[HN Gopher] Medieval Monks Wrote over Ancient Star Catalog - Par...
___________________________________________________________________
Medieval Monks Wrote over Ancient Star Catalog - Particle Accel
Reveals Original
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 64 points
Date : 2026-02-04 12:53 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| gxonatano wrote:
| It's incredible what knowledge we'd have, if it weren't for
| Christianity and the Dark Ages it engendered. There are tons of
| palimpsests like this, like the Archimedes Palimpsest, in which
| the beginnings of calculus was invented, almost two millenia
| before Newton, but were scraped off to make yet another Bible.
| Imagine what the West could have accomplished if monks weren't so
| busy erasing science and math.
| adolph wrote:
| Suggested reading: "How the Irish Saved Civilization" [0]
|
| Most cultural phenomena, be is classified as religious,
| philosophical, political, etc, are double-edged swords. The
| transition of the Western Roman empire to a succession of
| leaders from outside that tradition did lead to major losses in
| living standards of most Europeans. On the whole the root
| causes are certainly multi-factor such as large epidemics [1]
| and reflect significant susceptibilities in Roman culture. Many
| of the seeds for the Renaissance were held safe in the
| religious monasteries of the Medieval period and Cahill makes
| the case for the extremely remote Irish redoubts as making a
| critical contribution. If they made errors in which palimpsests
| to overwrite, well it is a pity that there wasn't a St. Linus
| of Torvalds there to save them with git.
|
| 0.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilizati...
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonine_Plague
| garciansmith wrote:
| I find that view to be reductive and correspond to simplistic
| stereotypes of the European Middle Ages (e.g., calling them the
| "Dark Ages"). It assumes people in very different places for
| 1,000+ years did the same thing and had the same views, then
| blames the fact that their values are different then ours all
| on their religious beliefs (which, too, were varied).
|
| This is not to say that tons of material was not lost, or only
| preserved in other places (e.g., Islamic states in North Africa
| and the Middle East), but it ignores the learning and
| innovations of the medieval period (scientific, legal,
| theological, etc.), and of course the fact that so many
| classical texts were only preserved because of those monks
| copying them down.
| cyberax wrote:
| I find that these reductive stereotypes are... actually true.
|
| Not all the Middle Ages were really Dark, but some of them
| were.
|
| > It assumes people in very different places for 1,000+ years
| did the same thing and had the same views
|
| But that was true, wasn't it? The Dark Ages started when
| Christianity spread through most of Europe. And really
| completely ended only when the Reformation fractured it.
|
| And sure, the Reformation was made possible by internal
| forces within the religious institutions, slowly building
| ideological foundation for it.
| stryan wrote:
| >> It assumes people in very different places for 1,000+
| years did the same thing and had the same views
|
| > But that was true, wasn't it? The Dark Ages started when
| Christianity spread through most of Europe. And really
| completely ended only when the Reformation fractured it.
|
| 1. Political, economic, cultural, and even religious
| systems would vary drastically by place and time in Europe.
| The lifestyle and thoughts of an English peasent in 600CE
| would be drastically different from the lifestyle of a
| Spanish or Frankish one, and would differ even more so
| between 600CE and 900CE.
|
| 2. The "Dark Ages" traditionally started when Rome fell in
| 476CE, long before Christianity had spread outside of
| traditional Roman lands.
|
| 3. The Reformation didn't start until the 16th century,
| long after the Dark Ages are considered to have ended.
| Generously you could say it started with the Hussites in
| the 1400s but that's still skipping over the Renaissance
| entirely which is the absolute latest end for the Dark Ages
| since the whole point of it as a historical context is
| "rediscovering" the Classical works.
| cyberax wrote:
| > 1. Political, economic, cultural, and even religious
| systems would vary drastically by place and time in
| Europe.
|
| This is a non-answer. Yes, political systems were
| different. The ARE still different.
|
| But during the Dark Ages, there were NO places in Europe
| where science or scholarship really flourished.
|
| > 2. The "Dark Ages" traditionally started when Rome fell
| in 476CE, long before Christianity had spread outside of
| traditional Roman lands.
