One might expect the starting point for this process to be the parameters of the Almagest. However, an intricate examination of the parameters, based on techniques for the expression and approximation of ratios known in Antiquity, shows that this cannot be the case. Moreover, the techniques giving rise to the parameters used in the Planetary hypotheses turn out not to be ``the elegant trio analyses of the Almagest but some sort of serial determinations of the parameters based on sequences of independent observations''; the author suggests they may have been similar to the calculations for Mars which James Evans presents in ``The Theory and Practice of Ancient Astronomy'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 362--368, and about which Evans says that ``it is more than likely that some such rougher method preceded the elegant perfection of Ptolemy'' (Duke's reference in note 6 should be to ``Evans (1998)'' instead of ``Evans (1987)''; the item is listed correctly in the references).