User:SteveMcCluskey/sandbox

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[edit] Scientists, Philosophers, and Historians

Is this article an appropriate place to discuss the different ways that Scientists, Philosophers, and Historians approach the history of science? I sense that some of the contributors to HoS pages are not communicating well because they are not aware of / do not accept the approaches of those in different disciplines.

A quick and dirty outline (open to changes) would include:

  • Scientists
    • Tend to focus on the achievements that led to present theory
    • Tend to accept the present norms of their scientific discipline as universally valid
    • May judge past science
      • by how closely its methods follow present scientific practice
      • by how closely its results correspond with present findings
  • Philosophers
    • Tend to accept that science has a special claim to truth
      • May deal with how institutions producing this objective knowledge developed
    • May use history of science to provide examples of particular philosophical models.
    • May evaluate past science as to whether it follows particular norms of scientific method
    • Often try to distinguish science from non science (the demarcation problem)
  • Historians
    • Tend to have an inclusive definition of what is science
      • Accept scientific inquiries in other times and cultures as legitimate
      • Try to understand the results of other investigations into nature on their own terms
      • Try to understand the internal logics and social roles of other ways of knowing
    • Question special claims to truth by past (and present) scientists

These are, admittedly, stereotypes, but we could find examples for many of them. --SteveMcCluskey 15:01, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Primary and Secondary Sources in History of Science

Since, as an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has a policy of not publishing original research. As a consequence, policy discourages reliance on primary sources and favors presenting the scholarly opinions provided in the secondary literature.

In history of science, the distinction between primary and secondary sources depends, to a certain extent, on the kind of article we are writing.

  • When writing an article about a scientific topic, the writings of Watson and Crick or Gamow are acceptable as secondary sources, since they reflect the judgements of important members of the scientific community.
  • When writing an article about the history of science, the same writings are primary sources and do not speak directly about the development of science without the same kind of problems of interpretation as any other primary source.

As a consequence, editors writing articles about the historical development of science should cite secondary historical literature in order to present the interpretations of important members of the historical community. --SteveMcCluskey 19:22, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The places I've been

Place of birth:
Spent more than one year:
Spent one month or more:
Days or weeks:

[edit] Original Research on History Pages

Maybe I'm misreading the concept of original research, but after a few months reading a range of history articles in Wikipedia, I see that many of them only cite primary sources and fail to cite reputable historical research. An example of this problem is the History of Creationism article, which ignores the many excellent historical studies of the rise of creationism, (I found 103 entries when I searched "Creationism" in the History of Science Society online Bibliography) but instead cites books by advocates and opponents of creationism. That is the way to do original research in history; it is not the way to write an encyclopedia article.

To the extent that primary sources may be selected to advance a particular point of view, this goes beyond the No Original Research policy into the Neutral Point of View policy.

Should the History Project take the lead in drafting some standards about how the No Original Research policy applies to history?

Off the top of my head, at a minimum historical articles should cite a range of reliable secondary historical studies on the topic under study. Primary sources may be used to illustrate and document a position but should not stand alone without citation of suitable secondary literature.

Personally, I'd argue that secondary literature should play the predominant role in any historical article. Specifically, every fact that is not common knowledge should be supported by citation of at least one specific secondary source and that the secondary source may be supplemented by citation or quotation of a primary source.


[edit] Peer Review needs citations

[edit] Scientific Revolution

Rather than just gripe about it, I thought I'd put up an outline for a new article.
I've also decided to copy the present article to User:SteveMcCluskey/Scientific Revolution where everyone is invited to engage in radical revisions. I'll be away the rest of today so I won't make many changes until tomorrow.
"The desire to edit is a basic human need."
--SteveMcCluskey 15:05, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Present Outline

  • Introduction
  1. Emergence of the revolution
  2. Early and medieval views of science
  3. Infusion of classical texts
  4. New scientific developments
  5. Theoretical developments
  6. Methodological developments
    1. Mechanization
    2. Empiricism
  7. Postmodern critiques

[edit] Proposed Outline

  • Introduction
  1. Significance of the "Revolution"
  2. Ancient and medieval background
  3. Transformational developments and their reception
    1. Copernicus's De revolutionibus
    2. Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica
  4. New Approaches to Nature
    1. The Mechanical Philosophy
    2. The Chemical Philosophy
    3. Empiricism
    4. Mathematization
  5. Subsequent Developments
    1. The New Astronomy
      1. Kepler
      2. Brahe
      3. Galileo
    2. The New Physics
      1. Galileo
      2. Newton's Principia
  6. Institutional changes
    1. The changing role of patronage
    2. Networks of communication
      1. Printing
    3. Scientific societies

[edit] Newton and Inertia

[edit] References

Cohen, I. B., "'Quantum in se est': Newton’s concept of inertia in relation to Descartes and Lucretius" in Notes and Records of the Royal Society 19(1964):131-155.

Volume 19 not in J-STOR

Hall, A.R., and M. B. Hall, Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1962).

See Hall and Hall 1962:309-311; cf. Cohen 1964.

[edit] Logicus's contributions

87.74.30.128 17:45, 28 September 2005 (UTC) A.Bellamy, e.mail <a.c.bellamy@lse.ac.uk>, 28 September 2005

I've about given up on Logicus. He is repeating the same unorthodox interpretation of Aristotle's view of inertia on Talk:Scientific Revolution that he raised a year ago on Talk:Inertia and other venues—and he seems to have been succesful in getting a line or two on the article on Inertia to present his interpretation of Aristotle. We seem to have a fringe interpreter of primary sources whose work clearly meets Jimbo Wales' criterion[8] for deletion on the grounds of NOR.

Judging from the outcome on Inertia, I don't think he's amenable to rational discourse. He expressed his frustration that he was unable to convince I. B. Cohen of his errors. I think his edits should be watched carefully and, as appropriate, deleted, reverted, or otherwise edited. It doesn't seem wise to encourage further debate by replies.

Bachmann's Law: Trolls are the driving force of Wikipedia. The worst trolls often spur the best editors into creating a brilliant article with watertight references where without the trollish ecapades we would only have a brief stub.[9]
LSE event Tuesday 3 Feb 2004
London School of Economics; Centre for Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences
Deconstructing Modernity: Did Newton Really Overthrow Aristotle?
5.30pm, T206, Lakatos Building
Speaker: Alex Bellamy
LSE Library Archives Catalogue
Bellamy; Alex C. (fl 1973-)
LAKATOS/12 Selected correspondence 1959-1974
LAKATOS/12/3 Philosophy of Science 1960-1974
...
92 Letter from Alex Bellamy to Lakatos, undated.
LAKATOS/15/3 Correspondence: Bellamy, Alex 1973
Description: Note from Alex Bellamy to Lakatos on the reverse of a translation of John Buridan, 'Questions on the Eight Books of the Physics of Aristotle' (photocopy from Clagett, 'A Collection of Medieval Documents' (1961)). The note relates to Kuhn and Murdoch's views on the medieval tradition. AccessStatus Open
LAKATOS/16/3 Paper by A C Bellamy [1970s]
Description: 'How Galileo 'discovered' that freely falling bodies are permanently accelerated: a critical case study in the methodology of scientific discovery', paper by A C Bellamy, nd [1970s]. This paper is discussed in Lakatos' correspondence with Alex Bellamy (see 16/65). AccessStatus Open
LAKATOS/16 Additional papers deposited by Alex Bellamy, 1964-1970s. [1964-1973]
Description: This series consists of: a folder of papers regarding Lakatos in the 1960s; a CD of an Open University programme featuring Lakatos, 1973; and, a paper on Galileo by A C Bellamy, 1970s. AccessStatus Open

"Popper's evolutionary epistemology: A critique", Gregory Currie (London School of Economics, UK)

Synthese, 37 (1978): 413-431 DOI 10.1007/BF00873248

...

Previous versions of this paper were criticized by Alex Bellamy, Irving Copi, Paul Feyerabend, Colin Howson, David Miller, Ilkka Niiniluoto, John Worrall, Peter Urbach, Elie Zahar and especially John Watkins. It should not be assumed, however, that any of them agree with the views expressed here.

Review Article: "Lakatos's philosophy of mathematics" Gregory Currie, (University of Otago, New Zealand)

Synthese, 42 (1979): 335-351

DOI 10.1007/BF00413811

Review article of I. Lakatos: Proofs and Refutations. Essays in the Logic of Mathematical Discovery. Edited by J. Worrall and E. G. Zahar, Cambridge University Press, 1976, xii + 174pp.

...

28. I am very grateful to Alex Bellamy for discussions of this problem, though I am ...

Matteo Motterlini, ed., For and Against Method: Including Lakatos's Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1999.

p. xi

This book would have not appeared were it not for Grazia Borrini Feyerabend, Gillian Page, John Watkins and John Worrall: to them and to the Imre Lakatos Memorial Fund I should like to express my special gratitude. I am grateful to Alex Bellamy, Nancy Cartwright, Marco Del Seta, Donald Gillies, Giulio Giorello, Colin Howson, Ladislav Kvasz, Brendan Larvor, Spiro Latsis, Marco Mondadori, John Preston, Elio Sindoni, Mauricio Suárez, Peter Urbach, Thomas Uebel and Elie Zahar for many useful suggestions.

p. 19

Lectures on Scientific Method
Lakatos gave a course of eight lectures at the London School of Economics in the Lent term of 1973.

p. 64

Lecture 6. Popper and the Rules of the Game of Science

p. 85

But just remember this Newtonian business: after all, we had a hundred anomalies in 1685. And what the scientists actually did was to shelve these anomalies and say: "The Newtonian theory is all right except for these hundred or so anomalies."

p. 86

Lecture 7 Falsification and Intellectual Honesty
Mr. Bellamy1 pointed out that this argument is for Popper and not against him. Indeed, according to Popper, our imaginary scientist is first of all a Newtonian who puts forward the completely falsifiable conjecture that the planets move in a particular way. Thus a potential falsifier can be easily specified....

p. 86, n. 1

Alex Bellamy was a postgraduate student reading Logic and Scientific Method at LSE in 1973. Of particular interest are some of his letters addressed to Lakatos concerning the difficulties that the methodology of scientific research programmes faces in solving the demarcation problem (Archive, section 12, item 92).

p. 87

I give my friend Bellamy this much credit: I was not clear enough in showing that this is in fact a deadly counterexample to the Popperian approach.

p. 90

Bellamy: Can we leave it that what you call shelving Popper calls abandoning?
Lakatos: No. I will tell you why. Let me say this much: I hope the dramatic difference between shelving and abandoning will be clear for everybody after what I am about to say....
According to the Logic of Scientific Discovery (and, Alex, I think you will find it very difficult to refute this), the rationality of the scientific enterprise (I quote, and note that it is repeated twelve times so you will recall at least one occurence) depends on cutting the propositions into two: basic statements and theoretical statements; falsifiable statements and unfalsifiable statements....
Moreover, I pointed out—and this is a matter of historical fact, not logic—that all theories are anomaly-laden. That means that there are always problems in any theory which have to be shelved. If all theories are born refuted, then it is perfectly clear that all theories are falsified right at the beginning; at this point the dichotomy collapses.

p. 96

Lecture 8. The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes

pp. 100-1

Bellamy: But this [Eddington's 1919 measurement of the gravitational shift of a star's apparent position during a solar eclipse] is a crucial falsifying experiment of Newton's theory, not simply a verifying experiment for Einstein's.
Lakatos: But why should it be any worse than Mercury's perihelion or the Moon's anomalous motion? There had already been one hundred and twenty negative experiments. The only thing that differentiates this refutation of Newton from the other one hundred and twenty refutations is that the South American expedition is at the same time a verification of Einstein's theory, whereas the others are not. Curiously enough, Einstein's theory inherits 99% of those refutations, eliminates only 1% and that is precisely what counts in its favour.

[edit] RfC on Logicus's editing

A Request for Comment (RfC) has been opened at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Logicus on Logicus's editing on this article and its associated talk page.

Anyone who has been following this article or its talk page is welcome to add comments by certifying the dispute, by endorsing either the posted summary or responses to it, or by submitting their own perspective on the events described.

[edit] Minority Views History

[edit] Origins of NOR Policy

At 16:10, 15 September 2006, Logicus (User:80.6.94.131) said " you apparently prefer 'authority' rather than reason in determining the truth." This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the encyclopedic nature of Wikipedia and its No Original Research policy.

Let's try to get at the heart of the No Original Research policy by tracing its origins. It began with an e-mail on the wikien-l where Jimbo Wales expressed his reaction to an editor who was advocating an unorthodox criticism of special relativity on the article by that name. That view was generalized to cover topics other than physics and became the original version of the No Original Research policy and is still included in the much larger current version.

Here's Jimbo's view, transposed from physics to history:

What do mainstream [history] texts say on the matter? What do the majority of prominent [historians] say on the matter? Is there significant debate one way or the other within the mainstream [historical] community on this point?
If your viewpoint is in the majority, then it should be easy to substantiate it with reference to commonly accepted reference texts.
If your viewpoint is held by a significant [minority of historians], then it should be easy to name prominent adherents, and the article should certainly address the controversy without taking sides.
If your viewpoint is held by an extremely small minority, then whether it's true or not, whether you can prove it or not, it doesn't belong in Wikipedia, except perhaps in some ancilliary article. Wikipedia is not the place for original research.
Remember, I'm not much interested in "is it true or not" in this context. We could talk about that forever and get nowhere. I'm only interested in the much more tractable question "is it encyclopedic and NPOV or not"? And this question can be answered in the fashion I outlined above.
--Jimbo

Since this is the official Wikipedia framework, we cannot determine whether a claim belongs in Wikipedia by debating whether it's true that Aristotle maintained a theory of inertia (or that seventeenth-century natural philosophers believed that Aristotle held a theory of inertia). Instead, our goal is to determine whether these views are held by a majority, a significant minority, or an extremely small minority of historians. To do that, we need to identify specific passages in which historians state these views and similar passages where historians state alternative views (such as that Aristotle believed that bodies are moved by some motive cause or that Galileo, Descartes, or Newton believed that their concepts of inertia or impetus contradicted the views of Aristotle).