|
| It should have started around the time of the move of the
| Roman capital to Constantinople. By the time of the fall
| of Rome, the Darkening had been in full swing.
|
| If you want a precise date, I propose the date of murder
| of Hypatia in 415 AD.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > But during the Dark Ages, there were NO places in
| Europe where science or scholarship really flourished.
|
| Ireland is often cited as one such place, thanks to early
| Christian monasteries. The Carolingian Renaissance was
| significant in Central Europe, and there were important
| cultural developments in Slavic lands, though perhaps not
| involving 'science' as such.
| stryan wrote:
| > But during the Dark Ages, there were NO places in
| Europe where science or scholarship really flourished.
|
| That seems different from what you originally argued but
| either way, that's also not really accurate. I'm going to
| assume you're referring to "Western Europe" here since
| you're clearly aware of Eastern Roman/Byzantine empire
| still existing, but that still leaves Al-Andalus, the
| Carolingian Renaissance, agricultural advancements like
| the three-field system, wheelbarrows, multiple types of
| milling technology, and during the latter end you start
| getting advanced compasses, bells, mechnical watches, and
| other metallurgy.
|
| Where all of these done in one or two specific places?
| No, continuing to ignore Byzantium here, but there was a
| still a variety of advancements happening all the time
| without which the Renaissance couldn't have happened.
|
| > It should have started around the time of the move of
| the Roman capital to Constantinople. By the time of the
| fall of Rome, the Darkening had been in full swing.
|
| I mean, you can think that but that's not how or what the
| term "The Dark Ages" usually refers to. It sounds like
| you have your own constructed time period in mind and I'm
| not interested in discussing something I'm not aware of.
|
| > If you want a precise date, I propose the date of
| murder of Hypatia in 415 AD.
|
| A very pointed date to choose.
| garciansmith wrote:
| > But that was true, wasn't it? The Dark Ages started when
| Christianity spread through most of Europe.
|
| No, it is not. As Stryan noted in another response to your
| comment, the idea that medieval Europe was somehow one
| uniform culture is incorrect.
|
| I would also add that the term "Dark Ages" is used in
| different ways by different people. People who don't know
| much about the Middle Ages often use that term to describe
| the whole of the Middle Ages, from roughly the fifth
| century to the end of the fifteenth (and Christianity had
| already spread around the Roman Empire by the fifth).
| Others just the early Medieval period (about 500 to 1000).
| Some limit the term to periods where we just don't have
| many sources, or it is perceived that we don't (e.g., I've
| heard it applied to Visigothic Spain).
|
| Fourteenth-century Humanists (who lived at a time often
| considered to be part of those so called "Dark Ages"!)
| first used the term to contrast what they thought were the
| centuries between their lives and the classical period.
| They even went so far as to emulate the handwriting of the
| classical texts they favored, thinking they should because
| that's how the Romans wrote. They didn't realize they were
| copying eighth- and ninth-century Carolingian hands
| instead, texts copied by monks and clerics and court
| scribes because they valued them. (Lower case letters in
| modern languages that use the Latin characters, like
| English, are still based on Carolingian minuscule.)
| cyberax wrote:
| I'm pretty sure most people call them "Dark Ages" because
| during this time the speed of social and scientific
| development almost entirely stopped.
|
| And mind you, I'm not saying that it stopped
| _completely_, but it slowed down to a crawl.
| pegasus wrote:
| In case you're wondering why you're being downvoted: the
| history is much more nuanced. While the Archimedes Palimpsest
| is a genuine and tragic example of lost text, the broader claim
| that Christianity engendered a period of scientific erasure is
| considered outdated
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis).
|
| For example, monasteries were the primary centers of literacy
| and education in Europe during the early middle ages, and they
| acted as the primary bridge for the survival of Greco-Roman
| intellectual heritage in the West. Not always intentionally,
| but they were the only sanctuary for books during those times.
