THE Greek astronomer Ptolemy, who declared the Earth was the centre of the universe, was not only wrong, it seems he fudged his data too.
That’s the conclusion of physicist Dennis Duke from Florida State University in Tallahassee, who examined the calculations in the Almagest, a book written by Ptolemy sometime in the second century AD. Duke has reason to be suspicious about Ptolemy: he has already proved that Ptolemy plagiarised extensively from earlier observations made by Hipparchus for his own catalogue of stars.
This time, Duke studied how Ptolemy had worked out the orbits of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn…
