[HN Gopher] Use of geometrical methods in Babylonian mathematica...
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Use of geometrical methods in Babylonian mathematical astronomy
(2016)
Author : Anon84
Score : 60 points
Date : 2022-05-09 12:33 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| gumby wrote:
| To flip this around: I have a chromatography textbook from only
| 20 years ago that teaches computing the area under the curve
| using what it called the "plate" method (i.e. draw rectangles
| inside the curve on the instrument's printout and then add up
| their areas).
| foob wrote:
| I had a physics professor many years back who told me about how
| they sometimes used to measure integrals by cutting out the
| areas of a plot they were interested in and weighing the
| resulting paper.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| But negative area??? Maybe it was printed on _complex_ paper
| FastMonkey wrote:
| You could cut the paper along the X axis, and subtract the
| area below from the area above.
| ncmncm wrote:
| We like to think we know who did what in early mathematics, but
| we really only know about Greeks whose compatriots took the
| trouble to write down their names.
|
| This particular result is contemporary with some of those
| selfsame Greeks. There is no telling which way advancements
| moved. Most likely it was both ways, by then. But there had been
| a long tradition of traveling to Egypt to learn geometry from the
| masters, and also of not naming foreigners one got things from.
|
| Going on two millennia later, Francis Bacon was scrupulous about
| reserving credit to Al-Haytham for inventing Science as we know
| it today. People following Bacon were not, so much.
| platz wrote:
| does it matter whether you have a heliocentric or a geocentric
| worldview when using this method?
| herodotus wrote:
| No. Babylonian astronomers created arithmetical techniques for
| predicting key events of the moon and planets, such as the date
| that Jupiter reached a stationary point in the sky. (The
| stationary point is the positions where Jupiter starts its
| retrograde motion). They were not trying to explain the nature
| of the universe (cosmology). Ptolemy derived cosmological
| models based on geometry, but even he was interested in
| prediction, not explanation. In both cases, it does not matter
| whether the astronomer's view is helio- or geo- centric.
| Ptolemy used a geocentric model, but he did point out that a
| heliocentric version was a possible alternative.
|
| Even Copernicus was not really that concerned with cosmology:
| he was showing an alternative to Ptolemy based on the
| heliocentric view of what he thought was the universe (now
| known to be the solar system).
|
| In my view it was Galileo who really first proposed that these
| models went beyond prediction to describe the reality of the
| cosmos.
| trasz wrote:
| Do we know why they tried to predict, but not explain? Or
| would prediction simply be a prerequisite for explanation?
| rosetremiere wrote:
| I heard (iirc in the "In our time" podcast) that they
| associated rare/unusual cosmological events (say, a solar
| eclipse) with signs from the gods. Hence, to better read
| the signs, you want to know what's normal/predicted.
|
| Don't quote me on this, though :)
| FastMonkey wrote:
| The periodic back and forth movement of a pendulum can be
| modelled as a circular rotation with constant angular
| velocity. We "know" that it just goes over and back so we
| "know" that the circular motion is just a model. All the
| same, maybe in the future, they'll figure out that
| pendulums actually move in 4 dimensions. Then they'll look
| back at us and think "surely they should have known that
| pendulums really moved in 4 dimensional circles, because
| they knew about this model".
|
| I'd imagine it's similar looking at the sky. If you "knew"
| the motion of the planets was related to some Gods moving
| around, you might expect that circular motion was just a
| model there too.
| herodotus wrote:
| The most likely reason was because there was an obvious
| correlation between astronomical events and things that
| happened on earth. The most obvious are seasonal weather
| events, which are obviously important for agriculture.
| Having noticed that these earthly events correlated with
| certain astronomical events, it was natural to extend this
| to predicting other events based on astronomical "omens"
| such as conjunctions, risings, stationary points and so on.
| It is likely that Babylonian rulers used astrologers when
| making decisions such as the best time to attack a
| neighbour.