[edit] Historians on Inertia in Aristotle

Well, lets try to tally up the views of the historical community on Aristotle having a view of inertia as reported by Logicus / A. Bellamy

Pro Isaac Newton. unspecified manuscript ca. 1690?, (Hall and Hall 1962)
Pro Thomas Heath. Mathematics in Aristotle
Con Alexandre Koyré. Galilean Studies
Con Pierre Duhem. unspecified source, perhaps his Le Systeme du Monde
Con Thomas Kuhn. unspecified source, perhaps his Copernican Revolution
Con Herbert Butterfield. The Origins of Modern Science
Con I. Bernard Cohen. Various
Con Emile Meyerson. Identity and Reality
Con Anneliese Maier. unspecified source, perhaps her Anneliese Maier, "Galileo and the Scholastic Theory of Impetus"
Con Stillman Drake. unspecified source

We could then add all the opposed views cited already in the article:

Con Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages, pp. 55-63, 87-104

[edit] Sorabji

Richard Sorabji, Matter, Space, and Motion: Theories in Antiquity and Their Sequel, (London: Duckworth, 1988), p. 227.

What [Philoponus] introduced was an alternative to Aristotle's dynamics, and he started with the motion of projectiles.
Aristotle had been puzzled as to what makes a javelin continue to move after it has left the hand. Its 'natural' motion is only downward. Its 'forced' or 'unnatural' motion onwards is produced for the first few feet by tha hand of the thrower who graps it. But after its release, Aristotle thinks another cause must be sought which like the hand is external to it, and yet in contact with it. He decides (Phys. 8.10, 267a2-12; cf. Cael. 3.2, 301b23-30) that by pushing the air, the thrower imparts to successive pockets of air behind the javelin the power to move it onwards.... In effect, the pockets of air are unmoved movers, although Aristotle does not say it that way.... Philoponus' inovation is to suggest that a force ... can be implanted by the thrower directly into the javelin, and need not remain external to it in the air. The force came to be called an impetus and was still a commonplace in the time of Galileo.
Aristotle's theory of projectiles was ripe for replacement. He does not explain sufficiently why air should sometimes help motiojn, as with projectiles, while at other times (Phys. 4.8, 215a24-216a11) it creates resistance to motion and reduces speed.

[edit] Ligatures

[edit] Scope

This guideline is about standard letters (a-z/A-Z) with diacritics, existing in languages of which the native script is based on the Latin alphabet:

As a Wikipedia:Naming conventions guideline, this guideline is about article names, not about the use of alternate versions with or without diacritics in the body of the Wikipedia articles.

This guideline does not apply to redirect pages, which can (and should) use diacritics to ensure that all popular variations of a name's spelling, still redirect to the proper article. Conversely, in those cases, like Charlotte Brontë, where English and Wikipedia use the diacritic, a redirect from the simple form (Charlotte Bronte) is a necessary service to the reader. For those cases where a word with a diacritic and its diacritic-less variant usually have a different meaning (canon/cañon; Vitória/Vitoria;...), see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (precision).

[edit] Other types of diacritics, non-standard letters and ligatures

The majority of this guideline is about "standard" letters with diacritics as are seen in the section above. This guideline, however, does not apply to the following letters:

  • Ð/ð - The upper case variant of this letter is a D with a diacritic, but the lower case variant is a completely different character (not the regular form of a d (as in a-z));
  • ɨ - and other IPA-specific glyphs containing what looks like a diacritic;
  • ί, ἰ, ύ, and other diacritics used in languages for which the standard notation doesn't use the Latin alphabet;
  • Diacritics used in some romanization/transliteration systems (e.g. Pinyin);
  • Ligatures like Œ (for Æ see above);
  • ß - found in the German alphabet;
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  • Ə/ə - found in the Azeri alphabet
  • Signs used to indicate metre schemes in poetry (see for example Dactylic hexameter).

For special-case characters such as þ, ð and ß, because of the limited geographic regions in which these letters are used, English-speakers in other parts of the world (especially those for whom English is a second language) often find these symbols incomprehensible and unpronounceable. Difficulties also arise in terms of how to alphabetize them, since most English speakers, even those for whom English is their native language, do not know where to place them in a standard alphabet. As a result, this guideline recommends that their use be avoided in article titles.

???

[edit] Nasr

[T]he idea of unity is not only the basic presupposition of the Islamic arts and sciences: it dominates their expression as well. The portrayal of any individual object would become a "graven image," a dangerous idol of the mind, the very canon of art in Islam is abstraction.... Thus we come to the central issue. Can our minds grasp the individual object as it stands by itself? or can we do so only by understanding the individual object within the context of the universe? In other words, from the cosmological point of view, is the universe the unity, and the individual event or object a sign (phenomenon, "appearance") of ambiguous and uncertain import? Or is it the other way around? Of these alternatives, which go back to the time of Plato, the Muslim is bound to accept the first -- he gives priority to the universe as the one concrete reality, which symbolizes on the cosmic level the Divine Principle itself,... Herein one can already see why mathematics was to make such a strong appeal to the Muslim: its abstract nature furnished the bridge that Muslims were seeking between multiplicity and unity.


Seyyed Hossein Nasr has argued that there is a distintly Muslim approach to science, flowing from Islamic monotheism and the related theological prohibition against portraying graven images. In science, this is reflected in a philosophical disinterest in describing individual material objects, their properties and characteristics and instead a concern with the ideal, the Platonic form, which exists in matter as an expression of the will of the Creator. Thus one can "see why mathematics was to make such a strong appeal to the Muslim: its abstract nature furnished the bridge that Muslims were seeking between multiplicity and unity."[1]

[edit] Ptolemy

[edit] Astronomy

Main article: Almagest

The Almagest is widely held to be the first systematic treatise on astronomy in antiquity. Babylonian astronomers had developed arithmetical techniques for calculating astronomical phenomena; Greek astronomers such as Hipparchus had produced geometric models for calculating celestial motions; Ptolemy, however, clearly derived his geometrical models from selected astronomical observations by his predecessors spanning more than 800 years. Ptolemy then reduced his astronomical models to tables, which could be used to compute the future or past position of the planets.[2] The Almagest also contains a star catalogue, which is probably an updated version of a catalogue created by Hipparchus. Its list of forty-eight constellations is ancestral to the modern system of constellations, but unlike the modern system they did not cover the whole sky (only the sky Ptolemy could see). Through the Middle Ages it was spoken of as the authoritative text on astronomy, with its author becoming an almost mythical figure, called Ptolemy, King of Alexandria.[3]The Almagest was preserved, like most of Classical Greek science, in Arabic manuscripts (hence its familiar name). Because of its reputation, it was widely sought and was translated twice into Latin in the 12th century, once in Sicily and again in Spain.[4] Ptolemy's model, like those of his predecessors, was geocentric and was almost universally accepted until an equally systematic presentation of a heliocentric geometrical model by Nicolaus Copernicus.

His Planetary Hypotheses went beyond the mathematical model of the Almagest to present a physical realization of the universe as a set of nested spheres[5], in which he used the epicycles of his planetary model to compute the dimensions of the universe. He estimated the Sun was at an average distance of 1210 Earth radii while the radius of the sphere of the fixed stars was 20,000 times the radius of the Earth.[6]

Ptolemy presented a useful tool for astronomical calculations in his Handy Tables, which tabulated all the data needed to compute the positions of the Sun, Moon and planets, the rising and setting of the stars, and eclipses of the Sun and Moon. Ptolemy's Handy Tables provided the model for later astronomical tables or zījes. In the Phaseis (Risings of the Fixed Stars) Ptolemy gave a parapegma, a star calendar or almanac based on the appearances and disappearances of stars over the course of the solar year.

His model and computational methods were were adopted and modified in the Arab world and in India, since they were of sufficient accuracy to satisfy the needs of astronomers, astrologers, timekeepers, calendar keepers, and navigators.

He studied this in great detail for many years.

[edit] Medieval Impetus vs Modern Inertia

One of the first historians of medieval science, the French physicist, Pierre Duhem, saw precursors of the modern idea of inertia in the impetus theory of Jean Buridan. Duhem (1861 – 1916) wrote in his posthumously published Le Système de Monde (I will quote the French rather than make you trust my translations):

La Mécanique de Galilée, c'est, peut-on dire, la forme adulte d'une science vivant dont la Mécanique de Buridan était la larve. (VIII, 200)

Duhem spelled out the nature of Buridan's embryonic form of the new physics in the following terms:

La loi de l'inertie n'a donc pas encore reçu de Jean Buridan son énoncé complet et définitif. Mais la part de vérité que de maître a reconnue est déja bien grande, assez grande pour bouleverser les fondements mêmes de la Philosophie péripatéticienne.
Tout la Dynamique dÁristote repose sur set axiome:
« Tout ce qui est en mouvement est nécessairement mû par quelque chose....»
A cette formule. voice que Buridan substitue cette autre:
Après qu'un corps a été mis en mouvement, il n'a plus pour se mouvoir, besoin d'aucun moteur extrinsèque: l'impetus qu'il a reçu une fois pour toute y suffit....
Voilà donc que s'écroule toute la Dynamique d'Aristote. (VIII, 338-9)

In Duhem's view Buridan had not yet definitively proclaimed the law of inertia, but his ideas had overthrown the foundations of peripatetic philosophy and brought about the collapse of Aristotle's dynamics.

Anneliese Maier, who approached the same texts as Duhem from the perspective of a student of medieval philosophy, saw a different picture. She agreed with Duhem that the late scholastics "prepared the way for the law of inertia" but she insisted that "from the outset, however, we must recognize that we are dealing with an analogue to the law of inertia, not an exact parallel to it. An exact parallel is out of the question, since late scholastic thinkers assumed that uniform motion is caused by a special kind of motive force called impetus, while modern mechanics postulates that uniform motion does not require any kind of force to make it continue..." (Maier, On the Threshold of Exact Science, (1982), pp. 77-8; translation of her 1955 Die naturphilosophische Bedeutung der scholastischen Impetustheorie.)

Subsequent historians of medieval science, such as Marshall Clagett, shared Maier's view that impetus was only "a kind of analogue to inertia." (Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages, (1959), p. xxviii). In his detailed discussion, Clagett notes that Buridan

spoke of [impetus] as a motive force and as the reason for the continued movement,... One cannot help but compare Buridan's impetus with Galileo's impeto and Newton's quantity of motion (momentum), even though on the face of it they are ontologically different from impetus considered as a kind of force. But while the affirmed ontology of impetus would seem to differentiate it from later concepts, yet the terms of its measure as presented by Buridan make an analogue with momentum,... (Clagett, p. 523).

Edward Grant came to much the same conclusion, which he concisely summarized in his Physical Science in the Middle Ages (1971):

Buridan seized upon quantity of matter and speed as means of determining the measure of impetus, the same quantities which served to define momentum in Newtonian physics, although in the latter momentum is usually conceived as a quantity of motion or a measure of the effect of a body's motion, whereas impetus is a cause of motion. Indeed, impetus was viewed as an internalization of the cause of motion which Aristotle had made external. It seemed a better way of adhering to Aristotle's dictum that everything that is moved is moved by another." (p. 50).

Grant repeated his earlier judgment, in almost the same words, in his The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages, (1996), pp. 95-6.

In a nutshell, Duhem's 90-year old discovery of medieval anticipations of the principle of inertia has been greatly modified by subsequent research. The three major historians of medieval science who have looked closely at the scholastic texts that attracted Duhem's attention all come to similar conclusions. Impetus and inertia are operationally similar, in that they are measured in the same terms, but ontologically distinct, in that impetus is a cause of continued motion within an Aristotelian dynamical framework while inertial motion needs no cause.

There are signs that impetus theory may have contributed to the later development of the theory of inertia. Galileo, for example, used impetus theory in his youthful De motu. (Clagett, pp. 666-7) but the crucial step was abandoning the Aristotelian notion that "everything that is moved is moved by another." This step took place during the course of the Scientific Revolution.

[edit] Galileo on violent motion

Buridan's impetus can be made to appear as coming very close to the later inertial concept; indeed, to become identical with Newton's vis inertiae. But such a // treatment contradicts the very basis of Aristotle's physics, in which all motions were classified as either natural or violent. Natural motions were caused by an internal or intrinsic property, which in the case of terrestrial heavy bodies carried them straight down, and to speak of this property as an external force (our "force of gravity") is an unpardonable anachronism. (Stillman Drake, "Impetus Theory Reappraised", Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 (1975): 27-46, at pp. 34-5)

The distinction between natural motions, undertaken by a body merely freed from restraint, and violent motions induced by external forces, was a very useful one. Even Galileo, who was not notably influenced by the authority of Aristotle, habitually made use of that same distinction and its terminology, though he early rejected the completeness of the ancient dichotomy. For Galileo there were also neutral motions, neither natural nor violent,... (Stillman Drake, "Impetus Theory Reappraised", Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 (1975): 27-46, at p. 35)

The germ of his later inertial idea is found in the same book [De motu (1590)], but it had nothing to do with impetus theory. It started from certain" neutral motions" that he offered in contradiction to Aristotle's conception that all motions must be either natural or violent. (ibid., p. 45)

Later, in chapter 16 [of De motu], the criterion of natural place was to lead on to the concept of motions that are neither natural nor forced, but "neutral," an advanced concept added marginally in chapter 14 [I, 300n]. (Stillman Drake, "The Evolution of De motu (Galileo Gleanings XXIV)", Isis, vol. 67, No. 2, (Jun., 1976), pp. 239-250, at p. 247)

[edit] Linguistic nationalism

Linguistic nationalism may refer to:

[edit] History of astronomy myths

The following three sections, dealing with general claims for Islamic heliocentrism and with specific claims that al-Zarqali, al-Biruni, and even al-Tusi had proposed elliptical orbits can be answered on two grounds.

