For it must be remembered that the system which Galileo advocated was the orthodox Copernican system, designed by the Canon himself, nearly a century before Kepler threw out the epicycles and transformed the abstruse paper-construction into a workable mechanical model. Incapable of acknowledging that any of his contemporaries had a share in the progress of astronomy, Galileo blindly and indeed suicidally ignored Kepler’s work to the end, persisting in the futile attempt to bludgeon the world into accepting a Ferris wheel with forty-eight epicycles as ‘rigorously demonstrated’ physical reality.
