But Ptolemy's formula's aren't completely wrong, either: they're actually very effective at predicting the movements of the planets and stars — just not good enough, it turns out, and rather more complex than they need to be.
* the idea that everything is made of (one of, or all) 4 elements
* humorist theory of disease
* belief in perpetual motion machines
* spontaneous generation
AFAICT all of these can be construed to be considered "good enough theories" but they generally fail to make accurate predictions, which "good science" doesn't.
They made good prediction for where the planets are going to be. They covered all the known planets. They produced accurate results for all the observations of their time. It took the lifetime work of Brahe and his development of his own observatories to even collect enough data for Kepler to be able to recognize differences between the approximate circle paths of the planets.
In short, just like Newton's, Ptolemy's formulas are a "good enough" approximation when knowing their limits.
I've even read one scientist, and I tend to believe him, claiming that Ptolemy himself, during the development of his formulas, must have used the Sun-centric model, and then he produced the "projected" result which was more acceptable for everybody who just wanted to calculate where the planets are on the sky, as seen from the Earth.
It's just that before the scientific method become common place a lot of theories weren't.