  • First, it should be noted that these claims appear primarily in the historical introduction to Asghar Qadir's textbook on special relativity and in a popular article on Islamic Science appearing in an on-line version of a magazine published by a petroleum company.
  • Secondly, there is a consensus among the principal historians of Islamic astronomy (Ragep 1987; Sabra 1998; Saliba 1996) that all Arabic / Islamic astronomy is based on the combination of the uniform circular motions of geocentric spheres; there is no question of either heliocentrism or elliptical orbits.
    • The specific claim that al-Biruni spoke of eliptical shapes in the heavens appears in a commentary by Biruni on Aristotle's cosmology, where he finds fault with validity of Aristotle's proof that the heaven's are spherical, but maintains that nonetheless he considers that they are spherical.
      • One historian of Islamic science, (Nasr 1964), quotes this passage in his Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines and maintains that Biruni implies "that the heavens could have an elliptical motion", despite Biruni's assertion that they actually do not.
    • The historian of astronomy (Hartner 1955) who presented the most detailed description of al-Zarqali's ellipse-like figures notes explicitly that they are neither ellipses nor are they heliocentric.


In the course of editing various articles on the history of astronomy, I have come across a number of claims that various non-western astronomers had anticipated certain modern discoveries. These claims arise in a broader context of editors who present historical articles as lists of the "first person to discover X". Well written history of science is not concerned with listing discoverers to give them credit, rather it is concerned with discussing how a particular intellectual, institutional, and social context contributed to a person coming to specific scientific ideas.

The specific myths I am concerned with here arise from an understandable desire to make Islamic and Indian scholars more "modern" than they were, as if giving them points for beating European scholars to specific discoveries is a way to increase their stature, and from a sense that European scholars have been wrongfully given credit for non-western achievements.

Unfortunately, these claims have the opposite effect:

  • In so far as they reflect misunderstandings of what these astronomers were actually doing, they lead the reader away from an understanding of their actual achievements.
  • To the extent that they are demonstrably false, they discredit both Wikipedia and the genuine achievements of Islamic and Indian astronomers.

I have spent some time tracing down the apparent sources of some of these claims, as best as I can, and have found several points.

  1. Most of them appear only in tertiary literature, based on (erroneous or selective) reading of the secondary literature.
  2. The tertiary sources cited often do not provide proper citations to their sources (which makes tracing the ultimate sources of their claims difficult).
  3. They are securely rebutted in the text-based secondary literature (or in the case of al-Biruni, in the texts themselves).

I have presented the sources of these claims, followed by critical material that can be used to evaluate them. I would welcome additional quotations of any sources on either side of these issues.

Unless sources are forthcoming, I will begin to remove these unsupported claims from the articles where they appear.

[edit] Whig history in Wikipedia

Beginning students in the history of science are commonly warned of the danger of writing Whig history; that is, the danger of writing about the past from a present perspective. One problem with Whig history is that it becomes a principle of selection, which is especially dangerous in writing a summary like an encyclopedia.

This principle of selection dominates Wikipedia's history of astronomy articles, as editors choose do discuss those elements where past authors anticipated modern ideas, and ignore the rest. As an example, compare the discussion of al-Biruni's astronomy with the source[7] on which it is chiefly based. In the Wikipedia article, more than half of the section on astronomy (12 out or 21 lines) deals with heliocentrism or gravity; in the principle source 11 out of 36 lines deal with his discussion of the possible rotation of the earth; there are no further discussions of heliocentrism or gravity. Further examples could be made by comparing Wikipedia's presentations with those of other scholarly encyclopedias, such as the Dictionary of Scientific Biography or the Encyclopedia of Islam.

Due to this presentist principle of selection, we find discussions of three topics dominating articles on the history of ancient and medieval astronomy:

  • Anticipations of heliocentrism
  • Anticipations of the rotation of the Earth
  • Anticipations of elliptical orbits
  • Anticipations of the concept of gravitation

These anticipations are selected to such an extent that the reader of these articles could come away almost totally unaware of the questions and methods governing early investigations of celestial phenomena.

  • That their inquiry followed the model of geometrical astronomy, based on combinations of uniform circular motions, that is first documented in the writings of Hipparchus and Ptolemy.
  • That the criticisms they levelled at their predecessors (such as Ptolemy) were framed within that model of geometrical astronomy.

In sum, by selecting material from the perspective of the present, we are in danger of writing a history, which, while accurate in detail, presents a false overall picture.

[edit] Indian heliocentrism

[edit] Noel Swerdlow (1973)

The revolutions of the planets in a Mahāyuga are given in two parts, the first corresponding to the planet's mean motion in longitude, the second to its mean motion on the epicycle, just as Ptolemy specifies mean motions in longitude and anomaly. For example, Jupiter completes 364,224 revolutions in longitude and 4,320,000 revolutions on its epicycle. When the motions are reduced to single revolutions, it turns out that the periods of the epicycles of the superior planets are one year, and the periods of the epicycles of Mercury and Venus are respectively about 88 and 225 days; that is, the periods of the inferior planets correspond to what we now call their heliocentric longitudinal periods, while the periods of the superior planets correspond to the annual motion of the earth. For this reason van der Waerden concludes that the models must be heliocentric.
Such an interpretation, however, shows a complete misunderstanding of Indian planetary theory and is flatly contradicted by every word of Aryabhata's description. Therefore, that mithyājñāna may not prosper, we shall explain the method of measuring motions in Indian planetary theory.... [8]

[edit] David Pingree (1973)

The reader should note that, in writing this survey, I have disregarded the rather divergent views of B. L. van der Waerden; these have been most recently expounded in his Das heliozentrische System in der griechischen, persischen und indischen Astronomie, Zürich 1970.[9]

[edit] Dennis Duke (2005)

For the inner planets, the sighra argument uses not the mean longitude of the planet, which would be just the mean longitude of the Sun, but instead the absolute longitude λP′of the sighra epicycle radius,4...
4. Thus for both outer and inner planets, the mean motion given is the heliocentric mean motion of the planet. There is no textual evidence that the Indians knew anything about this, and there is an overwhelming amount of textual evidence confirming their geocentric point of view. Some commentators, most notably van der Waerden, have however argued in favor of an underlying ancient Greek heliocentric basis, of which the Indians were unaware. See, e.g. B. L. van der Waerden, “The heliocentric system in greek, persian, and indian astronomy”, in From deferent to equant: a volume of studies in the history of science in the ancient and medieval near east in honor of E. S. Kennedy, Annals of the new york academy of sciences, 500 (1987), 525-546. More recently this idea is developed in about as much detail as the scant evidence allows in L. Russo, The Forgotten Revolution (2004).[10]

[edit] Islamic heliocentrism

[edit] Ibn al-Haytham (ca. 1000 [1990])

[22] The earth as a whole is a round sphere whose center is the center of the world. It is stationary in its [the world's] middle, fixed in it and not moving in any direction nor moving with any of the varieties of motion, but always at rest....
[35] The part which is neither heavy nor light surrounds the two remaining parts and moves around them with an unceasing motion. This part is that which is called the orb, and it is that which contains all the stars. [36] Its shape in its entirety is a spherical shape. It is surrounded and bounded by two spherical surfaces, whose center is the center of the world.... [37] This body in its entirety moves with a swift motion from the direction that is called east to the direction that is called west. It sets in motion by means of its own motion all the heavenly bodies which are contained within it with a circular motion.[11]

[edit] Asghar Qadir (1989)

These estimates [of the size and distance of the Sun and Moon] were available to Ibn-al-Haytham, over a thousand years later. He revived the view of Aristarchus. If on no other count, then just the sheer size of the Sun would have convinced him that the Earth went round the Sun. He showed that the planets / moved in circles round the Sun. Two centuries later, Al Zarkali modified these results... (pp. 5-6)
There were also major advances made in the study of celestial motion. Nicolai Copernicus, a Polish monk, had revived the views of Ibn-al-Haytham. According to this view, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn followed concentric, circular orbits of increasing radius about the Sun. The Moon followed a circular path about the Earth. Beyond Saturn were the fixed stars. (This picture is nowadays known as the Copernican system instead of Aristarchus' or Ibn-al-Haytham's system.) (p. 10)[12]

[edit] A. I. Sabra (1972)

[On the Configuration of the World] In his careful description of all movements involved, Ibn al-Haytham provided, in fact, a full, clear, and untechnical account of Ptolemaic planetary theory....
Perhaps most important historically was ibn al-Haytham's objection against the device introduced by Ptolemy which later became known as the equant".[13]

[edit] A. I. Sabra (1998)

The work done on planetary theory in thirteenth century Syria and northwest Iran and subsequently resumed in fourteenth century Damascus did not constitute a "revolution," as Saliba suggests (Saliba 1994, pp. 245ff., 258ff.), but a remarkably successful reform that exposed possibilities of achieving greater theoretical consistency within the Ptolemaic system, and, in [End Page 321] some cases, a better fit with observation. There was no attempt or desire to break away from the Ptolemaic paradigm as such. It would be odd to call "revolutionary" a reformist project intended to consolidate Ptolemaic astronomy by bringing it into line with its own principles. True, the new configurations embodied a number of "non-Ptolemaic" models, "non-Ptolemaic" in that they freed themselves from embarrassing features that appeared to mar the Ptolemaic constructions (Roberts 1966, p. 208), but, in their attempt to save the Ptolemaic principles (circularity, uniformity, and the use of eccenters and/or epicycles), the new configurations may equally well be regarded as more Ptolemaic than Ptolemy's. To look on these pre-Copernican endeavors as a reform, the result of a problem- or puzzle-solving program, is not to divest them of their obvious value, but to stress their adherence to the principles and the methodology of a hugely successful enterprise--principles and methodology which, understandably, had to be fully explored before they could be overthrown. Problem-solving, in this sense, is not a useless or second-rate effort but an exercise of the type that often functions in the history of scientific thought as a necessary prelude to "revolution." But, as is well known, when "the revolution" began to take shape, on the way from Copernicus to Kepler, an entirely new set of astronomical observations and a new flight of imaginative theorizing happened to be crucially involved.[14]

[edit] George Saliba (1999)

There is no talk at this point of heliocentrism, the concept commonly stressed in Copernican astronomy. But one should also equally hasten to say that Copernican heliocentrism is itself stressed (in a hindsight fashion) at the expense of the mathematical foundations of Copernican astronomy, foundations that Copernicus developed and used before he took the last step of displacing the center of the universe from the earth to the sun. One should also add at this point that in mathematical terms heliocentrism can be accomplished just by reversing the direction of the last vector connecting the earth to the sun. The rest of the mathematics involved in both types of astronomical systems could then remain the same. That fact was well known to pre-Copernican astronomers, and notably to someone like the polymath Biruni (d. c. 1049), and was dismissed as a philosophical problem and not an astronomical / mathematical one per se....
With the same mathematics, the same observations, more or less, astronomers working within the Islamic world could account for the planetary positions just as well as Copernicus could do, or even Ptolemy for that matter, despite the fact that the astronomers of the Islamic world continued to work within the cosmologically earth-centered Aristotelian system which was perfectly defensible for their time. The central problem for them had nothing to do with the issue of heliocentrism, rather it had to do with issues related to the lack of the inner consistency of Greek astronomy. By that I mean that they were seeking mathematical constructions that did not exhibit by their very definition a contradiction with the physical realities they were supposed to represent, as was clearly done in the defunct Ptolemaic astronomy.[15]

[edit] al-Zarqali's elliptical orbits

[edit] Willy Hartner (1955)

The Curve Described by the Centre of the Epicycle.... (p. 109)
The table [1] demonstrates with sufficient clarity that the "Ptolemaic curve" (about which no word is found in Ptolemy's Almagest) is practically interchangeable with the ellipse.... (p. 114)
As mentioned before, the first European author I know of who expressly stated thae similarity of the curve described by the centre of the epicycle with an ellipse was Peurbach, and even he contents himself with saying that it is a "kind of oval". In the Islamic world, however, as will be seen, the discovery is of a much earlier date.... (p. 118)
The text of Chapter IX [of Azarquiel's treatise] however, which will be summarized here, leaves no doubt that it is nothing but the curve resulting from Ptolemy's theory, which we discussed above in detail:
"Finally, join every three of the points thus marked, by an arc, and there will result a curve similar to a pignon. And when you have made the circles of Mercury as I have shown in this chapter, its postion will result from them very accurately, more so than in any other way".
Thus the first explicit description of the curve of Mercury's true deferent, as well as its practical application, is undoubtedly Arabic....
Concerning the plate illustrating Azarquiel's text, it may be well to note that it was obviously not carried out in accordance with the author's prescription. The small circle inthe middle (which looks like the Sun and therefore has deceived many interpreters) is nothing but the small circle with radius ε round F.(pp. 120-121).][16]

[edit] Asghar Qadir (1989)

Two centuries later [after Alhacen], Al Zarkali modified these results, in the light of better data, to state that they [the planets] moved in ellipses with the Sun at one focus. (p. 6)
Kepler revived Al Zarkali's law of planetary motion, which states that planets move in ellipses with the Sun at one focus. (This is now known as Kepler's first law rather than Al Zarkali's law.) He went on, however, to state two more laws which were quantitatiive. (p.11)[17]

[edit] E. J. Aiton (1987)

Sixth, from what has been said it appears clearly that the center of the epicycle of Mercury, on account of the motions stated above, does not, as in the cases of the other planets, describe the circular circumference of the deferent but rather the periphery of a figure that resembles a plane oval.71

71 A modern analysis of the motion of the epicycle in the theory of Ptolemy described by Peurbach may be found in Hartner, Oriens-occidens, (cit. n. 65), pp. 465-478. Peurbach was the first European to describe the curve as similar to an ellipse, though it had been so described by al-Zarqali in the eleventh century. According to Hartner's analysis, the curve implied by Ptolemy's theory is practically an ellipse. On al-Zarqali see Heinrich Suter, Die Mathematiker und Astronomen der Araber und ihre Werke (Leipzig: Teubner, 1900; rpt. New York: Johnson, 1972), pp. 109-11[18]

