Despite all of the above successes,
the Copernican model was not embraced
for sound scientific reasons:
the model did not explain the observations any better than did the
Ptolemaic model; Copernicus was forced to introduce
epicycles to be even be competitive with Ptolemy because of his assumption
of uniform motion on circles
he simply stated that the stars were very far away in order
to explain the lack of an observed
annual trigonometric parallax
there was no physical foundation for the model
*The Phases of Mercury and Venus weren't observed at the time. Their
discovery awaited Galileo and the telescope.
