Epicycles were brilliant math, as description, but the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation.

Consider that as mobile organisms, our sentience coalesces as a sequence of perception, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the point of the present moving past to future. Physics codifies it as measures of duration.

The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events rise and all.

There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is conserved, because it is the present. It creates time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. time is frequency, enter are amplitude.

So the energy, as present and process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.

Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuation rise and fall.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and substance go future to past. Though it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information.

consequently there is an intellectual tendency to focus on the patterns, rather than the processes generating them.

Th future is not determined, as the process of determination can only occur as the present.

Nor is free will logical, since an action free of cause would logically be free of effect as well and the premise of will is to affect. We are small part of nature's process of selection.

Accountants use a lot of math as well, but in accounting it's understood the complexity can obscure as easily as enlighten, so it's considered bad form to just write in a figure and call it "dark money," whenever there is a gap in the books.

Math is pattern recognition, but when correlation is mistaken for causation, it's called numerology.