[edit] al-Biruni's elliptical orbits

[edit] Willy Hartner (1955)

n. 87. For Al-Biruni's (973-1048) purely mathematical treatment, see Fig. 15, showing a page from one of the earliest manuscripts known of his Mas`udic Canon (al-Qanun al-Mas`udi), written less than a century after the author's death. [The Figure cited shows two conventional figures, one for the motion of Venus and the superior planets, the other for the motion of mercury. Both employ traditional Ptolemaic geocentric models of circular deferents and epicycles.][19]

[edit] Richard Covington (2007)

In his comprehensive encyclopedia of astronomy, Kitab al-qanun al-Mas’udi, or the Canon Mas’udicus, dedicated in 1031 to Mahmud’s son and successor, Mas’ud, al-Biruni also observed that the planets revolved in apparent elliptical orbits, instead of the circular orbits of the Greeks, although he failed to explain how they functioned. It was not until the 13th century that al-Tusi conceived a plausible model for elliptical orbits.[20]

[edit] E. S. Kennedy (1970)

[The Canon] Treatises 1 and 2 set forth and discuss general cosmological principles (that the earth and heavens are spherical, that the earth is stationary, etc.)....
Treatises 6 and 7 are on the sun and moon respectively. Here (and with planetary theory further on) the abstract models are essentially Ptolemaic.[21]

[edit] al-Biruni (11th c. [2004])

33) The Sixth Question: [Aristotle] has mentioned in Book II that [the shape of the heaven is of necessity spherical because] the oval and the lenticular shapes would require space and void whereas the sphere does not, but the matter is not so. In fact, the oval [shape] is generated by the rotation of ellipse around its major axis and the lenticular by its rotation around its minor axis. As there is no difference concerning the rotation around the axes by which they are generated, therefore none of what Aristotle mentions would occur and only the essential attributes of the spheres would follow necessarily. If the axis of rotation of the oval is its major axis and if the axis of rotation of the lenticular is its minor axis, they would revolve like the sphere, without needing an empty space (makan khal). This could happen, however, if the axis of [rotation of] the oval is its minor axis and the axis of [rotation of] the lenticular is its major axis. In spite of this, it is possible that the oval can rotate around its minor axis and the lenticular around its major axis, both moving consecutively without needing an empty space, like the movement of bodies inside the celestial sphere, according to the opinion of most people. And I am not saying this with the belief that the celestial sphere is not spherical, but oval or lenticular; I have tried hard to refute this theory but I am amazed at the reasons offered by the man of logic.[22]

[edit] Kuhn as a Historian of Science

Discuss Kuhn, Conant, and the Case Studies...

"Kuhn had an epiphany. What had appeared wrong and absurd in the ancient texts suddenly made sense; Aristotle had not been writing bad Newtonian physics but good Greek philosophy.... The sympathetic reading of texts, the search for apparent absurdities as clues to interpretation and tests for understanding, became Kuhn's historical and pedagogical method. As he later said, intellectual historians learn this method in school; but for him, then a graduate student in physics, it came with the force of an independent solution of a deep riddle."[23]

[edit] References

J. L. Heilbron, "Thomas Samuel Kuhn, 18 July 1922-17 June 1996," Isis, 89 (1998): 505-15.

[edit] Fomenko

The “new chronology” views of Academician A.T. Fomenko and his followers concerning the process of world history were discussed in the historical department of Moscow State University, chaired by its dean, Professor S.P. Karpov, on December 21, 1999. The pioneers of the “new chronology” consider it a scientific concept resting on the achievements of mathematics and their interpretation of the works of ancient astronomers. This has raised objections among many scholars. The scientific press and the mass media point out the faults and distortions in the works of Fomenko and his followers (e.g., see Vestn. Ross. Akad. Nauk, 1999, no. 12). But Fomenko and company continue to propagate their novel idea. As the growing popularity of the Fomenko group’s views and publications are a grave danger to Russia’s culture as a whole, the round table subjected them to a comprehensive critical analysis. Below is the text of the contribution by V.L. Yanin, eminent historian and archaeologist, and specifically a student of the history and culture of Ancient Russia.[24]

[edit] Review of Fomenko (1996)

It is surprising, to say the least, that a well-known (Dutch) publisher could produce an expensive book of such doubtful intellectual value, of which the only good word that can be said is that it contains an enourmous amount of factual historical material, untidily ordered, true; badly written, yes; mixed-up with conjectural nonsense, sure; but still, much useful stuff. For the rest of the book is absolutely worthless. It reminds one of the early Soviet attempts to produce tendentious science (Lysenko!), of polywater, of cold fusion, and of modern creationism. In brief: a useless and misleading book.[25]

[edit] Sidorov on Fomenko (2006)

Eurasianism is an influential ideology, and the New Chronology of Anatoly Fomenko and Gleb Nosovskii could be treated as its peculiar reincarnation....

According to the New Chronology, the first Rome was Alexandria (Egypt), the second Rome was Constantinople (a.k.a. Jerusalem),... the Third Rome as Moscow was the capital of a Great Russian Empire that embraced practically the entire world.

The New Chronology is essentially about “the true grandeur of ancient Russian history, about the strength of the Russian spirit and weaponry, about power that managed to unite the peoples of the world.[26]

[edit] Sheiko on Fomenko (2004)

Fomenko's greatest achievement is the invention of a Slav-Turk empire that allegedly dominated the first half of world history, that is, until the seventeenth century. This 'Russian Horde' as Fomenko named it, was based in the area that we normally associate with the Golden Horde founded by the Mongol khans in the thirteenth century.

Fomenko's vision is an inspiring one for those who measure Russia's greatness by the amouht of space it occupies on a map. He offers an account of the Russian state as if it were the history of all of Eurasia. Fomenko's writing is inspired, in part, by the work of the Eurasianists of the early twentieth century who first argued that Russia was neither European nor Asian but a distinctive society. (p. 5)

Conventional historians were at first unsure whether to regard Fomenko and his entourage as post-modern clowns or dangerous ethno-nationalists. For his critics in Russia, Fomenko is both an embarrassment and a potent symbol of the depths to which the Russian academy and society have generally sunk amid the economic disasters and political and military humiliations heaped upon Russia since the fall fo Communism. (p. 6)

For his critics, Fomenko's ideas are providing fuel for those who would reconstitute a Russian Empire. It is not just modern-day Mongols who are deprived of part of their heritage. In Fomenko's history, Ukraine and Belarus too have no identity outside of their connection to Russia. Pseudo-historians are unrepentant, noting that the Mongolian and Ukranian peoples are sadly mistaken in the delusion that they were ever anything other than elements of the Russian Horde. (p. 8)

Fomenko's version of history is popular among a reading public disillusioned with Communism and the broken promises of consumer capitalism. It is deliberately aimed at keeping alive an imperial consciousness and secular messianism in Russia. Thus, Fomenko's history has a practical application in modern-day Russia and confirms that an imperialist discourse is alive and well, making more difficult Russia's evolution into a nation state. (p. 13)

Fomenko's ideas are popular not because of what he claims is his main concern, that is, rewriting world chronology, but because he finds in history a simple answer to the question of who the Russians are. (p. 14)

Fomenko ... provides no fair-minded review of the historical literature about a topic with which he deals, quotes only those sources that serve his purposes, uses evidence in ways that seem strange to professionally-trained historians and asserts the wildest speculation as if it has the same status as the information common to the conventional historical literature. (p. 21)

Fomenko insists that his new dates are the result of a complex statistical-mathematical research of the so-called quantititative features of ancient texts and chronicles. What that means is not exactly clear. The calculations are difficult for the non-specialist to follow and the endless tables are no doubt designed to intimidate as much as to impress. (p. 52)

Conventional histories often describe the regional and tribal names of groups that have lived in Russia as if they were separate and unrelated peoples –Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, Goths, Bulgars, then Polyane, Duleby, Severyane, Ulichi, Drevliane, Polovtsi, Pechenegs, and, much later, Cossacks, Muscovites, Ukranians, Byelorussians. Within each and every group there are often many gradations. For Fomenko, we should see a single [Russian] ethnos lurking behind mythical and historical names. (p. 56) [contra Geary et al.]

For good reason, Russian readers are deeply skeptical of much of what passed for history in the Soviet Union. (p. 75)

Fomenko was a child of the Soviet system to the point where his principal secondary sources are often Stalin-era histories and his usual way of dismissing an idea that he does not agree with it is to label it as 'anti-scientific', as a Soviet Marxist might have done in the Stalin era. Thus Fomenko described the German historian Bayer as the founder of the 'anti-scientific' Norman theory, just as his predecessors in the Stalin era did. (p. 76)

[27]

[edit] Billington on Fomenko (2004)

James Billington, formerly professor of Russian history and currently the Librarian of Congress placed Fomenko's work within the context of the political movement of Eurasianism, which sought to tie Russian history closely to that of its Asian neighbors. Billington describes Fomenko as ascribing the belief in past hostility between Russia and the Mongols to the influence of Western historians. Thus, by Fomenko's chronology, "Russia and Turkey are parts of a previously single empire."[28]

[edit] Review of Billington

L’auteur appréhende en effet le néoeurasisme comme le symbole le plus pertinent de cette mouvance autoritariste obsédée par la question de l’étaticité et de la grande puissance (gosudarstvennost´ et deržavnost´) de la Russie, même s’il mentionne également le radicalisme orthodoxe, par exemple celui du métropolite Johann, ou les conceptions fantasmagoriques de Fomenko sur la « nouvelle chronologie » mondiale.[29]

[edit] Valentin Yanin on Fomenko [1999]

We live in an epoch of total non-professionalism, which spreads through the entire society fromthe power structures to the lowest levels of the educational system. The ordinary school produces dilettantes who assume that their miserable and faulty knowledge is adequate for judging professionals. A society brought up on scandals craves negativity and shock effects. It loves the sleight of hand trickery of a David Copperfield or an Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko.[30]

[edit] Michael Gorodetsky on Fomenko

[edit] 2007

Fomenko is a respectful scientist in mathematics, though not unequivocally (see the devastating review of one of his books by Almgren). Moreover he is a member of the Russian academy of Science. But in history he is definitely a pseudo-scientist with all characteristic features of pseudoscientific activity. And his activity in history was claimed pseudoscience by the same academy. Just as an example - he with his coauthor has published in Russia more than 60(!) books for wide audience on New Chronology. Today it is even not pseudoscience but commercial enterprise. It looks he decided now to earn in wider American market.[31]

[edit] 2005

Anatoly Fomenko is just an example of pseudoscience. He is indeed a professional mathematician but in a rather peculiar area - differential geometry. I have a special site www.newchrono.net (net - means "no" in Russian) devoted to his activity. Unfortunately it is mostly in Russian. And I was an editor and author of the book "Astronomy Against New Chronology". All the papers (in Russian) are available online. His knowledge of astronomy is extremely low, but even lower is his knowledge of egyptian astronomy. He is searching planets among decans. Nowadays it is simply a commercial publishing project. It is enough to say that he has published with his active colleague Nosovsky nearly 50 (!) books. Full bibligraphy is here: http://www.newchrono.net/fomenko/refs.htm

... Current activity of Fomenko is just a reflection of the totally destoyed sciencein [sic] Russia.[32]

[edit] van Gent on Fomenko (2005)

I guess that this proves that with statistics (used by the wrong people) you can make any claim seem valid.

Fomenko's weird chronological ideas have been discussed several times in the past on HASTRO (see the HASTRO archives) and it is depressing to see that he still gets media attention for his historical rubbish.

Several of his books are now also available in English and I was amused to read in the first volume of his _History: Fiction or Science_ (Delamare Publishing, 2003) how inscriptions in a medieval Dutch cathedral in Bois-le-Duc (Den Bosch - not far from Utrecht) prove that Jesus was born around the year 1000. Six more volumes of this nonsense are promised to become available in the near future.[33]

[edit] Ari Belenkiy on Fomenko (2003)

Fomenko's approach was to arrive to new dating based on systematic errors in Almagest. I see that doing this one cannot gain more than 1 degree (+-28') which gives not more than 100 year historical setback. This is clearly not enough for Fomenko himself.

In 1985-6 Fomenko told me that he contacted R.Newton trying to convince him to adopt his strategy on revising chronology rather than criticising Ptolemy. Newton did not support his aspirations (or even did not understand him fully).[34]

[edit] F. R. Stephenson on R. R. Newton (2003)

Unfortunately, Newton’s investigations suffered from two fundamental defects. The two parameters he sought to determine were highly correlated; and he also adopted a somewhat arbitrary weighting scheme in analysing suspected observations of total solar eclipses. Many of the observations he investigated were of doubtful reliability. Hence, despite the low weight he assigned them, they had a disproportionate effect on his solutions. In particular, Newton obtained discordant values for [the lunar orbital acceleration] n˙ of around –40 arcsec/cy2. More reliable investigations of ancient eclipses had to await the independent determination of n˙.

Improved values for n˙ began to be obtained from the mid-1970s. Morrison andWard (1975), from a discussion of observations of transits of Mercury, determined n˙ =–26±2 arcsec/cy2. Subsequent results were obtained using both lunar laser ranging and studies of the orbits of artificial satellites. Current results from these two methods are in good accord. Using artificial satellite observations, Christodoulidis et al. (1988) obtained n˙ =–25.27±0.61 arcsec/cy2, while Williams and Dickey (2003) have lately deduced –25.7 arcsec/cy2 from lunar laser ranging. On the basis of conservation of angular momentum in the Earth–Moon system, it may be calculated from these results that the rate of increase in the LOD due to tides alone is close to 2.3 ms/cy.

