I am left, then, with this question of how many more epicycles will it take before the larger academic community recognizes that the earth is turning, and that such turning accounts for the spread of light across the land. (slaw.ca)
They were simply pessimists who couldn't imagine that anything as obviously complex as epicycles could be dramatically simplified with a simple model of planetary orbits. (judithcurry.com)
Ptolemaic astronomy went on adding planetary epicycles to remove discrepancies; defenders of the phlogiston theory were driven to postulate negative chemical weights in order to maintain their paradigm. (religion-online.org)