the.com/epicycle
a circle drawn on a circle so the wrong theory can keep pretending to work.
means a small orbit added to a bigger orbit in old astronomy, used to patch a model that was fundamentally mistaken.
from greek epikyklos, 'upon a circle' — ptolemy stacked these to save the earth-centered universe from bad predictions, and mostly it worked, which was the problem.
stacking problemastronomers kept adding epicycles on epicycles for centuries
copernicus ironyhis sun-centered model still needed epicycles too
kepler's fixellipses finally made the extra circles unnecessary
modern insultnow means any absurd patch hiding a bad theory