Jupiter, Moon...
...watch for that bright planet next to the Moon, that's Jupiter.
With binoculars, your can see at least four of Jupiter's moons.
Ancient Babylonian astronomers used calculus to find Jupiter 1,400 years before Europeans
Updated
Ancient Babylonians Tracked Jupiter With Calculus
Jan 29, 2016
Image from EarthSky
Dr Ossendrijver examined five tablets numbered as trapezoid text A to trapezoid text E, four of which deal with geometrical trapezoid shapes, but nobody understood what they were about.
However, one of the tablets — trapezoid text A — provided Dr Ossendrijver with the key to understanding the other four tablets.
“I discovered that they describe the motion of Jupiter as a velocity, the number of degrees it moves across the sky in a day,” Dr Ossendrijver said.
“If you plot the velocity of Jupiter against time, you get a creeping curve which looks like a rectangle with a slanted top — that’s the trapezoid.”
The tablets show two intervals from when Jupiter first appears along the horizon at night, to the planet’s position in the sky after 60 and 120 days.
The tablets also computed the time when Jupiter covers half of this 60-day distance by partitioning the trapezoid into two smaller ones of equal area.
“We’re not really sure why the Babylonians were so interested in the motion of the planet Jupiter, but one possible explanation is that Jupiter was associated with Marduk the supreme god of Babylon,” Dr Ossendrijver said.
“These astronomers or priests were employed by Babylon’s main temple where Marduk was venerated. Each god had a star and Marduk’s was Jupiter.”
Babylonian writing is thought to have originally developed as an accounting system for keeping track of property such as sheep, grain, or the size of a field.
“That’s what most of the cuneiform tablets we have from Mesopotamia deal with,” Dr Ossendrijver said.
“But by about 2000 BCE they began to develop a form of mathematics with sophisticated field computations and methods for solving what we call quadratic equations that go beyond these practical things. It’s a way of describing and computing motion, similar to what we today call integral calculus.”
These tablets redefine our history books as the origins of calculus are generally traced back to the Middle Ages when people began using geometry to calculate velocity by plotting the position of an object against time.
“This is highly surprising. No-one expected to find something like this in antiquity,” Dr Ossendrijver said.
With binoculars, your can see at least four of Jupiter's moons.
Ancient Babylonian astronomers used calculus to find Jupiter 1,400 years before Europeans
Updated
Ancient Babylonians Tracked Jupiter With Calculus
Jan 29, 2016
The earliest known examples of mathematical and
geometric astronomy have been identified in a series of ancient
Babylonian cuneiform tablets. An analysis of the tablets, reported in the journal Science, reveals ancient Babylonians were able to calculate the position of
Jupiter using geometric techniques previously believed to have been
first used some 1,400 years later in 14th century Europe. “These texts are the earliest evidence we have from antiquity
of mathematical astronomy,” said the study’s author Dr Mathieu
Ossendrijver, a historian on Babylonian astronomy with the Humboldt
University in Berlin.
Image from EarthSky
Dr Ossendrijver examined five tablets numbered as trapezoid text A to trapezoid text E, four of which deal with geometrical trapezoid shapes, but nobody understood what they were about.
However, one of the tablets — trapezoid text A — provided Dr Ossendrijver with the key to understanding the other four tablets.
“I discovered that they describe the motion of Jupiter as a velocity, the number of degrees it moves across the sky in a day,” Dr Ossendrijver said.
“If you plot the velocity of Jupiter against time, you get a creeping curve which looks like a rectangle with a slanted top — that’s the trapezoid.”
The tablets show two intervals from when Jupiter first appears along the horizon at night, to the planet’s position in the sky after 60 and 120 days.
The tablets also computed the time when Jupiter covers half of this 60-day distance by partitioning the trapezoid into two smaller ones of equal area.
“We’re not really sure why the Babylonians were so interested in the motion of the planet Jupiter, but one possible explanation is that Jupiter was associated with Marduk the supreme god of Babylon,” Dr Ossendrijver said.
“These astronomers or priests were employed by Babylon’s main temple where Marduk was venerated. Each god had a star and Marduk’s was Jupiter.”
Babylonian writing is thought to have originally developed as an accounting system for keeping track of property such as sheep, grain, or the size of a field.
“That’s what most of the cuneiform tablets we have from Mesopotamia deal with,” Dr Ossendrijver said.
“But by about 2000 BCE they began to develop a form of mathematics with sophisticated field computations and methods for solving what we call quadratic equations that go beyond these practical things. It’s a way of describing and computing motion, similar to what we today call integral calculus.”
These tablets redefine our history books as the origins of calculus are generally traced back to the Middle Ages when people began using geometry to calculate velocity by plotting the position of an object against time.
“This is highly surprising. No-one expected to find something like this in antiquity,” Dr Ossendrijver said.
Comments
Sado-ga-shima, summer 1993. Lying on the beach after KODO show and watching shooting stars in the sky, first time. KODO + mini-meteor shower - to be recommended!!
Too bad that most Japanese don't realise that 木曜日 has nothing to do with trees or wood, but everything to do with Jupiter, which was also the name of a Roman god whose attributes were similar to the Germanic Thor, from which we get Thursday....