I’ve been thinking about cycles. A cycle is something that repeats, like the rotation of a wheel, or the rotation of the earth. A true cycle never has an end until something external affects it, and the same is true for the start of a cycle in that something external to the cycle has to happen to start the cycle off.
Conceptually, a perfect cycle would be something like a sine or cosine wave. It’s called a wave because if plotted (amplitude versus time) it resembles a wave in water, with its peaks and troughs. It’s fundamental constants are the distance between the waves and the amplitude of the maximum of each cycle.
The sine and cosine waves are derived from a circle – when a radius of the circle rotates at a constant rate, the sine and cosine can be measured off a diagram of the circle and the rotating radius. The point where the radius touches the circle is a certain distance above the horizontal diameter of the circle and is also a certain distance to the right of the vertical diameter of the circle. If the radius of the circle is one unit, then the sine is the height and the cosine is the distance to the right.
As the radius sweeps around the circle the sine of the angle it makes to the horizontal diameter goes from zero when the angle is zero and the radius lies along the horizontal diameter to one unit when it is at 90 degrees to the horizontal diameter. When the angle increases further, the sine decreases until it is again zero at 180 degrees, and as it sweeps into the third quadrant of the circle it goes negative, increasing to one unit again at 270 degrees (but downwards) and finally returning to zero at 360 degrees. 360 degrees is (simplistically) the same as zero degrees and so the cycle repeats.
The cosine starts at one unit at zero degrees, decreases to zero units at 90 degrees, decreases further to one unit downwards (conventionally called minus one) at 180, then increases to zero again at 270 degrees and finally to complete the cycle, it increases to one unit at 360 degrees.
When plotted against the angle, the sine and cosine produce typical wave shapes, but shifted by 90 degrees. If the radius rotates at a constant speed, the sine and cosine can be plotted against time, which produces a curve like the track of a point on a wheel as it is rolled at constant speed.
While these curves are pleasingly smooth and symmetrical, in the real world we can only get close to these ideals. A wheel will slip on the surface that it is turning on, friction on axles slows a freely spinning wheel, lengthening each “cycle” by small amounts, altering the curves so that they are minutely different at different times.
If an ellipse is drawn inside the circle such that it touches the circle at the points where circle touches the horizontal diameter, the radius will cut the ellipse at some point and it turns out that the curves plotted from the intersection point are still sine and cosine curves. However the heights or amplitudes of the curves are different.
An ellipse is approximately the shape of the orbit of a planet about a sun for reasons that I won’t go into here. It isn’t an exact ellipse, mainly because of the effects of other bodies, though it is accurate enough that things like the length of a planet’s year doesn’t vary significantly over many lifetimes. The most accurate atomic clocks can be used to measure the differences but they only need to be adjusted infrequently by very small to keep in line with astronomical time.
To account for these errors the astronomer Ptolemy devised an ingenious scheme. An ellipse can be looked on as result of imposing a smaller cycle of rotation on a larger one, a bit like having a jointed rod, with the larger part connected to the centre of a circle and the smaller part connected to the end of the larger part. If the smaller rod rotates at a constant speed at the end of the larger rod then the tip of the smaller rod draws out a more complex path. If the correct rotation rate is chosen, as is the correct starting angle between the two rods, then the tip of the smaller rod will draw out an ellipse.
Ptolemy suggested that the variations from an ellipse could be modelled by imposing other smaller cycles on the first two cycles, and indeed this does result in more accurate descriptions of the orbits.
Ptolemy got a bad press because he believed that these cycles were real manifestations of reality, and his system of epicycles on epicycles on epicycles was hugely complex, but his system can be extended to model any physical system to any degree of accuracy required. It can be proved mathematically that his process exactly matches any equation if the process is taken to infinity. It’s one method of fitting a curve to arbitrary data.
In particular Ptolemy was able to use his methods to calculate the distance of the planets, which was a singular success for his method. It is the sort of technique which is used today to calculate the orbits of newly discovered comets – when it is discovered the astronomer has only one point of location so he/she cannot predict the orbit. When the comet’s next position is measured, the astronomer can start to predict the orbit. A third observation can vastly improve the accuracy of the calculation of the orbit.
Subsequent observations allow the orbit to be refined even more until the astronomer can accurately predict the complete orbit of the comet and its periodicity using something like Gauss’ method as described in the link. In essence the procedure of observation, calculation and prediction/re-observation is the same as Ptolemy used, even though the underlying physics and philosophy is different. Ptolemy’s ideas may seem quaint to us, but in his time we knew much less about the universe, and, given the era in which he was working his ideas were not that outlandish. He did not even know that the planets revolved around the sun. He didn’t know about gravity as a universal force.
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