|
| Besides, this is not how history works. Civilizations come and
| go and times of transition always take a toll. An eye-opening
| recent book on these questions I can recommend is Tom Holland's
| "Doninion: The Making of the Modern World".
| mdurana wrote:
| For anybody interested in the book:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52259619-dominion I would
| highly recommend. Holland (historian, not the actor) makes a
| great case about why many of our thoughts nowadays are rooted
| in Christianity.
| jact wrote:
| This is not a very historically informed comment. This didn't
| take place during the "dark ages," for one, but in a Christian
| monastery in Islamic Sinai if the timing of the article is
| correct. It's a shame that some of these discoveries were
| overwritten but this was a common practice in any culture
| because paper was so expensive.
|
| The writings of St. John Climacus were also far more useful and
| interesting to people at the time since they dealt with what
| for them were practical matters of how to lead the life of
| their community. This isn't because they were narrow-mindlessly
| religious. Monks also had to busy themselves with calendrical
| calculations -- and therefore astronomy. These were works of
| what we would call practical philosophy or ethics, like the
| famous Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. It would also have been
| tragic to potentially lose those culturally significant
| writings in favor of astronomical or mathematical texts.
| DarknessFalls wrote:
| What if Hipparchus originally charted stars that no longer
| exist in our sky, due to having gone supernova hundreds of
| year ago? A thousand year time difference is roughly 1/3rd of
| a complete equinox precession, which would also be
| interesting to compare against our modern day observations.
|
| All of this is valuable, both the cultural knowledge and the
| scientific. I doubt the monks realized the gravity of their
| choice so long ago.
| jact wrote:
| I'm not saying it's not unfortunate that things get lost
| just that we shouldn't act like this was some kind of act
| of ignorant vandalism.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Oh they knew. They knew.
|
| Okay just kidding, but also people stealing what they think
| are good ideas, discarding the rest, and passing off what
| is passed along as their own? Everyone does that. Anyone
| who says different is blind to their own behavior.
| throwpoaster wrote:
| With a less negative attribution bias this process is
| called "learning".
| riazrizvi wrote:
| I prefer the phrase "adding value".
|
| And let's take a moment to appreciate the word 'value',
| one of the true heavy lifters in the world of words.
| dismalaf wrote:
| > I doubt the monks realized the gravity of their choice so
| long ago.
|
| I mean, the star chart was probably something equivalent to
| a text book for us. Many texts were uniquely preserved at
| St. Catherine's since they had Mohammed's letter of
| protection not to mention being a fortress in the middle of
| a desert.
|
| At the time the monks probably thought it was a common
| enough text to not worry about.
| dismalaf wrote:
| > Christian monastery in Islamic Sinai if the timing of the
| article is correct
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ladder_of_Divine_Ascent
|
| According to this article his writings pre-date the Islamic
| conquest (639).
|
| Of course, there was also this:
| https://www.sinaimonastery.com/index.php/en/history/mohammed
|
| And St Catherine's is a fortress in the middle of the desert
| so who knows what it's status was, it was an interesting time
| (beginning of Islamic conquests).
| jact wrote:
| The palimpsest was made during that time, though.
| legitster wrote:
| Also, to add to this - the "dark ages" were kind of a
| misnomer. The center of culture and science in the West
| packed up and moved from Rome to Constantinople. What we
| think of as the "dark ages" were really the "barbarian"
| tribes of Europe (starting with the Franks), slowly becoming
| educated and cultured within the shadow of the old Roman
| empire.
|
| Also, the monks and scribes creating palimpsest were not
| thoughtless. In the West we enjoy a very wide collection of
| ancient texts specifically through the diligent work of
| making and distributing copies. They were remarkably literate
| and intentional in their work.
|
| A lot of these palimpsest were not entire books, but
| fragments or loose pages that had built up over centuries and
| then bound and repurposed. They were not any more sentimental
| with them than you would be with a pile of old journals from
| a thrift shop. A collection of celestial observations done by
| the eye were certainly not of particular interest to them.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Well 7-9th centuries were relatively dark in Constantinople
| as well, it took quite a while to recover from the Islamic
| invasions. It was just not a good period for Europe and the
| Mediterranean economically, demographically and
| politically.