In analysing ancient observations, it has become accepted practice to assume that n˙ is accurately known and to solve only for changes in the Earth’s spin rate by enumerating the variation in ΔT. Since global sea-level changes have been minimal over the historical period, there are good reasons for assuming that tidal friction – and hence n˙ – has remained sensibly constant during that time.[35]

[edit] Gurshtein on Fomenko (1999)

A.T.Fomenko is a mathematician from Moscow University. His extremely extravagant ideas started with Robert Newton and later on were broadened. They were discussed many times in different astronomical and historico-astronomical seminars in Moscow. The common conclusion is that there are some rough astronomical errors in his calculations. There are some publications on this issue but unfortunately all of them are in Russian. The criticism of Fomenko's calculations is supported by some prominent Russian astronomers including Yuri N.Efremov, of State Astronomical Institute in Moscow. But this Russian "Robert Newton" is very aggressive and he published his book in English.[36]

[edit] Fomenko on Robert Newton

[I]n the early 70's, namely, in 1972 - 1973, I had to deal with the dates of ancient eclipses during my studies of one of the key problems in celestial mechanics (see Chron1, Chapter 2 for more details). It had to do with computing the so called coefficient D" in the Theory of Lunar Motion. The parameter characterizes acceleration and is computed as a time function on a large historical interval. The computations were performed by Robert Nerwton, a contemporary American astronomer and astrophysicist. Upon their completion, he made the undxpected discovery of parameter D" behaving in the most peculiar manner, namely, performing an inexplicable leap on the interval of VIII-X century A. (Fomenko, p. xxi)

He [Fomenko] had noticed the 1972 article of the American astrophysicist Robert Newton ([1303]), where the latter described a strange leap in lunar acceleration, and the so-called parameter D. The leap occurred around the X century A. D. (Fomenko, p. xxx)

...in the 1970s, the author of the current book discovered the possibility of a link between the alleged gap in the value of D" (see [1303]) and the results of N. A. Mozorov's research concerning the dating of ancient eclipses ([544]). A study of the issue and a new calculation of parameter D" attains an altogether different quality; namely, one sees the complete elimination of the mysterious leap. (Fomenko, p. 96)

1303. Newton, R. R. Astronomical evidence concerning non-gravitational forces in the Earth-Moon system. Astrophys. Space Sci. Volume 16 (1972): 179-200. (Fomenko, p. 580)

[edit] Stephenson and Steele on LBAT

Critics point out that Fomenko's discussion of astronomical phenomena tends to be selective, chosing isolated examples that support the New Chronology and ignoring the large bodies of data that provide statistically supported evidence for the conventional dating. For his dating of the Almagest star catalog, Fomenko arbitrarily selected eight stars from the more than 1000 stars in the catalog only eight from which only one (Arcturus) which has a large systematic error. This star has a dominant effect on Fomenko's dating.[37] Statistical analysis using the same method for all "fast" stars points to the antiquity of the Almagest star catalog.[38][39] Rawlins points out further that Fomenko's statistical analysis got the wrong date for the Almagest because he took as constant Earth's obliquity when it is a variable that changes at a very slow, but known, rate.[40]

Fomenko's studies ignore the abundance of dated astronomical records in cuneiform texts from Mesopotamia. Among these texts is a series of astronomical diaries, which records precise astronomical observations of the Moon and planets, often dated in terms of the reigns of known historical figures extending back to the sixth century BCE. Astronomical retrocalculations for all these moving objects allow us to date these observations, and consequently the rulers' reigns, to within a single day.[41] The observations are sufficiently redundant that only a small portion of them are sufficient to date a text to a unique year in the period 750 BCE to 100 CE. The dates obtained agree with the accepted chronology.[42] In addition, F. R. Stephenson has demonstrated through a systematic study of a large number of Babylonian, Ancient and Medieval European, and Chinese records of eclipse observations that they can be dated consistently with conventional chronology at least as far back as 600 BCE.[43] In contrast to Fomenko's missing centuries, Stephenson's studies of eclipse observations find an accumulated uncertainty in the timing of the rotation of the earth of 420 seconds at 400 BCE, and only 80 seconds at 1000 CE.[44]

[edit] Book Publishers and Conflict of Interest

I'm curious about how to deal with what appears to be the use of an article page that while describing the ideas presented in a set of (probably self-published) books, seems to be an advertisement for those books. There is a real tension here between Wikipedia's encyclopedic commitment to the dissemination of ideas and its refusal to be used for commercial purposes. Before deciding whether to go forward to the Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard, I'm deliberately being general and not naming specific articles or editors.

In the case I have in mind I have been informed by a reliable source on an academic discussion list that the author of the books in question has moved from scholarly research to commercial publication.

Just as an example - he with his coauthor has published ... more than 60(!) books for wide audience.... Today it is even not pseudoscience but commercial enterprise. It looks he decided now to earn in wider American market.

The publisher of the books in question only publishes books by this author and they are widely advertised on the web. Advocates for them have posted PR materials on various open sites including videos on Youtube and suspicious looking rave notices on Amazon.com. I suspect that the original editors of the article may be engaging in similar PR activity on Wikipedia. These editors take a strong proprietary attitude towards "their" article and strongly challenge on the talk page anyone who disputes the ideas presented in the article.

The article could be an encyclopedic description of a pseudoscientific activity if it were not for some editors who push this fringe point of view in violation of WP:UNDUE, are Single Purpose Accounts dedicated to advancing this fringe point of view in this and other articles, and appear, by circumstantial evidence, to be associated with the publisher of the books advocating this Point of view in violation of WP:COI. Do any members of the community have any ideas as to how to deal with this?

The editors involved with this page have been:

[edit] Mithec and the French Connection

The ISBNs of various editions of History: Fiction or Science? provide an interesting overlap. Although the publisher code remains the same (913621), the publisher is listed variously as Mithec under one set of ISBNs, and Delamere Resources under the other. Although the book is in English, in both cases the language group identifier is 2, indicating the publisher is in the French speaking area.

  • ISBN 2-913621-07-4 Fomenko, T., Anatoly et.al. History: Fiction or Science? New Chronology. City: Delamere Resources, 2007.
  • ISBN 2-913621-06-6 Fomenko, Anatoly. History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 2. City: Delamere Resources LLC, 2005.
  • ISBN 2-913621-08-2 Fomenko, Anatoly. History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 3. City: Delamere Resources LLC, 2007.
  • ISBN 2-913621-10-4 Tamdhu, Franck and Polina Zinoviev. Russia.Britain.Byzantium.Rome.History:Fiction or Science? Chronology Vol.IV. City: Delamere Resources LLC, 2008.
  • ISBN 2-913621-01-5 Fomenko, Anatoly. History: Fiction or Science?. City: Mithec, 2003.
  • ISBN 2-913621-02-3 Fomenko, T., Anatoly et.al. History: Fiction or Science?. City: Mithec, 2003.
  • ISBN 2-913621-03-1 Fomenko, Anatole et.al. History: Fiction or Science?. City: Mithec, 2003.
  • ISBN 2-913621-05-8 Fomenko, Anatoly. History: Fiction or Science?. City: Mithec, 2004.

The title page of Volume 1 of History: Fiction or Science? provides the web address of http://history.mithec.com. History: Fiction Or Science? is distributed in the US by Mithec Distribution Services of Ashland, OH[12]. Amazon.de lists MITHEC as the publisher of History: Fiction or Science?.

There is also a user named Mithec who has posted over 100 short videos on YouTube that are ads emphasizing various aspects of Fomenko's new chronology, complete with price, web link, and toll free telephone number. A few of them have French titles despite their English language narration. Mithec's user pageon YouTube provides the following information about the source of this coordinated public relations operation:

mithec

  • joined: April 21 2006
  • Age: 58
  • Country: France

If the French editor(s) on Wikipedia are closely related to the French publishers and to the Mithec on YouTube, we have an unacceptable conflict of interest.

[edit] Account of NC actions

I was drawn to look at New Chronology (Fomenko), and related articles, by a recent discussion on the History of Astronomy Discussion List (HASTRO-L) about Fomenko's misuse of astronomy. The Russian astronomer, Michael Gorodetsky, recently (6 Dec 2007) said this about Fomenko:

Fomenko is a respectful scientist in mathematics, though not unequivocally (see the devastating review of one of his books by Almgren). Moreover he is a member of the Russian academy of Science. But in history he is definitely a pseudo-scientist with all characteristic features of pseudoscientific activity. And his activity in history was claimed pseudoscience by the same academy. Just as an example - he with his coauthor has published in Russia more than 60(!) books for wide audience on New Chronology. Today it is even not pseudoscience but commercial enterprise. It looks he decided now to earn in wider American market.

Gorodetsky's comments made me sensitive to the spam-like qualities of the article, with links to advertising sites (since removed)and a large image of Fomenko's books (since rescaled).

The main advocates of the New Chronology appear to be closely related to each other and to the publisher. They are:

The advocates of Fomenko's New Chronology have engaged in several actions

  • In July 2005 one of the anonymous editors User:83.195.170.42 posted a link[15] to a bookpage selling Fomenko's books on the New Chronology at the head of the list of external links, which I recently removed.[16]
  • Two years later in July 2007 Poggio Bracciolini added links to advertising videos (described below) directly below the link to the sale of Fomenko's books to the list of external links[17] and in the related article Anatoly Fomenko.[18] I recently removed both links.
  • Various advocates of the New Chronology have engaged in extensive defenses of the ideas of the New Chronology and attacks on its critics, peppered with occasional sarcastic comments on other editors.[19]

What we are seeing on Wikipedia may be related to the wider use of the internet to advertise Fomenko's books. On YouTube a French user named mithec has, since April 2006, posted over 100 short videos that are ads linking Fomenko's new chronology to a wide range of searchable topics, and providing price, web address, and toll free telephone number. A few of them have French titles despite their English language narration. These appear to be connected to the publisher since the name Mithec also appears in the web address of the publisher on the copyright page of History: Fiction or Science?, http://history.mithec.com; Mithec Distribution Serveces is the name of the US distributor; and Mithec is listed on Amazon.de as the publisher.

If the French editor(s) on Wikipedia are closely related to the French Mithec on YouTube, we have an unacceptable conflict of interest that needs to be monitored carefully. In any event, we have a long-term ongoing activity to use Wikipedia to sell Fomenko's books on the New Chronology; a caution to the users mentioned above about WikiSpam and Conflict of Interest seems appropriate. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 15:02, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Kepler

In our view Kepler's decision to base his causal explanation of planetary motion on a distance-velocity law, rather than on uniform circular motions of compounded spheres, marks a major shift from ancient to modern conceptions of science. Kepler's discussion of the distance-velocity law as a physical principle appears in his Astronomia Nova, Chapter 39, and his first attempt to quantify it for planetary motion appears in Chapter 40. We know of no one prior to Kepler who tried to apply this physical principle quantitatively to planetary motion. On several occasions Kepler claimed to have constructed an astronomical system 'without hypotheses' as Petrus Ramus (d. 1572) had advocated. Such models as eccentrics and epicycles were understood as 'hypotheses'. What Kepler meant was that he had begun with physical principles and had then derived a trajectory from it, rather than simply constructing new models. In other words, even before discovering the area law, Kepler had abandoned uniform circular motion as a physical principle, and Ptolemy's equant (as well as variations of it) then became a useful device to be kept or discarded depending on whether it could be harmonized with an underlying principle.[45]
The transition from models to trajectories also underlies Kepler's claim to have met Ramus's challenge. Kepler equates the models of previous astronomers with Ramus's 'hypotheses'. His own trajectory-based astronomy may therefore be seen as an 'astronomy without hypotheses'. Kepler's New Astronomy is indeed a new and radical departure from the tradition he inherited.[46]

[edit] Wilson in Cambridge History of Science

In 1700 planetary astronomy was scarcely yet touched by Newton's mathematical discoveries. The ellipticity of the planetary orbits (Kepler's first law) had come to be widely accepted, although it was never verified empirically with precision. Kepler's so-called second law -- the equable sweeping out of area by the Sun-planet vector -- was not so much an empirical law as a consequence of Keplerian dynamics; it had been generally rejected early because of mathematical difficulties it entailed. Substitute rules were proposed, but as Nicholas Mercator (ca. 1619-1687) pointed out in 1670, any viable substitute must closely approximate the Keplerian area rule. In the Principia, Newton presented the areal rule as logically equivalent to a central force, and the ellipse with Sun in the focus as derivable from an inverse-square central force.
Kepler's third law, unlike the first two, stood on its own feet as an empirical law: the squares of the planetary periods varied as the cubes of their mean solar distances. It, too, Newton now showed, was a consequence of the inverse-square law.[47]

[edit] Thoughts on Defining a University

[edit] A History of the University in Europe (1991)

The university is a European institution, indeed it is the European institution par excellence. There are various reasons for this assertion.
As a community of teachers and taught, accorded certain rights, such as administrative autonomy and the determination and realization of curricula (courses of study) and of the objectives of research as well as the award of publicly recognized degrees, it is a creation of medieval Eurpoe, which was the Europe of papal Christianity. this is shown in the first volume of our history.
It is, moreover, the only European institution which has preserved its fundamental patterns and its basic social role and functions over the course of its history; it has indeed strengthened and extended in these respects....
No other European institution has spread over the entire world in the way in which the traditional form of the European university has done. The degrees awarded by European universities – the bachelor's degree, the licentiate, the master's degree, and the doctorate – have been adopted in the most diverse societies throughout the world. The four medieval faculties of artes – variously called philosophy, letters, arts, arts and sciences and humanities – law, medicine, and theology have survived and have been supplemented by / numerous disciplines, particularly the social sciences and technological studies, but they remain none the less at the heart of universities throughout the world. Even the name of the universitas, which in the Middle Ages was applied to corporate bodies of the most diverse sorts and was accordingly applied to the corporate organization of teachers and students, has in the course of centuries been given a more particular focus: the university, as a universitas literarum, has since the eighteenth century been the intellectual institution which cultivates and transmits the entire corpus of methodically studied intellectual disciplines.[48]
The origin of the first universities is a very complex process,... Bologna or Paris may be called the oldest university depending on the weight which one attributes to one or another of the various elements which make up a university. If one regards the existence of a corporate body as the sole criterion, then Bologna is the oldest, but only by a slight margin. It was in Bologna that, towards the end of the twelfth century, the foreign students of law grouped themselves together as 'nations' and therewith developed a basic organizational form of the medieval European university. If one regards the association of teachers and students of various disciplines into a single corporate body as the decisive criterion, then the oldest university would be Paris, dating from 1208.[49]

[edit] Ferruolo, The Origins of the University (1985)

Three basic characteristics were thought to distinguish this new educational institution from other types of schools. First, it was an enduring and autonomous corporate body. As a formal association with a significant degree of legal autonomy and the right of self-governance, the corporation exercised control over its membership and could make and enforce its own statutes. In this sense, the university was like any other medieval guild or communia. In its specific function, the university was a community engaged in study, a studium.... The second basic characteristic of the university was an emphasis on the sharing and the transmission of knowledge. The professional identity of the university consisted in teaching or being taught. Third, in contrast to other schools, the university was not narrowly specialized in its constitution or in its goals. From early in its history, the university was intended to subsume the specialization of academic disciplines and division of faculties within a broader institutional structure defined by common educational goals and purposes....
Given how the university came to be defined, the decisive step in its development came when masters and scholars of various subjects and with diverse professional objectives first joined together to form a single guild or community.[50]

[edit] Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition (1997)

[edit] Imperial Culture: Byzantium

In the mid 1040s the higher schools of Byzantium were reformed by imperial order. Two subjects, law and philosophy, were taught. Both the curricula and the teaching staff were subject to imperial scrutiny. The law school had its own buildings, including a library, and offered free tuition, making law the chief career open to men of talent.... Philosophical education did require tuition fees and appears to have been less centrally organized, but it was equally under official control.[51]

[edit] Radiocarbon Precision

[edit] Calibration methods

The raw radiocarbon dates, in BP years, are therefore calibrated to give calendar dates. Standard calibration curves are available, based on comparison of radiocarbon dates of samples that can be independently dated by other methods such as examination of tree growth rings (dendrochronology), ice cores, deep ocean sediment cores, lake sediment varves, coral samples, and speleothems (cave deposits).