| ncmncm wrote:
| We know that, at various times, explanation was a strictly
| and vigorously defended priestly prerogative, and
| encroaching on that was a good way to get oneself dragged
| behind a chariot all through town.
| qubex wrote:
| Orbits are always periodic functions, so quite amusingly
| heliocentric and geocentric models are equivalent (because of
| Fourier transformations).
| DecentAI wrote:
| throwingrocks wrote:
| > not surprised
|
| > finally reveal
|
| You're talking as if you know something others don't?
| lalos wrote:
| Not only this, but most of the knowledge got recovered from
| Arabic texts/libraries in the Iberian peninsula after they got
| kicked out, i.e. Betelgeuse from the constellation Orion is a
| misspelling/mistranslated. Also, sine and cosine have an
| interesting history encoded in its Latin name, feel free to
| research the origins of those words too.
| ordu wrote:
| This cuneiform is from 350 to 50 BCE. 350BCE is in the lifetime
| of Aristotle. 50BCE is long after Archimedes was dead.
|
| So it is easily can be that Babylonians learned something from
| Greeks.
| Banana699 wrote:
| As an Egyptian those kinds of activist interpretation of
| history are just endlessly tiring and no less annoying than
| when/if the occasional Greek-fevered guy or gal think that
| Greeks invented knowledge in exactly 300 BC. and not a year
| before.
|
| There are many reasons not to descend into this kind of point-
| scoring:
|
| - Zeroth, it's super disrespectful, all of those cultures were
| the first breath of civilization that we know of. I'm not an
| emotional guy and I'm fairly pissed off at a lot of aspects of
| human civilizations, but even I think that the Old Ones deserve
| more respect than being compared to each other in a fantasy,
| silly competition that nobody asked for and doesn't serve
| anything except satisfying petty modern grievances. ("nooo, my
| ancients could beat up your ancients").
|
| - First, the premise is naive and ahistoric. The modern 'west'
| was shaped by countless forces, Christianity, Islam's contact,
| Protestant Reformation, Enlightenment, colonialism, etc...
| Exactly zero (0) of those things happened to Classical Greece,
| the 'west' would be as alien a civilization to them as
| Persians.
|
| When you start looking for other civilizations achievements to
| 'offset' the contribution of Greeks, you fail to notice that
| the Greeks aren't western in any reasonable sense of the word.
| You have been dragged into a game with fundamentally silly
| rules. Don't try to win silly games.
|
| - Second, civilizations reinvent each other's wheels all the
| time, there is no reason why the same environment that inspired
| Egyptian and Babylonian scholars didn't also inspire Greek
| scholars.
|
| - Third, it's exaggerated how much 'white supremacist' actually
| exist outside of one or more imagination. The term became
| meaningless. Liking your civilization more is not being
| supremacist, it's a natural, if misguided, instinct that is
| present in the vast majority of population of all cultures.
| kardianos wrote:
| This is a really odd (bad?) framing. I've never heard of
| someone who is impressed by Ancient Greek
| science/knowledge/ability talk down about Babylonian/Egyption.
| Most histories I read talk about how many of these are
| connected and were successive.
|
| Can you cite some "pro western supremaciests" you refer to? It
| honestly sounds like you are just making stuff up to try to
| demonize other people.
| schuyler2d wrote:
| There are so many examples it's maybe hard to know where to
| begin -- after all it happened for at least 1-5 centuries in
| modern/pre-modern history, and before then the Greeks and
| then the Romans, e.g. did it themselves. There are whole sub-
| fields of history of science about this process.
|
| Ask yourself why names like Al Kindi and Kandiaronk are
| unfamiliar or unlikely to be familiar to you -- or Western
| statecraft begins at Plato or Weber rather than its grounding
| in Chinese statecraft brought over mostly by Leibniz. Which
| Arab scientists inspired Kepler and his predecessors and why
| are you unlikely to have learned that history -- even though
| it's been known for over a century.
