Apart from the twenty-seven observations of his own, the entire Copernican system was based on the observational data of Ptolemy, Hipparchus, and other Greek and Arab astronomers, whose statements he had uncritically accepted as Gospel truth, never pausing to consider the possibility of errors committed by careless scribes and translators in those notoriously corrupt texts, nor of mistakes and the doctoring of figures by the ancient observers themselves. When, at last, he realized the unreliability of the data on which he had built, he must have felt that the bottom had fallen out of his
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