Ancient scientists helping modern scientists

Ancient scientists helping modern scientists December 8, 2016
Ashur5Contrary to the stereotypes about ancient and medieval knowledge and totally contradicting Mark Twain’s depiction in Connecticut Yankee of King Arthur’s court panicking over an eclipse, the scientists of yore were keen observers of the heavens.  They kept meticulous records of things like eclipses and analyzed them mathematically.  
Now astronomers from 2016 A.D. are using data recorded by the Babylonians in 136 B.C. to determine that the earth’s rate of rotation has slowed down.  They are also making use of astronomical observations from ancient and medieval Greece, China, and the Middle East.  (Maybe some of them were the Wise Men!)This is a good example of how knowledge builds and information is connected, not only in the present but across time.
From Rebecca Boyle, Astronomers Are Using Ancient Eclipse Records to Solve a Cosmic Mystery – The Atlantic:
On the morning of April 15, 136 B.C.E., residents of the ancient city of Babylon, in what is now Iraq, experienced quite a sight. An hour and a half after sunrise, the moon moved across the face of the sun, blotting it out so only the golden halo of its atmosphere was visible. The sky went dark.“Venus, Mercury and the Normal Stars were visible; Jupiter and Mars, which were in their period of disappearance, were visible in that eclipse,” a Babylonian astrologer inscribed in cuneiform, on a clay tablet now stored in the British Museum.To measure the eclipse’s duration, the astrologer would have used a cylindrical vessel called a clepsydra, or a water clock, whose slow draining marked the passage of time. “It moved from SW to NE. 35 us [time duration] for obscuration and clearing up. In that eclipse, north wind which…” The rest of the observation is on a missing chunk of tablet and was lost to history, but the astrologer may have been noting that the wind shifted direction, which happens during a total eclipse.
This account, one of the most precise eclipse records from antiquity, is more than a souvenir from the sands of Babylon. In a remarkable example of science being practiced across millennia, today’s astronomers are using it to show that the Earth’s rotation is slowing down and the day is getting shorter—but not as much as we might expect. . . .If the rate of Earth’s rotation was the same back then as it is now, the eclipse path on April 15, 136 B.C.E. would have been far to the west of Babylon, slicing up through the Mediterranean and into northern Italy. If the Earth’s rotation was slowing at the rate we would expect based on the tidal influence of the moon, it would have fallen far to the east, over what is now Afghanistan. But we can be sure, based on this cuneiform account, that it was over Babylon, the walled city of Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi.The discrepancy means the Earth’s rotation has slowed since then. In a new research paper, Morrison and colleagues explain that since the first-ever recorded eclipse observation, in 720 B.C.E., the Earth’s rotation has slowed by about six hours. That’s not much change in nearly 2,740 years, but it adds up, Morrison says. . . .
Morrison and colleagues analyzed the timing and location of eclipses from Babylon, China, Greece, Arab dominions in the Middle East, and medieval Europe. The record is astonishing, covering nearly three millennia on three continents. It includes translations from ancient lunar calendars to today’s Western calendar, a mind-boggling degree of scholarship encompassing archaeology, astronomy and history.

[Keep reading. . .] 

Photo:  public domain from Wikipedia Commons

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