Signs of Modern Astronomy Seen in Ancient Babylon

[ashling]

I apologize if this has been recently posted as if it has someone will get all indignant and spend much time and energy berating me for not searching first. So if you are inclined to do so, save your energy and just ignore this post. Sometimes, however, they are just trying to be nice and let me know about the other pos. in which case, Thank you in advance.

I think I need a hug

I got this the other day but my computer is being a butthead and either locks up when I try to post or engages in some other form of passive aggressive computer buttheadedness Also, I am ADD and get easily sidetracked ... oh look, a squirrel


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/29/science/babylonians-clay-tablets-geometry-astronomy-jupiter.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0





also

Ancient Babylonian astronomers calculated Jupiter’s position from the area under a time-velocity graph
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6272/482

The idea of computing a body’s displacement as an area in time-velocity space is usually traced back to 14th-century Europe. I show that in four ancient Babylonian cuneiform tablets, Jupiter’s displacement along the ecliptic is computed as the area of a trapezoidal figure obtained by drawing its daily displacement against time. This interpretation is prompted by a newly discovered tablet on which the same computation is presented in an equivalent arithmetical formulation. The tablets date from 350 to 50 BCE. The trapezoid procedures offer the first evidence for the use of geometrical methods in Babylonian mathematical astronomy, which was thus far viewed as operating exclusively with arithmetical concepts.

[OxQQme]

1. Let the naysayers begin saying woo

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=&imgrefurl=http://www.parismatch.com/Actu/Insolite/Planete-X-Nemesis-Nibiru-900227&h=626&w=1000&tbnid=-VYQvM5RzrvoAM:&docid=a5msICVOyn8piM&ei=VPSsVoLoJ8LIjwPnnq6oCw&tbm=isch&ved=0ahUKEwiC4sKZidLKAhVC5GMKHWePC7UQMwgfKAIwAg

[Odin2005]

2. The Ancients weren't stupid

They didn't have the technology we do to help with their observations, but they were just as smart as we are.

People like to think that the Ancient Greeks were great scientists, but that is far from the truth, in fact the Greeks were great plagiarists who picked and chose from Mesopotamian and Egyptian sources so much as those sources agreed with the narrowness of Greek scientific thought.

It is no accident that the Roman Imperial period was a time of scientific stagnation, a stagnation that only ended when the empire began to fall apart and the rising Medieval Middle-Eastern culture broke through.

[Flaxbee]

3. Saw this yesterday - fascinating. Thanks for posting!

I love this sort of news. My mom did too; she'd have been so excited to hear about this ...