Early AstronomyPeople must have watched the skies from time immemorial. Human beings have always shown intellectual curiosity in abundance, and before the invention of modern distractions people had more time-and more mental energy-to devote to stargazing than we have. Megaliths, Chinese oracle bones, Babylonian clay tablets, and Mayan glyphs all yield evi dence of early peoples' interest in the skies. To understand early astronomy we need to be familiar with various phenomena that could-and still can-be seen in the sky. For instance, it seems that some early people were interested in the points on the horizon where the moon rises or sets and marked the directions of these points with megaliths. These directions go through a complicated cycle-much more complicated than the cycle of the phases of the moon from new to full and back to new, and more complicated than the cycle of the rising and setting directions of the sun. Other peoples were interested in the irregular motions of the planets and in the way in which the times of rising of the various stars varied through the year, so we need to know about these phenomena, i. e. , about retrogression and about heliacal rising, to usc the technical terms. The book opens with an explanation of these matters. Early astronomers did more than just gaze in awe at the heavenly bodies; they tried to understand the complex details of their movements. By 300 H. C. |
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I have owned Hugh Thurston’s Early Astronomy for some time, but I have not had occasion to examine it closely until recently when I spotted an error in his chapter on Chinese astronomy – specifically some calculations of the winter solstice of the year 1277. Finding an error in one table led to errors in another, which led me to translate the numerals in the original Chinese source, which led to errors in his graph of the parabola produced to calculate the zenith value that defines the moment of the solstice. A lot of advances in astronomy come from finding small errors and then pursuing them obsessively.
It is odd that Springer Verlag did not use editors who at least would have caught inconsistencies between tables, even if they did not have scrutinize the data down to the level of peer review. Spotting two or three obvious errors should have made them dig deeper and redo the math.
It is also odd that in spite of all the errors in the data the math eventually produces the right zenith value for the 1277 winter solstice. Thurston was 72 years old and a professor emeritus when the book was published in 1994 and it may be that the mathematical calculations were done years before then and the tables and graphics were others, with little supervision.
A reference to Laplace’s Exposition du Système du Monde does not lead to his use of Chinese data to calculate the length of the year.
I am still worrying at the problem, obsessively, and I will probably have a closer look at the rest of the book.
John Hill
1996/268p./42
Contents
Early Stargazers | |
Megalithic Astronomy | |
The Babylonians | |
The Egyptians | |
The Chinese | |
The Greeks | |
The Astronomy of Aryabhata | |
Arabic Astronomy | |
The Mayas | |
The European Renaissance | |
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Bibliographic information
| Title | Early Astronomy Springer Study Edition |
| Author | Hugh Thurston |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | Springer Science & Business Media, 1996 |
| ISBN | 0387948228, 9780387948225 |
| Length | 268 pages |
| Subjects | › › Science / Astronomy Science / Physics / Astrophysics |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |