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Is Atlas Holding Hipparchus' Lost Star Map?
cr0kin0le writes "The Farnese Atlas at the Naples National Archaeological Museum may be holding a celestial globe which accurately depicts the long-lost star catalog of Hipparchus, according to a physics professor at Louisiana State University."
In the NYTimes.com picture, they added a leaf... Is this some American thing? /European
A)bort, R)etry or S)elf-destruct?
That's pretty cool. The scientists/naturalists/etc. of the past may have had a more primitive understanding of the universe, but they weren't stupid. It's amazing to think that they figured out so much about the sky so long ago with so few tools, when today most people don't have a working knowledge that even comes close to matching it.
> Hmm.. Anyone else notice that the statue has a fig leaf over the groin in one photograph, but not the other? Did it fall off recently, or what?
No, it's just the pre-Ashcroft and post-Ashcroft versions.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
A sculpture probably isn't going to show enough detail, but old charts are interesting as they can show stars as being brighter or dimmer than they are today. For example, in the mid 19th century Eta Carinae was the second brightest star in the sky (after Sirius), now it's almost invisible to the naked eye (around 5th magnitude IIRC). The bright stars Castor and Pollux in Gemini were around the same magnitude, now Castor is dimmer (the brighter Pollux is still 'beta Geminorum'). I wonder what Hipparchos might have seen that we dont see now?
In the NYTimes.com picture, they added a leaf... Is this some American thing?
Of course The American Version Is The Correct Version. Don't trust Our Media?
The danish version is just a filthy porn version from this well-known immoral little country.
I don't need a signature.
So there's a star map in Naples?
Now all I need to do is find all the other Star Maps to locate the Star Forge and defeat Darth Malak.....
May the force be with me....
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
It's a real leaf, that was placed on it in the Victorian era by Papal decree, and was recently removed as part of a restoration project, but most news outlets frankly don't want to spend $20 for an updated photo when their old stock still works.
Look at the little peepee on atlas!!! LOL!!!
Please, the polite way of putting it is "He's a grower, not a shower".
Another possible retort is: "Yeah, but did you see what a great great ass he has? Divine!". Note that this can lead to awkward silences in predominantly male enviroments such as Slashdot though.
Right guys? Guys...?
*crickets*
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
so does it tell you where Salvatore di Giacomo, Lorenzo Bernini, Gaetano Filangieri, and Enrico De Nicola used to live?
Ah, yes, yet another tale wherein the ancient peoples outdo their modern imitators. Except for the whole "found a system of the world wherein the mode of learning is a self-correcting, self-perpetuating mechanism that leads to heights, depths, and breadths of knowledge undreamt of four centuries ago, much less twenty."
I don't know much about the Chaldeans' observations, so I'll concede that they might have outstripped Tycho. But I'm fairly certain that they did not point out that the planets move in ellipses with the Sun at one focus, or that the orbits of any planet sweeps out equal areas in equal time, or that the period of a planet's orbit is proportional to the 3/2 power of its distance from the Sun (OK, technically, its semi-major axis). So, advantage: Kepler.
And I am absolutely certain that they did not then note that a universal attraction of each planet for the others actually pulls them off said ellipses and causes a more complex motion -- let alone actually providing a method to correct for this -- oh, and incidentally, crafting a system of mechanics that not only allows one to build skyscrapers and suspension bridges but leads to investigations and methods that eventually discover electromagnetism, relativty, and quantum mechanics.
So I think advantage: Newton, as well.
The ancients were not idiots. They were just as smart as we are today. But they knew less than we do about the physical universe and they didn't have a system even remotely similar to science, that allowed a steady and self-correcting accumulation of knowledge. I can honestly not understand the apparently fervent need of many to worship at the altar of mist-enshrouded nameless ancestors, who "have" to be better than the well-documented founders of the modern world.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Maybe I'm being overly suspicious, but you look to me like a European karma whore. What true American would call Denmark "well-known"?
He calculated, within six and a half minutes, the length of a year That's some pretty fast calculating...
The Farnese Atlas is an interesting example of [1] lost knowledge being rediscovered, [2] ancient wisdom forgotten during the Dark Ages, and what do we get?
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
The linked photo is from the Naples Archeological Museum (Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli). The NYTimes photo is from the Griffith Observatory in LA. Hence they're not necessarily the same piece of stone, and the latter may be a copy of the original in Naples. On another porn-related note, the Naples Museum is well known across the world for its beloved "Secret Room," full of sexually explicit artifacts dug up from Pompeii and other Roman sites. That, along with the awesome mosaics, are well worth the trip to Naples. Naples has a bad rap for a being unsafe (and parts of it are) but anyone going to Italy should surely go.
C'mon -- the guy's got the south pole on his back. That's bound to cause some shrinkage.