The calibration curves can vary significantly from a straight line, so comparison of uncalibrated radiocarbon dates (e.g., plotting them on a graph or subtracting dates to give elapsed time) is likely to give misleading results. There are also significant plateaus in the curves, such as the one from 11,000 to 10,000 radiocarbon years BP, which is believed to be associated with changing ocean circulation during the Younger Dryas period. Over the historical period from 0 to 10,000 years BP, the average width of the uncertainty of calibrated dates was found to be 335 years, although in well-behaved regions of the calibration curve the width decreased to about 113 years while in ill-behaved regions it increased to a maximum of 801 years. Significantly, in the ill-behaved regions of the calibration curve, increasing the precision of the measurements does not have a significant effect on increasing the accuracy of the dates.[52]

The 2004 version of the calibration curve extends back quite accurately to 26,000 years BP. Any errors in the calibration curve do not contribute more than ±16 years to the measurement error during the historic and late prehistoric periods (0 - 6,000 yrs BP) and no more than ±163 years over the entire 26,000 years of the curve, although its shape can reduce the accuracy as mentioned above.[53]

[edit] Fringe Archaeoastronomy

Archaeoastronomy owes something of its poor reputation among scholars to its occasional misuse to advance pseudo-historical accounts of the antiquity of certain cultures in certain regions. Since the Nineteenth Century numerous scholars have sought to use archaeoastronomical calculations to demonstrate the antiquity of Ancient Indian Vedic culture, computing the dates of astronomical observations ambiguously described in ancient poetry to as early as 4500 BCE.[citation needed] David Pingree, a historian of Indian astronomy, condemned "the scholars who perpetrate wild theories of prehistoric science and call themselves archaeoastronomers." [54]

A similar example was the attempt by Gallagher,[55] Pyle,[56] and Fell[57] to interpret inscriptions in West Virginia as a description in Celtic Ogham of the supposed winter solstitial marker at the site. The controversial translation was supposedly validated by a problematic archaeoastronomical indication in which the winter solstice Sun shined on an inscription of the Sun at the site. Subsequent interpretations criticized its cultural inappropriateness, as well as its linguistic and archeaoastronomical claims, to describe it as an example of "cult archaeology."[58]

[edit] Archaeoastronomy and its relations to other disciplines

"...[O]ne of the the most endearing characteristics of archaeoastronomy is its capacity to set academics in different disciplines at loggerheads with each other." [59]

Reflecting Archaeoastronomy's development as an interdisciplinary subject, research in the field is conducted by investigators trained in a wide range of disciplines. Authors of recent doctoral dissertations have described their work as concerned with the fields of archaeology and cultural anthropology; with various fields of history including the history of specific regions and periods, the history of science and the history of religion; and with the relation of astronomy to art, literature and religion. Only rarely did they describe their work as astronomical, and then only as a secondary category.[60]

Both practicing archaeoastronomers and observers of the discipline approach it from different perspectives. George Gummerman and Miranda Warburton view archaeoastronomy as part of an archaeology informed by cultural anthropology and aimed at understanding a "group’s conception of themselves in relation to the heavens', in a word, its cosmology.[61] Todd Bostwick argued that "archaeoastronomy is anthropology – the study of human behavior in the past and present."[62] Paul Bahn has described archaeoastronomy as an area of cognitive archaeology.[63] Other researchers relate archaeoastronomy to the history of science, either as it relates to a culture's observations of nature and the conceptual framework they devised to impose an order on those observations[64] or as it relates to the political motives which drove particular historical actors to deploy certain astronomical concepts or techniques.[65][66] Art historian Richard Poss took a more flexible approach, maintaining that the astronomical rock art of the US Southwest be read employing "the hermeneutic traditions of western art history and art criticism"[67] Astronomers, however, raise different questions, seeking to provide their students with identifiable precursors of their discipline, and are especially concerned with the important question of how to confirm that specific sites are, indeed, intentionally astronomical.[68]

The reactions of professional archaeologists to archaeoastronomy have been decidedly mixed. Some expressed incomprehension or even hostility, varying from a rejection by the archaeological mainstream of what they saw as an archaeoastronomical fringe to an incomprehension between the cultural focus of archaeologists and the quantitative focus of early archaeoastronomers.[69] Yet archaeologists have increasingly come to incorporate many of the insights from archaeoastronomy into archaeology textbooks[70] and, as mentioned above, some students wrote archaeology dissertations on archaeoastronomical topics.

Since archaeoastronomers disagree so widely on the characterisation of the discipline, they even dispute its name. All three major international scholarly associations relate archaeoastronomy to the study of culture, using the term Astronomy in Culture or a translation. Michael Hoskin sees an important part of the discipline as fact-collecting, rather than theorizing, and proposed to label this aspect of the discipline Archaeotopography.[71] Ruggles and Saunders proposed Cultural Astronomy as a unifying term for the various methods of studying folk astronomies.[72] Others have argued that astronomy is an inaccurate term, what are being studied are cosmologies and people who object to the use of logos have suggested adopting the Spanish cosmovisión.[73]

When debates polarise between techniques, the methods are often referred to by a colour code, based on the colours of the bindings of the two volumes from the first Oxford Conference, where the approaches were first distinguished.[74] Green (Old World) archaeoastronomers rely heavily on statistics and are sometimes accused of missing the cultural context of what is a social practice. Brown (New World) archaeoastronomers in contrast have abundant ethnographic and historical evidence and have been described as 'cavalier' on matters of measurement and statistical analysis.[75] Finding a way to integrate various approaches has been a subject of much discussion since the early 1990s.[76][77]

[edit] Further Reply

I have little to add to AlunSalt's comments, except perhaps to note as background that, as the title of Todd Bostwick's introductory essay to the Oxford 7 proceedings, ""Archaeoastronomy at the Gates of Orthodoxy," implies, Archaeoastronomy has always been trying to establish its credentials as a reputable academic discipline. That makes its practitioners sensitive to fringe elements within the field. The repeated instances where Breadh20 "rail[s] against academic archaeologists" (numerous examples are easily found by searching on "archaeolog") has intimations of the kind of anti-establishment fervor often associated with pseudoarchaeology.
On two specific examples, Breadh2o took exceptional offense when I introduced two examples of "Fringe archaeoastronomy" assuming they were directed at him. In fact, I chose one concerning Vedic Archaeoastronomy because I had seen discussions of the topic elsewhere on Wikipedia and felt it would contribute to those discussions by putting them in a larger context. The other one I chose for the simple reason that I had used the example before in a lecture and had the material conveniently at hand. Breadh2o took that as an opportunity to spring to the defense of Barry Fell against the archaeological establishment.
Breadh2o also asserted that AlunSalt elevated Heinrich Nissen to the pedestal of the first archaeoastronomer because Nissen's work on Greek Temples matched Salt's. In fact, a check of the edit history reveals that AlunSalt's original major revision of the article credited Lockyer as the first archaeoastronomer; only later in response to complaints did he replace Lockyer with Nissen. The accusation was patently false.
The general tenor of Breadh2o's intemperate comments and repeated edits without reliable sources comes close to disruptive editing, but I hope we do not have to ask for the sanctions mentioned there.

[edit] A nice quote

Subject: Re: Ancients Celts in Colorado?
From: Neil Alasdair McEwan <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: CELTIC-L - The Celtic Culture List.
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 1997 00:37:21 -0300

...

It's funny, you don't see Native Americans going about claiming to have put up Stonehenge, do you? We owe them at least the same forbearance in return.

slainte

Neil

[edit] A Place for trans-Atlantic diffusionism

Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact

[edit] Disruptive Editing on Archaeoastronomy

I am asking admin assistance in dealing with User:Breadh2o's edits since late December on Archaeoastronomy and its talk page, which have constituted a clear case of Disruptive Editing. Let me begin with a little background. The article was highly undocumented until April 2006, when User:Alunsalt performed a major rewrite. As a personal aside, that fine revision was one of the things that drew me to move from being an anonymous editor to editing under my own name. Among my other edits I continued to contribute to Archaeoastronomy, which developed to provide a solidly documented account of the growth, development and content of that complex interdisciplinary field.

Near the end of December, Breadh2o first appeared on Wikipedia (he occasionally edited under the IP 24.9.222.91).[20]. He opened his discussion on the Archaeoastronomy talk page with criticisms of the article's content, criticisms of the alleged suppression of archaeoastronomy by archaeologists, and ad hominem attacks on Alunsalt. Those of us who had been actively involved in the article first thought we would "give him time and space" to improve the article, but it soon became apparent that this was not leading to productive edits, so on 21 March Alunsalt posted an informal request for comments on the five Wikiprojects associated with the article to establish a consensus on POV. Shortly thereafter, on 24-25 March, Breadh2o posted a formal RfC for Science-related articles, questioning abuse by "two academics". As the discussion became increasingly personal, on 30 March Alunsalt tried to address the subject matter of the article by posting a notice on the No Original Research/Noticeboard. In order to get a wide range of comments, friendly notices of these actions were posted on the Talk pages of the five Wikiprojects associated with the article. Despite these friendly notices, only a few editors: User:Alunsalt, User:SteveMcCluskey, User:Breadh2o, and User:DougWeller have participated actively in the discussion. In addition, a few other people have commented, [21] [22] and with the exception of Breadh2o all have endorsed the position of Alunsalt and SteveMcCluskey on the editing of the article. Despite this apparent consensus, Breadh2o repeats the same arguments for his unorthodox thesis.

On 13 April admin User:Kathryn NicDhàna posted a notice on the Administrators' noticeboard / Incidents pointing out, among other things, Breadh2o's OR, POV pushing, and insistence on unencyclopedic tone and questionable sources. On Breadh2o's talk page, another admin, User:Blueboy96, cautioned him against personal attacks and attempting to use Wikipedia as a soapbox; about a week later Kathryn NicDhàna added a warning to the talk page about WP:CIVIL and WP:OWN. A few days afterwards, Breadh20 had dismissed Kathryn NicDhàna's warnings as a case of her choosing "to side with Alun Salt's and Steve McCluskey's [alleged] carte blanche to revert any edit I might attempt."

In the course of the discussion, Breadh2o identified himself as as Scott Monahan, who has "edited for over a decade" an off-wiki site to which he provided a link in the article (see footnote 3), who operates another website, OldNews, concerned with demonstrating that "Plains Indians had visitors from the far side of the Atlantic a thousand years before Columbus," and that he makes his living in internet, broadcast and cable video media, in which he advances these ideas.

Our substantive concern was that Breadh2o's edits were intent upon pushing his own point of view, by using the archaeoastronomy article as a vehicle to propagate the marginally related fringe hypothesis that Celtic people left inscriptions in the Colorado/Oklahoma region and which involves a hostile opposition to the archaeological establishment. Examples of this process included:

  • In his earliest posts on the talk page he made clear his open hostility to archaeology "which looks downward" and his perception that "the agenda of archaeologists or anthropologists" was being used "to summarily veto legitimate inquiry."
  • He presented an original research account of the origins of archaeoastronomy, which sought to place pyramidologists at the origins of the discipline and would conveniently remove archaeologists from any significant role in its establishment.
  • He repeatedly insisted[23][24][25][26][27]that critiques of the archaeological establishment for its refusal to accept diffusionist and other unorthodox ideas was an essential part of the article, placing it successively in two different places.[28][29]
  • He responded to a discussion under fringe archaeoastronomy of a site in West Virginia which was claimed to associate Ogham inscriptions with claimed archaeoastronomical indications, by adding a defense of diffusionism and an attack on the archaeological establishment for stifling dissent.
  • He associated archaeoastronomy with the unorthodox hypothesis that Celtic inscriptions describing astronomical phenomena provide evidence of early trans-Atlantic contact.
  • He engaged in repeated ad hominem attacks against editors who challenged his point of view, Alunsalt, SteveMcCluskey, User:Dougweller at the No Original Research/Noticeboard, against the archaeological community as a group,[30][31] and against the academic system in general.
  • He provided a link to his off-wiki site on which we find an extensive bibliography and long history of disputes going back to 1977 between advocates of Celtic influence in the Southwest and members of the archaeological establishment.
  • He refused to accept an attempt at consensus and in the course of his refusal did not assume good faith, accusing User:Bwwm, a new, but active, editor in articles on the History of Science, of being sockpuppet.