|
| If you're genuinely interested here are maybe some places to
| start: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0948GPBBH/ref=dp-kindle-
| redirect?... (Dawn of Everything by Graeber)
| https://historyofphilosophy.net/series/islamic-world
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XXY491X/ref=dp-kindle-
| redirect?... (Orientalism by Said)
|
| edit: here's a popular article detailing an example of how
| concerted and conscious this process is and then 'lost to
| history' due to the layers of our educational environment:
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-
| wh...
| pythagowannabe wrote:
| I know invoking astrology is a good way to discredit
| oneself, but that particular historic perspective
| attributes the origin of proto-scientific knowledge to the
| lost races from before the last cataclysm. This is
| generalizing a lot on my part, but trying to reveal the
| identity of Hermes Trismagestis will take you on a tour of
| the ancient world that crosses continents in ways you would
| never imagine. This is all to say that the Babylonians and
| Egyptians were extremely revered and cited this entire time
| for their scientific knowledge TO THIS DAY (take a look at
| our nation's symbolism).
| schuyler2d wrote:
| How we view astrology is a good example of how our
| racial/ethnic imaginations and imagined 'heritage'
| distort the record. For people like Newton and Copernicus
| their obsessions with alchemy and astrology are
| sidelined/excused/footnotes that are charming as we
| offset it against their scientific contributions, while
| Arabic, Egyptian, Babylonian and other sources are
| dismissed because they "were only doing it for astrology"
| and couldn't have known/understood the 'real'
| science/scientific value of their work.
| antognini wrote:
| I'm not entirely convinced by this. There is a common
| pattern in the biographies of the early Greek astronomers
| in which the biographer says that they traveled to Egypt or
| the East to learn their astronomy and mathematics. It's
| enough of a trope that scholars think that at least in some
| cases tales of traveling to the East were embellished to
| add credence to the astronomer's ideas.
|
| But in most cases it does seem that in many cases Greek
| astronomers really did travel to either Egypt or Babylonia
| to learn astronomy and mathematics and were quite open
| about it. There's a story about how Eudoxus, who was very
| poor for a Greek philosopher, had to raise funds from his
| friends to afford to travel to Egypt and study with the
| priests there. After seeing the observatory that the
| Egyptians used he decided to build one of his own in
| Cnidos.
|
| Ptolemy was also explicit about the fact that he used
| Babylonian records to validate his planetary model (though
| he complains about their quality in places).
|
| None of this is to say that by the early modern era Western
| scholars had neglected eastern influences. But the Greeks
| themselves were very willing to acknowledge their eastern
| influences.
| schuyler2d wrote:
| I think it filters through multiple layers. So Greeks had
| a bias both engaging/naming locals rather than people
| from outside -- so much that we know a ton about Greek
| 'lost works' but notice that their sources when they
| learned from their travels weren't named in the same way.
|
| The Greeks, whether willful or lazy, didn't seem to
| reliably understand with much precision the cultures they
| discussed. A favorite example of mine is how we hear of
| the "Hanging Gardens of Bablyon" (edit: instead of
| Nineveh) seems mostly to be from the Greeks not caring
| much the difference between one city and another in the
| Middle East.[1] (where it also seems "Archimedes' Screw"
| should also be attributed to someone else).
|
| These sources mention they're not original, but both
| contemporary all the way to modern secondary sources then
| reference the Greek or other 'Western' person that
| introduced this concept. Even when conscious of the more
| complicated origin, it's justified by having a common
| reference or more easily pronounceable/culturally
| relevant name.
|
| As a ~sibling comment~ (edit: _your_ comment) then
| mentions, later secondary critics become skeptical that
| the author really had a past attribution or were they
| trying to give better authority to their own ideas (or in
| Kondiaronk 's case, to add deniability for possibly
| heretical or treasonous ideas).