| wsowens wrote:
| It's disappointing to see the myth of the "Christian Dark Ages"
| still repeated so often.
|
| It's true that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire led to
| a regression in social order. To blame this complex collapse
| entirely on Christianity is overly simplistic. There's
| obviously some casualties during this period of upheaval (like
| the Palimpsest you mentioned), but if anything the early
| Christian monasteries deserve some credit for preserving
| knowledge during this period of tremendous upheaval.
|
| Many have also pointed out how Eurocentric this view is.
| Mathematics and science continued to flourish in Arabic and
| Chinese places of learning as well. Algebra, modern astronomy,
| and the printing press did not pop out of the aether the moment
| Europeans decided to start printing Greek gods again.
| lukan wrote:
| To me the difference is, there seems to have been way more
| freedom of thought in the pre christian societies. Polytheism
| is (usually) more open to new ideas than religios dogma of
| one god. This is for me what dark times means, and the age of
| enlightenment when it was possible again to dare to think in
| new directions and not be afraid of the inquisition anymore.
|
| How to do real research, when you have to align every insight
| with some old book or face the stake? Only very restricted,
| in secrecy and not in open exchange.
|
| So also in non christian societies people were killed for
| having the wrong ideas, but comparing greece or early rome
| with the christian empires, it seems obvious to me why
| progress was slowed down for so long.
| something765478 wrote:
| Eh, even those polytheistic societies had their own
| inquisitions. Socrates was executed for defying the gods,
| and lots of Christians and Jews were persecuted because
| they refused to accept that the emperor was a god.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Socrates was charged with corrupting the youth. That
| charge is almost never given context when it comes up in
| modern classrooms, so read this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Tyrants
| svieira wrote:
| > To me the difference is, there seems to have been way
| more freedom of thought in the pre christian societies.
|
| I see you're one of today's lucky 10,000! https://en.wikipe
| dia.org/wiki/Diocletianic_Persecution#Great...
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Consider why the Roman public, commoners in particular but
| not exclusively, were so ready to abandon the religious
| beliefs of their forefathers and throw it all away, even
| defacing the old temples, to adopt some jewish desert
| hippie's promise of simple salvation. Perhaps you'd like to
| think this conversion of Rome was all by the sword, but in
| reality the early christian converts chose despite very
| credible threats of state violence, and the state itself
| only converted when the critical mass of common christians
| could no longer be denied or ignored.
|
| Rome's culture and traditional was fundamentally broken; it
| no longer served the needs of the Roman people, and if
| Christianity hadn't popped up, it would have been some
| other system of reform instead. The status quo was
| unstable, rapidly deteriorating. You may idealize the
| religious tolerance of their polytheism, but what that
| matter if it isn't actually serving the spiritual needs of
| the people?
| legitster wrote:
| > Polytheism is (usually) more open to new ideas than
| religios dogma of one god.
|
| This is a modern view with hindsight bias. In the ancient
| world, the existence of many gods did not imply peaceful
| co-existance, but very heated rivalry and politics.
|
| Ironically pagan authors of late antiquity were the
| "conservatives" in our modern sense. Pagan literally means
| "farmer" - it might have similar implications to how we
| would call someone a "redneck" today. At the time, they
| were opposed to foreign gods and new influences on their
| traditional and respectable Pantheon.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| If anything Rome was a little too open to foreign
| dieties. Titus performed the right of Evocatio at the
| siege of Jerusalem, a custom where the god(s) of their
| foes were enticed to abandon their current patrons in
| return for a home and worship on Rome.
| nsavage wrote:
| People are already correcting you, but I find it hard to read
| this much into the case of this particular text. We'd need to
| know the full context to what exactly happened, but they might
| have chosen to sacrifice the catalog for many reasons, not just
| because of an anti-scientific bend. Maybe it was one of many
| copies that they held, yet the other ones didn't survive.
|
| We also need to consider that these sorts of texts _did_
| survive because of monks. They kept the embers alive. Without
| them, we would have nothing, not living among the stars.