Breadh2o's edits have concentrated almost exclusively on archaeoastronomy; as of 7 April, 277 of his 301 edits have been on archaeoastronomy or its talk page, the other 24 have been on user pages and the No Original Research noticeboard. In contrast, only 104 of Alunsalt's 393 edits have been on archaeoastronomy or its talk page and only 120 of SteveMcCluskey's 4480 edits have been on the archaeoastronomy pages. His pattern of edits suggest that Breadh2o wishes to use Wikipedia as a vehicle to continue his long-running conflict with the academic establishment. This conflict is one of the identifying characteristics of Pseudoarchaeology and the hostile method he employs is characteristic of Disruptive editing. Given the decade-long history of this conflict, the lack of resolution at either the RfC or the No Original Research/Noticeboard, Breadh2o's continued insistence that his unorthodox POV, that "pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact" and claimed "Ogham archaeoastronomy in Colorado and Oklahoma" has something to do with archaeoastronomy, and his repeated expressions of hostility, I doubt that it can be resolved by any of Wikipedia's conflict resolution procedures.

Either Breadh2o should agree to voluntarily refrain from editing on archaeoastronomy and its talk page, or he should be permanently banned from the article and its talk page.

[edit] Calling for Closure

This discussion has been going on, in various venues, for quite some time and we have pretty well reached the point where the same thing is being said over and over again. It is time now to see if we can arrive at consensus. Thus far only a few editors: User:Alunsalt, User:SteveMcCluskey, User:Breadh2o, and User:DougWeller have participated actively in the discussion. In addition, a few other people have commented, [32] [33] [34] and with the exception of Breadh2o all have endorsed the position of Alunsalt and SteveMcCluskey on the editing of the article. Despite this apparent consensus, Breadh2o repeats the same arguments for his unorthodox thesis.

As I read the discussion, Breadh2o stands by himself against the other members of the Wikipdeia community who have expressed their position on these debates. It is time for us to move on and resume editing the article in a productive fashion in accordance with the consensus expressed here.


{{subst:ANI-notice|topic|reason=possible [[WP:DE|Disruptive Editing]] at [[Archaeoastronomy]] and its [[Talk:Archaeoastronomy|talk page]]}} --~~~~


I'm out of here and you are on notice. Breadh2o (talk) 21:34, 24 March 2008 (UTC) [35]
RfC Draft

[edit] AN/I Tabulation

There seems to be something close to a consensus here, but no one has volunteered to summarize the discussion and advise Bradh2o of the consensus. One reason for this reluctance may be the complexity of the discussion so far. Since I called this AN/I it would not be appropriate for me to draft the consensus, but as a step to clarify matters I am tabulating the opinions expressed so far regarding the requested ban. When editors made multiple proposals, I tabulated the most recent one.

Of course, this does not close discussion and there is always time to add further comments.

User / Date Ban Duration Comments
SteveMcCluskey 16:12, 21 April 2008 archastr & talk permanent alternate: voluntary suspension
Breadh2o 16:39, 21 April 2008 (UTC) none n/a
Alun Salt 19:19, 21 April 2008 (UTC) archastr & talk indefinite until shows productive edits
Haemo 22:10, 21 April 2008 (UTC) topic ban some time time to dilute personal conflict
ThuranX 03:54, 24 April 2008 (UTC) topic ban
EdJohnston 20:26, 24 April 2008 (UTC) article apparent consensus
ThuranX 11:40, 25 April 2008 (UTC) topic ban
llywrch 21:35, 25 April 2008 (UTC) article and talk page voluntary for some time
Kathryn NicDhàna 03:30, 26 April 2008 (UTC) topic/article uncertain perhaps indef petition good behavior; bad behavior block

[edit] AN/I Ban Archive

Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive408#Disruptive Editing on Archaeoastronomy

[edit] Topic Ban Sources

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[edit] Western Europe in the Middle Ages

After the significant contributions of Greek scholars to the development of astronomy, it entered a relatively static era in Western Europe from the Roman era through the Twelfth century. This lack of progress has led some astronomers to assert that nothing happened in Western European astronomy during the Middle Ages.[78] Recent investigations, however, have revealed a more complex picture of the study and teaching of astronomy in the period from the Fourth to the Sixteenth centuries.[79]

Western Europe entered the Middle Ages with great difficulties that affected the continent's intellectual production. The advanced astronomical treatises of classical antiquity were written in Greek, and with the decline of knowledge of that language, only simplified summaries and practical texts were available for study. The most influential writers to pass on this ancient tradition were Macrobius, Pliny, Martianus Capella, and Calcidius.[80] In the Sixth Century Bishop Gregory of Tours noted that he had learned his astronomy from reading Martianus Capella, and went on to employ this rudimentary astronomy to describe a method by which monks could determine the time of prayer at night by watching the stars.[81]

In the Seventh Century the English monk Bede of Jarrow published an influential text, On the Reckoning of Time, providing churchmen with the practical astronomical knowledge needed to compute the proper date of Easter using a procedure called computus. This text remained an important element of the education of Clergy from the Seventh Century until well after the rise of the Universities in the Twelfth Century.[82]

The range of surviving ancient Roman writings on astronomy and the teachings of Bede and his followers began to be studied in earnest during the revival of learning sponsored by the emperor Charlemagne.[83] By the Ninth Century rudimentary techniques for calculating the position of the planets were circulating in Western Europe; medieval scholars recognized their technical flaws, but texts describing these techniques continued to be copied, reflecting an interest in the motions of the planets and in their astrological significance.[84]

Building on this astronomical background, in the Tenth Century European scholars such as Gerbert of Aurillac began to travel to the Spain and Sicily to seek out learning which they had heard existed in the Arabic speaking world. Their they first encountered various practical astronomical techniques concerning the calendar and timekeeping, most notably those dealing with the astrolabe. Soon scholars such as Hermann of Reichenau were writing texts in Latin on the uses and construction of the astrolabe and others, such as Walcher of Malvern, were using the astrolabe to observe the time of eclipses in order to test the validity of computistical tables.[85]

By the Twelfth century, scholars were traveling to Spain and Sicily to seek out more advanced astronomical and astrological texts, which they translated from Arabic and Greek to further enrich the astronomical knowledge of Western Europe. The arrival of these new texts coincided with the rise of the universities in medieval Europe, in which they soon found a home.[86] Reflecting the introduction of astronomy into the universities, John of Sacrobosco wrote a series of influential introductory astronomy textbooks: the Sphere, a Computus, a text on the Quadrant, and another on Calculation.[87]

In the 14th century, Nicole Oresme, later bishop of Liseux, showed that neither the scriptural texts nor the physical arguments advanced against the movement of the Earth were demonstrative and adduced the argument of simplicity for the theory that the earth moves, and not the heavens. However, he concluded "everyone maintains, and I think myself, that the heavens do move and not the earth: For God hath established the world which shall not be moved."[88] In the 15th century, cardinal Nicholas of Cusa suggested in some of his scientific writings that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and that each star is itself a distant sun. He was not, however, describing a scientifically verifiable theory of the universe.

[edit] Islamic astronomy

Main article: Islamic astronomy

The Arabic world under Islam had become highly cultured, and many important works of knowledge from ancient Greece were translated into Arabic, used and stored in libraries throughout the area. The late 9th century Persian astronomer al-Farghani wrote extensively on the motion of celestial bodies. His work was translated into Latin in the 12th century.

In the late 10th century, a huge observatory was built near Tehran, Iran, by the astronomer al-Khujandi who observed a series of meridian transits of the Sun, which allowed him to calculate the obliquity of the ecliptic, also known as the tilt of the Earth's axis relative to the Sun. In Persia, Omar Khayyám compiled many tables and performed a reformation of the calendar that was more accurate than the Julian and came close to the Gregorian. An amazing feat was his calculation of the year to be 365.24219858156 days long, which is accurate to the 6th decimal place.

Muslim advances in astronomy included the construction of the first observatory in Baghdad during the reign of Caliph al-Ma'mun,[89] the collection and correction of previous astronomical data, resolving significant problems in the Ptolemaic model, the development of universal astrolabes,[90] the invention of numerous other astronomical instruments, the beginning of astrophysics and celestial mechanics after Ja'far Muhammad ibn Mūsā ibn Shākir discovered that the heavenly bodies and celestial spheres were subject to the same physical laws as Earth,[91] the first elaborate experiments related to astronomical phenomena and the first semantic distinction between astronomy and astrology by Abū al-Rayhān al-Bīrūnī,[92] the use of exacting empirical observations and experimental techniques,[93] the separation of natural philosophy from astronomy by Ibn al-Haytham,[94] the first non-Ptolemaic models by Ibn al-Haytham and Mo'ayyeduddin Urdi, and the first empirical observational evidence of the Earth's rotation by Nasīr al-Dīn al-Tūsī and Ali al-Qushji.[95]