|
| And then modern glosses use the excuse of summarizing the
| _Western_ intellectual history -- so what if Al Kindi
| came up with the first correct understanding of how
| optics works -- what matters is what Europeans read in
| Aristotle and later in Newton, etc.
|
| Credit and real history are available, but they are
| discussed incredibly rarely -- when the idea of a
| scientist in the Middle Ages is evoked, it's not someone
| that has learned Arabic or depends on Arabic translations
| to learn, but in popular media, only the original (or
| locally original) things are favored (lens-making, etc).
| Those are often genuinely great things, or genuinely
| changed something in Europe.
|
| In science discourse, itself, we often favor the first
| _named_ person we know that introduced a concept, but
| which names have been preferred goes back to that erased
| history that includes all of those biases.
|
| You might swim in texts that credit the original
| civilizations that we know discovered these texts, but in
| secondary education and popular accounts they're
| completely erased.
|
| [1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CG3JMD0/ref=ppx
| _yo_dt_b...
|
| (small edits)
| LiquidSky wrote:
| >or Western statecraft begins at Plato or Weber rather than
| its grounding in Chinese statecraft brought over mostly by
| Leibniz
|
| You're all over the place here, and simply factually wrong.
|
| Plato/Aristotle's writings on politics and statecraft
| predate Liebniz's interest in Chinese philosophy and
| politics by around 2,000 years. It is simply inarguable
| that the Western political tradition is grounded in them.
| If you mean to say that modern Western political theory and
| practice is more influenced by Chinese thought via Liebniz
| than is generally acknowledged, that is a much more
| defensible statement.
| schuyler2d wrote:
| The latter is what I was saying and plenty of Chinese
| statecraft was contemporary or earlier than
| Plato/Artistotle, so if there's a reason to fetishize
| earlier sources, then there's still no need.
|
| I'm "all over the place" because modern accounts of
| political theory are "all over the place" -- sometimes
| start with Plato and some start with Weber, but very few,
| if any, start with Chinese sources -- why is that? Why
| isn't that the most common thing we should encounter when
| reading about political theory?
| [deleted]
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I've heard this before. TBF, there is a lot of idealistic
| portrayals of Greek society and philosophers in western
| media, and Egypt and Persian peoples are usually the bad
| guys. Whether you believe that is a deep set prejudice and
| active discrimination campaign or a natural tendency re the
| history of one's continent is up to you.
| kardianos wrote:
| > I've heard this before. TBF, there is a lot of idealistic
| portrayals of Greek society and philosophers in western
| media, and Egypt and Persian peoples are usually the bad
| guys.
|
| Sometimes nations (Greek, Roman, Persian, etc...) killed
| and pillaged and from the perspective of someone writing
| what is now histories, yes, those people doing the killing
| would be termed "bad guys".
|
| > Whether you believe that is a deep set prejudice and
| active discrimination campaign or a natural tendency re the
| history of one's continent is up to you.
|
| You can actually measure sentiment to some degree. It
| sounds like you are trying to mind read. Don't do that.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Pre-Islamic Persia barely appears at all in Western media
| outside of stories about Alexander the Great, the 300
| narrative, some random Biblical stuff where Cyrus the Great
| does a cameo, and I guess the Prince of Persia video games.
| The only consistent negative portrayal seems to be around
| the 300, which while a-historic in its telling is just kind
| of a lazy trope.
| pm90 wrote:
| > Pre-Islamic Persia barely appears at all in Western
| media
|
| Wait, you're talking about Hollywood/ PostWW2 Western
| media, right? Because if we look back at how Western
| historians generally framed the events of the eighteenth
| century onwards, its almost always been of eastern and
| oriental cultures as being savages and it was the "White
| Mans Burden" to bring them the light of civilization.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I was responding to a comment about Western media. Which
| is a 20th century affair.