| exhumet wrote:
| even stuff like the maya codices, priests just burned up almost
| every bit of text and historical text that the culture kept so
| were just missing SO much on them
| mikkupikku wrote:
| They were in the process of righteously stamping out one of
| the most blood thirsty civilizations ever, but yes they got
| mildly overzealous with the books. I think they nonetheless
| errored on the side of caution.
| dismalaf wrote:
| Except this wasn't "scraped off to make yet another Bible".
|
| St John Climacus' writings are some of the most interesting in
| the history of Christianity. Probably the most mystical of all
| Christian writings and give an amazing insight into the history
| of Christian monasticism. Also still held in high regard for
| sure in the Orthodox Churches.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I was thinking exactly this. Having just toured Rome, the
| Christian history is considerably easier to access than the
| older Roman history, even for prominent sites like the Forum,
| Palatine Hill, the Colosseum. The quality of the Christian work
| was also far inferior to the older layers underneath.
|
| Darkly amusing is the Vatican. Reading about piety, service,
| generosity and kindness while beggars suffer at the entrance
| queue. The contrast between words and actions couldn't be more
| striking.
| svieira wrote:
| The beggars are professionals almost every single time. To
| the point where they _have licenses from the state_ to beg
| (my friends were filming an amateur film in Rome and were
| stopped by the Guardia because they thought my friends were
| breaking the law by impersonating a Gypsy.)
| lostlogin wrote:
| I don't believe that for those I saw. Do you have a link to
| anything explaining begging licences?
|
| Begging barefoot at zero degrees, poor health, dirty and
| miserable. I don't see this as anything other than grinding
| poverty.
|
| If I'm wrong, a sum that doesn't matter to me was grifted.
|
| Your explanation is convenient for the conscience.
| svieira wrote:
| This was in 2006 - digging around, I find things like htt
| ps://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA452289555&sid=googleS
| ...
|
| > Abstract:
|
| > Several Italian judges, including the members of the
| Supreme Court, have defined begging with children as a
| "Roma cultural practice". In response, the Italian
| Parliament enacted law no. 94/2009, which severely
| represses the practice. The article contests that begging
| is a Roma cultural practice and claims, instead, that it
| is an economic practice which may sometimes connect to
| other elements of Roma culture. The article critiques
| both the cultural argument put forward by Italian judges,
| and Italian law no. 94/2009, neither of which serves to
| defend the rights of Roma children. It concludes by
| suggesting a different kind of legal approach to child
| begging, more respectful of the constitutional duty of
| solidarity and protection of the family, and based on
| social policies rather then criminal repression.
|
| and references to Article 669-bis C.P. talking about this
| 2018 law "re-introducing" limits to begging, so I suspect
| that the "impersonating a gypsy" bit was a mis-
| understanding and it was really "impersonating a person
| in need".
|
| > If I'm wrong, a sum that doesn't matter to me was
| grifted.
|
| "Give to anyone who asks" is a fine approach, one that I
| follow too.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| What could the "West" have accomplished? Perhaps in a religious
| zeal we only would have burned ourselves up long ago. A
| knowledge of math and science does not innately impart some
| higher wisdom.
|
| As it is we have cabals of bankers and technocrats applying
| every mathematical and scientific advancement in attempting to
| construct their own version of global authoritarian priest
| classes. For now it stands they are only being held back by the
| _other_ things learned from _other_ humanist disciplines...
| throwpoaster wrote:
| Flagged for hate speech.
| PepperdineG wrote:
| Recycling expensive media is a thing that was going on before
| the common era. Egyptian mummies were for instance wrapped in
| recycled papyrus. Look at the BBC wiping tapes, which when
| something is expensive to buy, economics can be the driver in
| erasing versus buying additional new media material. Even
| Neanderthals would recycle their expensive stone tools using
| the cores-on-flakes method to make smaller tools out of the old
| broken ones.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The so-called "Dark Ages" were not solely engendered by
| Christianity, and even the arguably negative characteristics of
| Christianity in late antiquity were ultimately shaped by
| prevalent outside factors and not inherent to the religion
| itself. It literally took many centuries for Roman civilization
| to collapse, and the root cause was that (like many ancient
| societies) it was basically predicated on plunder and conquest,
| so the whole arrangement began to collapse like a slow-motion
| trainwreck when they could not effectively plunder anymore.
