Accordingly, the task of the mathematicians was now to design a system which would reduce the apparent irregularities in the motions of the planets to regular motions in perfectly regular circles. This task kept them busy for the next two thousand years. With his poetic and innocent demand, Plato laid a curse on astronomy, whose effects were to last till the beginning of the seventeenth century, when Kepler proved that planets move in oval, and not circular orbits. There is perhaps no other example in the history of thought of such dogged, obsessional persistence in error, as the circular
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