|
| I also think 18th and 19th century we working from a much
| more limited set of historical information. Persepolis
| was first excavated in the 1930s. Old Persian Cuneiform
| wasn't fully deciphered until around 1850 and was the
| basis for decipherment of other languages using
| cuneiform. It wasn't until then tat any primary
| historical texts could even be studied. Whereas Greek
| never disappeared and ancient greek was studied from the
| classical era onwards. A lot of what we knew about old
| Persia prior to the 1850s came from people like Xenophon
| who had a particular ax to grind in contemporary (to him)
| Greece and used Cyruus and Persia as stand in for ideas
| he wanted to compare and contrast with Athens and Sparta.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| That is a late 20th century phenomenon. If you go back
| into the 1800s and earlier, it was pretty common for a
| college kids to spend a lot of time learning to translate
| ancient Greek texts.
|
| 2 interesting and good reads are the cyropedia and the
| anabasis, both by xenophon, and neither portraying the
| Persians in a negative light.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| With no way to edit my comment to include the corrections
| below, I'll just state that my opinion has softened.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| It seems to be pretty rampant within alt-right corners [1].
| But yes, of course they're interconnected for anyone that
| spends time reading and thinking about it.
|
| [1] https://www.vox.com/2019/11/6/20919221/alt-right-history-
| gre...
| [deleted]
| kardianos wrote:
| Uh, this article is someone on "the left" talking about why
| "the right" thinks it is important to study history. In
| this case, cites that "the right" is concerned with how
| civilizations fail, such as the Roman Empire.
|
| This doesn't have anything to do with western supremacists,
| and it very much isn't someone on "the right" talking about
| themselves.
|
| I'm totally cool with reading history and trying to learn
| from it.
| pm90 wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > The men who consume this stuff -- and yes, it's almost
| exclusively men -- tend to believe two things: that
| ancient Greek and Roman culture are the basis of Western
| civilization and that these cultures are the exclusive
| achievements of white men.
|
| > But the idea isn't merely to celebrate these ancient
| cultures. The goal is to turn a phrase like "Western
| civilization" into code for "white culture" and to cement
| a narrative about history that glorifies patriarchy and
| undercuts cultural progressivism.
|
| Your framing of the article is wildly incorrect. It makes
| it pretty clear that White Supremacists aren't concerned
| about history in itself, _but in a framing that glorifies
| white men_. Presumably its analogous to how neo nazis
| revere Hitler and the Nazi party.
|
| The goal in each case is a yearning for "better times in
| the past" by emulating the past days of "glory".
| zmgsabst wrote:
| That's a description given by their political rivals --
| and a strawman.
|
| It also doesn't support the original claim: that people
| talk down about Babylon and Egypt, a claim that never
| appears in the article.
|
| Celebrating Greece and Rome as European achievements
| doesn't denigrate people from other areas. Nor does
| acknowledging how their philosophy filtered into European
| and later American thought.
|
| The paragraph you cited sounds like a bad faith "hit
| piece" unrelated to the claims that are being discussed
| regarding Babylon and Egypt.
| pm90 wrote:
| Your inability to get the argument doesn't distract from
| the point being made. The article goes into various
| instances of this phenomenon happening, and your response
| is that it "sounds bad faith"? Thats not a strong
| argument.
| edgyquant wrote:
| This is no different than right wingers pointing to the
| most obscure tumblr accounts as proof "democrats are all
| crazy." It's not a serious piece nor would any academic
| treat it as such. This does not belong on HN, period.
| pm90 wrote:
| False equivalency.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Nope it's an exact equivalency. If you don't like the
| comparison it's because you see how dishonest the tactic
| is
| canMarsHaveLife wrote:
| > that ancient Greek and Roman culture are the basis of
| Western civilization
|
| Honest question: isn't that specific part true?
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Try to ask that question without using words stolen from
| Greek or Latin but still incomprehensible English.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Stolen is a weird way to put it, most of the Latin origin
| words come to English through France because Normans
| invaded England in 1066 and the rulers spoke French.
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