|
| There might have been some hope that it could gradually
| transition to a somewhat more modern style of economic
| development, but this was hindered by the Barbarian invasions
| especially of the Huns, so this whole dynamic only really took
| hold much later, in the Middle Ages.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Yet somehow the scientific method as we know it evolved in (and
| only in) Christian universities.
|
| Of course there were significant regressions but the Roman
| world wasn't exactly some pro-science utopia. Where do you
| think Christians got the idea of burning witches?
|
| Climate change, the plague and extreme political instability
| (that already was ripping the Roman world apart for centuries)
| and the resulting societal, economic and demographic collapse
| pretty much made the dark ages inevitable (and the church was
| the only thing keeping the lights on however dim they were).
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Now here's an interesting thought: Would you have deduced that
| stars are distant suns if you'd lived in the ancient world?
|
| Apparently the only pre-modern people (i.e. pre-Giordano Bruno)
| recorded as making the claim were Anaxagoras and Aristarchus of
| Samos [0], but their ideas were completely rejected by
| contemporaries.
|
| In retrospect, it just seems so blindingly obvious that I'm
| tempted to believe that I too would have seen through the
| Aristotelean BS.
|
| But surely there must be aspects of reality that will seem
| similarly obvious to future generations, and yet I don't feel any
| insights coming on.
|
| I should say, Aristarchus is the ideal of maximizing information
| from minimal data:
|
| >Aristarchus of Samos (Samos is a Greek island in the Aegean Sea)
| lived from about 310 to 230 BC, about 2250 years ago. He measured
| the size and distance of the Sun and, though his observations
| were inaccurate, found that the Sun is much larger than the
| Earth. Aristarchus then suggested that the small Earth orbits
| around the big Sun rather than the other way around, and he also
| suspected that stars were nothing but distant suns, but his ideas
| were rejected and later forgotten, and he, too, was threatened
| for suggesting such things
|
| [0] https://solar-center.stanford.edu/FAQ/Qsunasstar.html
| RupertSalt wrote:
| So first of all, I believe that St. Katherine of Alexandria's
| hagiographies are the personification of the mythical Library,
| especially because her monastery now boasts the largest
| collection of ancient papyrus and codices ever assembled. It is
| rather clear to me that the Sinai monastery is the actual
| successor, and that the vast majority of Alexandria's
| collection never burned at all. (The monastery also hosts
| Moses' burning bush and famously, a fire extinguisher is
| mounted next to it.) Muhammad himself ordered the sparing of
| the community during seige times.
|
| That being said, I also believe that the ancients were well-
| aware that our Sun is a local star. And by extension, that
| stars are distant suns. I have been doing research on the Star
| of Bethlehem, and it is painfully, obviously clear that the
| Star sought by the Magi is the Sun itself, since when they met
| with Herod, they first described Springtime (late April through
| June) and then the Winter Solstice as they pursued the Sun to
| Bethlehem. Furthermore, anyone traveling for seven months, and
| only at night, in the ancient world, while bearing priceless
| treasures, would have been fools, unless they also carried
| torches, weapons, mercenaries, and medical supplies.
| Furthermore, any Hellenistic pagan reading the New Testament
| would've clearly discerned the identification of Jesus with the
| divine aspects of Phoebus Apollo (among other Olympians); the
| Sun metaphors continue to the present day. The Star of
| Bethlehem simply cannot be distant, dim, or anything but our
| own Sol.
|
| Anyway, yeah, recently the descriptions of the large-scale
| copying at the Port of Alexandria has convinced me that the
| Library amassed a gigantic collection of knowledge and texts,
| and those were, for the most part, safely transferred "by
| angels" to Sinai when the time was right. And palimpsests
| notwithstanding, there are still tons of texts still unread,
| unindexed, and undiscovered in there.
