From Norbert Wiener’s “Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine”:

Even before the existence of any adequate dynamical theory, even as far back as the Babylonians, it was realized that eclipses occurred in regular predictable cycles, extending backward and forward over time. It was realized that time itself could better be measured by the motion of the stars in their courses than in any other way. The pattern for all events in the solar system was the revolution of a wheel or a series of wheels, wether in the form of the Ptolemaic theory of epicycles or the Copernican theory of orbits, and in any such theory the future after a fashion repeats the past. The music of the spheres is a palindrome, and the book of astronomy reads the same backward as forward.