| srean wrote:
| In science being right is nowhere close to enough, otherwise
| it's speculative fiction, a fairy tale, you have to provide
| convincing reasons, you have to demonstrate that you have
| considered alternative explanations (hypotheses) and after this
| process there remains one standing.
|
| Sadly, Aristarchus's _hunch_ was way ahead of his times and one
| could not convincingly explain the absence of screaming winds,
| absence of stellar paradox, could not convincingly explain why
| weights dropped from a height were not left behind as the Earth
| below spun away at fantastic speed.
|
| In this duel of ideas I think the critics of Aristarchus's
| idea's were great scientists as measured by current standards,
| although they were wrong, they were wrong for the right
| reasons.
| Archelaos wrote:
| To add to this: I think that what appears to us to be
| stagnation in scientific interest was due to the fact that
| Ptolemaios was so brilliant. Contrary to popular belief, the
| empirical quality of his cosmology in terms of predictability
| was not surpassed by Copernicus, but only by Kepler about 100
| years later.
|
| There were some minor discrepancies, that bothered experts in
| the late middle ages, which let to Copernicus. But even he
| could not convincingly solve them. (In his theory the Sun is
| not at the center, but the mean Sun, as is the center of
| Ptolemaios deferent not exactly the Earth.)
|
| With Ptolemaios, however, cosmology had stabilised to such an
| extent that the fundamental questions had found their answers
| and astronomers turned their attention to practical issues
| and refinements, such as calendars and the related problem of
| the very odd movements of the moon. (You need Newton and
| gravitation to solves this, more or less.)
| chairmansteve wrote:
| I often wonder if Quantum Mechanics is a "Ptolomaic"
| understanding of the sub atomic world.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| I don't think it should be obvious. If you could measure
| spectra, that would tell you that starlight and sunlight are
| the same, but you could still think they were very tiny suns
| that were near. You would need to measure parallax to know they
| were far away. Neither of these are possible without precision
| technology, though you could probably argue that it could have
| been done in ancient times with enough effort.
|
| Maybe if the solar system had more than one star, or there were
| other stars very close, people would have caught on a lot
| quicker.
| adolph wrote:
| This is so true. There is an awesome Terry Tao / 3blue1brown
| collaboration that explicates the epistemological basis:
| _Terence Tao on the cosmic distance ladder_
|
| Pt 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdOXS_9_P4U
|
| Pt 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFMaT9oRbs4
|
| Commentary and Corrections:
| https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/02/13/cosmic-distance-
| la...
| jacobolus wrote:
| For a bit of context, the _Phaenomena_ was a book by Eudoxus (c.
| 400 BC) explaining the then-current knowledge of astronomy;
| unfortunately there are no extant copies. A poem (also called
| _Phaenomena_ ) by Aratus (c. 300 BC) made the content more
| accessible, and was extremely popular. The only surviving work by
| Hipparchus (c. 150 BC) is a critical commentary on these two
| books, and it only survived because it was bundled together with
| several other commentaries on Aratus' poem which were copied as a
| group. Hipparchus synthesized Mesopotamian astronomical
| observations and measurement techniques with Greek spherical
| geometry, founding the subject we now call trigonometry. All of
| his other works are lost, but much of the content of Ptolemy's
| _Syntaxis_ (a.k.a. _Almagest_ , c. 150 AD) was taken from
| Hipparchus' astronomical and mathematical works.
|
| Any additional fragments of Hipparchus' works is of great
| interest to the history of mathematics and astronomy.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| If you're interested in the history of science and lost
| knowledge, you may enjoy the book entitled "The Swerve" by
| Greenblatt which is about similar discoveries of ancient codices
| in Europe--in particular "de Rerum Natura" by Lucretius.
| kristopolous wrote:
| For those who don't know, star catalogs were basically GPS
| systems. With a calendar, sextant and an accurate catalog, you
| should be able to know where you are.
|
| Apollo 13 astronauts used this method, works pretty well
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