Several Muslim astronomers also considered the possibility of the Earth's rotation on its axis and perhaps a heliocentric solar system.[96][97] It is known that the Copernican heliocentric model in Nicolaus Copernicus' De revolutionibus was adapted from the geocentric model of Ibn al-Shatir and the Maragha school (including the Tusi-couple) in a heliocentric context,[98] and that his arguments for the Earth's rotation were similar to those of Nasīr al-Dīn al-Tūsī and Ali al-Qushji.[95] Some have referred to the achievements of the Maragha school as a "Maragha Revolution", "Maragha School Revolution", or "Scientific Revolution before the Renaissance".[99]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Science and Civilization in Islam.
  2. ^ Bernard R. Goldstein, "Saving the Phenomena: The Background to Ptolemy's Planetary Theory", Journal for the History of Astronomy, 28 (1997): 1-12
  3. ^ S. C. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr. 1998, pp. 20-21.
  4. ^ Charles Homer Haskins, Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1967, reprint of the Camb ridge, Mass., 1927 edition
  5. ^ Dennis Duke, Ptolemy's Cosmology
  6. ^ Bernard R. Goldstein, ed., The Arabic Version of Ptolemy's Planetary Hypotheses, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 57, 4 (1967), pp. 9-12.
  7. ^ Khwarizm, Foundation for Science Technology and Civilisation.
  8. ^ Noel Swerdlow, "Review: A Lost Monument of Indian Astronomy" [review of B. L. van der Waerden, Das heliozentrische System in der griechischen, persischen und indischen Astronomie], Isis, 64, No. 2. (Jun., 1973), pp. 239-243.
  9. ^ David Pingree, "The Greek Influence on Early Islamic Mathematical Astronomy", Journal of the American Oriental Society, 93, no. 1. (Jan. - Mar., 1973), pp. 32-43 (p. 32, n. 1).
  10. ^ Dennis Duke, "The Equant in India: The Mathematical Basis of Ancient Indian Planetary Models." Archive for History of Exact Sciences 59 (2005): 563–576, n. 4[1].
  11. ^ Y. Tzvi Langerman, Ibn al Haytham's On the Configuration of the World, Harvard Dissertations in the History of Science, New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990, pp. 61-3.
  12. ^ Asghar Qadir, Relativity: An Introduction to the Special Theory, Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 1989, pp. 5-6, 10
  13. ^ A. I. Sabra, "Ibn al-Haytham," Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 6, pp. 189-210, New York: Charles Scribners, 1972, p. 198.
  14. ^ A. I. Sabra, "Configuring the Universe: Aporetic, Problem Solving, and Kinematic Modeling as Themes of Arabic Astronomy," Perspectives on Science 6.3 (1998): 288-330
  15. ^ George Saliba (1999). Whose Science is Arabic Science in Renaissance Europe?, section 2
  16. ^ Willy Hartner, "The Mercury Horoscope of Marcantonio Midhiel of Venice", Vistas in Astronomy, 1 (1955): 84-138.
  17. ^ Asghar Qadir, Relativity: An Introduction to the Special Theory, Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 1989, pp. 6, 11
  18. ^ E. J. Aiton, "Peurbach's Theoricae Novae Planetarum: A Translation with Commentary", Osiris, 2nd Series, Vol. 3. (1987), pp. 4-43, p. 26
  19. ^ Willy Hartner, "The Mercury Horoscope of Marcantonio Midhiel of Venice", Vistas in Astronomy, 1 (1955): 84-138, at pp. 123-4
  20. ^ Richard Covington, "Rediscovering Arabic Science," Saudi Aramco World, May/June 2007
  21. ^ E. S. Kennedy, "al-Bīrunī", Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 2, pp. 147-158, New York: Charles Scribners, 1970.
  22. ^ Rafik Berjak and Muzaffar Iqbal, ed., "Ibn Sina—Al-Biruni correspondence", Islam & Science, Summer, 2004 (based on the critical edition of Nasr, Seyyed Hossein and Mohaghegh, Mehdi, ed. (1995), Al-As'ilah wa'l-Ajwibah (Questions and Answers), Kuala Lumpur: International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization, 1995).
  23. ^ Heilbron, "Thomas Samuel Kuhn", p. 507
  24. ^ Introduction to article on Fomenko in the Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences
  25. ^ H. G. van Bueren, "Mathematics and Logic", Review of A. T. Fomenko, Empirico-Statistical Analysis of Narrative Materials and its Applications to Historical Dating, 2 vols, (Dordrecht: Kluwer) 1994, in Annals of Science, 53 (1996): 206-207. (Van Beuren is Professor Emeritus of astronomy, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands)
  26. ^ Dmitrii Sidorov, "Post-Imperial Third Romes: Resurrections of a Russian Orthodox Geopolitical Metaphor", Geopolitics, 11 (2006):317–347, at pp. 336-7 .
  27. ^ Konstantin Sheiko, "Lomonosov's Bastards: Anatolii Fomenko, Pseudo-History, and Russia's Search for a Post-Communist Identity," Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia, 2004.
  28. ^ James H. Billington, Russia in Search of Itself, (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press / Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004, pp. 82-4.
  29. ^ Marlène Laruelle, Review of James H. Billington, Russia in search of itself, Washington, D.C., Woodrow Wilson Center Press / Baltimore — London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004; Cahiers du Monde Russe, 45/3-4, pp. 736-7.
  30. ^ V. L. Yanin, "Ziiaiushchie vysoty' akademika Fomenko" http://www.hist.msu.ru/Science/DISKUS/FOMENKO/janin.htm; translated in James H. Billington, Russia in Search of Itself, (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press / Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004, pp. 83-4.
  31. ^ Michael L. Gorodetsky on History of Astronomy Discussion Group (HASTRO-L), Thu, 6 Dec 2007 12:14:53 -0500
  32. ^ Michael L. Gorodetsky on History of Astronomy Discussion Group (HASTRO-L), Mon, 21 Mar 2005 16:36:41 +0300
  33. ^ R. H. Gent on History of Astronomy Discussion Group (HASTRO-L), Mon, 21 Mar 2005 13:02:59 +0100
  34. ^ Ari Belenkiy on History of Astronomy Discussion Group (HASTRO-L), Sun, 2 Mar 2003 23:14:42 +0200
  35. ^ F. R. Stephenson, "Historical eclipses and Earth's rotation", Astronomy & Geophysics, 44, 2 (2003): 22-27.
  36. ^ Alexander A Gurshtein on History of Astronomy Discussion Group (HASTRO-L), Thu, 18 Feb 1999 14:13:40 -0700
  37. ^ Yu. N. Efremov, Астрономия и синдром “новой хронологии” (Astronomy and the Syndrome of "New Chronology").
  38. ^ A. K. Dambis and Yu. N. Efremov, "Dating Ptolemy's Star Catalogue through Proper Motions: The Hipparchan Epoch", Journal for the History of Astronomy, 31 (2000): 115-134;see especially note 17 (p. 134).
  39. ^ http://www.newchrono.net/fomenko/starwars.htm Astronomy against "New Chronology" (in Russian)].
  40. ^ Dennis Rawlins, "Recovering Hipparchos’ Last Lost Lustrous Star", DIO 4.3 (1994): 119. Rawlins provides evidence that Ptolemy's catalog was in fact written some three centuries earlier by Hipparchus.
  41. ^ Asger Aaboe, Episodes from the Early History of Astronomy, (New York: Springer, 2001) pp. 39-40 ISBN 0-387-95136-9.
  42. ^ F. R. Stephenson and J. M. Steele, "Astronomical Dating of Babylonian Texts Describing the Total Solar Eclipse of S.E. 175", Journal for the History of Astronomy, 37 (2006): 55-69. This study showed that either the details of the description of the solar eclipse or of a set of conjunctions of the slow planets Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars were sufficient to equate S.E. 175 with 137/6 BCE. Additional details provided further confirmation of this dating.
  43. ^ F. Richard Stephenson, "Historical Eclipses and Earth's Rotation", Astronomy & Geophysics, 44 (2003): 2.22-2.27.
  44. ^ Fred Espenak, Eclipse Predictions and Earth's Rotation
  45. ^ Peter Barker and Bernard R. Goldstein, "Distance and Velocity in Kepler's Astronomy", Annals of Science, 51 (1994): 59-73, at p. 60.
  46. ^ Peter Barker and Bernard R. Goldstein, "Distance and Velocity in Kepler's Astronomy", Annals of Science, 51 (1994): 59-73, at p. 73.
  47. ^ Curtis Wilson, "Astronomy and Cosmology," pp. 328-353 in Roy Porter, ed., The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 4, Eighteenth-Century Science, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), at p. 329.
  48. ^ Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, ed., Walter Rüegg, General Editor, A History of the University in Europe, vol. 1, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1991) pp. xix-xx ISBN 0-521-54113-1.
  49. ^ Walter Rüegg, "Themes", pp. 3-34 in Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, ed., Walter Rüegg, General Editor, A History of the University in Europe, vol. 1, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1991) p. 6 ISBN 0-521-54113-1.
  50. ^ Stephen C. Ferruolo, The Origins of the University: The Schools of Paris and Their Critics, 1100-1215, (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1985) pp. 4-5 ISBN 0-8047-1266-2
  51. ^ Marcia Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400-1400, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) p. 127 ISBN 0-300-07852-8
  52. ^ These results were obtained from a Monte Carlo analysis using simulated measurements of varying precision using the 1993 version of the calibration curve. The width of the uncertainty represents a 2σ uncertainty (that is, a likelihood of 95% that the date appears between these limits. T. R. Niklaus, G. Bonani, M. Sutr, and W. Wölfli, "Systematic investigation of uncertainties in radiocarbon dating due to fluctuations in the calibration curve." Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B 92 (1994): 194-200.
  53. ^ Paula J. Reimer et al., "INTCAL04 Terrestrial Radiocarbon Age Calibration, 0–26 Cal Kyr BP", Radiocarbon 46 (2004): 1029-1058; data online at http://www.radiocarbon.org/IntCal04%20files/intcal04.14c .
  54. ^ David Pingree, "Hellenophilia versus the History of Science," Isis, 83(1982):554-563, esp. p. 556; reprinted in Michael H. Shank, ed., The Scientific Enterprise in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 2000), pp.30-39.
  55. ^ Ida Jane Gallagher, "Light Dawns on West Virginia History", Wonderful West Virginia, 47(1983): 7-11.
  56. ^ Robert L. Pyle, "A Message from the Past", Wonderful West Virginia, 47(1983):3-6.
  57. ^ Barry Fell, "Christian Messages in Old Irish Script Deciphered from Rock Carvings in W. Va.", Wonderful West Virginia, 47(1983):12-19.
  58. ^ W. Hunter Lesser, "Cult Archaeology Strikes Again: A Case for Pre-Columbian Irishmen in the Mountain State?", West Virginia Archeologist, 35(1983): 48-52.
  59. ^ C.L.N. Ruggles. 'Ancient Astronomies - Ancient Worlds', Archaeoastronomy (25): Supplement to the Journal for the History of Astronomy (31), 2000, S86
  60. ^ Stephen C. McCluskey, "The Study of Astronomies in Cultures as Reflected in Dissertations and Theses", Archaeoastronomy, 16(2004): 20-25.
  61. ^ George J. Gummerman and Miranda Warburton, "The Universe in Cultural Context: An Essay", pp. 15-24 in John W. Fountain and Rolf M. Sinclair, ed., Current Studies in Archaeoastronomy: Conversations Across Time and Space, (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005), pp. 15-16 ISBN 0-89089-771-9.
  62. ^ Todd W. Bostwick, "Archaeoastronomy at the Gates of Orthodoxy...", pp. 1-10 in Todd Bostwick and Bryan Bates, ed. Viewing the Sky Through Past and Present Cultures; Selected Papers from the Oxford VII International Conference on Archaeoastronomy, , Pueblo Grande Museum Anthropological Papers No. 15, City of Phoenix, 2006, p. 3. ISBN 1-882572-38-6
  63. ^ P. Bahn. Archaeology: A Very Short introduction, OUP, 1996, 49
  64. ^ Stephen McCluskey, "Etnoscienza dei Pueblo," pp. 1002-1009 in Storia della Scienza, vol. 2, Cina, India, Americhe, Sec. 3, "Le Civilta Precolombiane," (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2001).
  65. ^ Johanna Broda, "Zenith Observations and the Conceptualization of Geographical Latitude in Ancient Mesoamerica: A Historical Interdisciplinary Approach", pp. 183-212 in in Todd Bostwick and Bryan Bates, ed. Viewing the Sky Through Past and Present Cultures; Selected Papers from the Oxford VII International Conference on Archaeoastronomy, Pueblo Grande Museum Anthropological Papers No. 15, City of Phoenix, 2006. ISBN 1-882572-38-6
  66. ^ Gerardo Aldana, The Apotheosis of Janaab' Pakal: Science, History, and Religion at Classic Maya Palenque," (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007), pp. 14-15. ISBN 0-87081-855-X
  67. ^ Richard L. Poss, "Interpreting Rock Art: European and Anasazi Representations of Spirituality", pp. 81-98 in John W. Fountain and Rolf M. Sinclair, ed., Current Studies in Archaeoastronomy: Conversations Across Time and Space, (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005), p. 97. ISBN 0-89089-771-9
  68. ^ Bradley E. Schaefer, "Case Studies of the Three Most Famous Claimed Archaeoastronomical Alignments in America", pp. 27-56 in Todd Bostwick and Bryan Bates, ed. Viewing the Sky Through Past and Present Cultures; Selected Papers from the Oxford VII International Conference on Archaeoastronomy, Pueblo Grande Museum Anthropological Papers No. 15, City of Phoenix, 2006, p. 30. ISBN 1-882572-38-6
  69. ^ C. L. N. Ruggles, Astronomy in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 3-9.
  70. ^ Victor B. Fisher, "Ignoring Archaeoastronomy: A Dying Tradition in American Archaeology", pp. 103-112 in Todd Bostwick and Bryan Bates, ed. Viewing the Sky Through Past and Present Cultures; Selected Papers from the Oxford VII International Conference on Archaeoastronomy, Pueblo Grande Museum Anthropological Papers No. 15, City of Phoenix, 2006, p. 30. ISBN 1-882572-38-6
  71. ^ Michael Hoskin, Tombs, Temples, and Their Orientations: A New Perspective on Mediterranean Prehistory, (Bognar Regis, UK: Ocarina Books, 2001), pp. 13-14. ISBN O-9540867-1-6
  72. ^ C.L.N. Ruggles & N.J. Saunders. 'The Study of Cultural Astronomy',Astronomies and Cultures eds. Clive L.N. Ruggles and Nicholas J. Saunders, University Press of Colorado, 1993. 1-31
  73. ^ C.L.N. Ruggles, Ancient Astronomy, ABC-Clio, 2005, 115-117, ISBN 1851094776
  74. ^ A.F. Aveni. 'Archaeoastronomy: Past, Present and Future', Sky and Telescope 72 (1986): 456
  75. ^ M.A. Hoskin. Tombs, Temples and Their Orientations, Ocarina Books, 2001. 2. ISBN 0-9540867-1-6
  76. ^ C.L.N. Ruggles & N.J. Saunders. 'The Study of Cultural Astronomy',Astronomies and Cultures eds. Clive L.N. Ruggles and Nicholas J. Saunders, University Press of Colorado, 1993. 1-31
  77. ^ S. Iwanisewzski. 'Time and space in social systems - further issues for theoretical archaeoastronomy', Astronomy, Cosmology and Landscape: Proceedings of the SEAC 98 Meeting, Dublin, Ireland, eds Clive Ruggles, Frank Prendergast and Tom Ray. Ocarina Books, 2001. 1-7
  78. ^ Henry Smith Williams, The Great Astronomers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1930), pp. 99-102 describes "the record of astronomical progress" from the Council of Nicea (325 AD) to the time of Copernicus (1543 AD) on four blank pages.
  79. ^ Stephen C. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) ISBN 0-521-77852-2.
  80. ^ Bruce S. Eastwood, Ordering the Heavens: Roman Astronomy and Cosmology in the Carolingian Renaissance, (Leiden: Brill, 2007) ISBN 979-90-04-16186-3.
  81. ^ Stephen C. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 101-110 ISBN 0-521-77852-2.
  82. ^ Faith Wallis, ed. and trans., Bede: The Reckoning of Time, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004), pp. xviii-xxxiv ISBN 0-85323-693-3
  83. ^ Stephen C. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 131-164 ISBN 0-521-77852-2.
  84. ^ David Juste, "Neither Observation nor Astronomical Tables: An Alternative Way of Computing the Planetary Longitudes in the Early Western Middle Ages," pp. 181-222 in Charles Burnett, Jan P. Hogendijk, Kim Plofker, and Michio Yano, Studies in the Exact Sciences in Honour of David Pingree, (Leiden: Brill, 2004)
  85. ^ Stephen C. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 171-187 ISBN 0-521-77852-2.
  86. ^ Stephen C. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 188-192 ISBN 0-521-77852-2.
  87. ^ Olaf Pedersen, "In Quest of Sacrobosco", Journal for the History of Astronomy, 16(1985): 175-221
  88. ^ Nicole Oresme, Le Livre du ciel et du monde, xxv, ed. A. D. Menut and A. J. Denomy, trans. A. D. Menut, (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Pr., 1968), quotation at pp. 536-7.
  89. ^ Nas, Peter J (1993). Urban Symbolism. Brill Academic Publishers, 350. ISBN 9-0040-9855-0. 
  90. ^ Krebs, Robert E. (2004). Groundbreaking Scientific Experiments, Inventions, and Discoveries of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Greenwood Press, 196. ISBN 0-3133-2433-6. 
  91. ^ George Saliba (1994). "Early Arabic Critique of Ptolemaic Cosmology: A Ninth-Century Text on the Motion of the Celestial Spheres", Journal for the History of Astronomy 25, p. 115-141 [116].
  92. ^ S. Pines (September 1964). "The Semantic Distinction between the Terms Astronomy and Astrology according to al-Biruni", Isis 55 (3), p. 343-349.
  93. ^ Toby Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science, p. 326. Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521529948.
  94. ^ Roshdi Rashed (2007). "The Celestial Kinematics of Ibn al-Haytham", Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 17, p. 7-55. Cambridge University Press.
  95. ^ a b F. Jamil Ragep (2001), "Tusi and Copernicus: The Earth's Motion in Context", Science in Context 14 (1-2), p. 145–163. Cambridge University Press.
  96. ^ Seyyed Hossein Nasr (1964), An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines, (Cambridge: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press), p. 135-136
  97. ^ Dr. Kasem Ajram (1992). Miracle of Islamic Science, Appendix B. Knowledge House Publishers. ISBN 0911119434.
  98. ^ George Saliba (1999). Whose Science is Arabic Science in Renaissance Europe? Columbia University.
    The relationship between Copernicus and the Maragha school is detailed in Toby Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science, Cambridge University Press.
  99. ^ George Saliba (1994), A History of Arabic Astronomy: Planetary Theories During the Golden Age of Islam, p. 245, 250, 256-257. New York University Press, ISBN 0814780237.

[edit] Miscellaneous Labels

Scientia donum dei est, unde vendi non potest.
Knowledge is a gift of God, therefore it cannot be sold.
Medieval aphorism.
It is the nature of idea to be communicated:
written, spoken, done.
The idea is like grass. It craves light,
likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding,
grows better for being stepped on.
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
Copyright protection under this title is not available
for any work of the United States Government.
U.S. Code, Title 17, Chap. 1, Sec. 105.
If we would begin to worry about the desolate backwaters
of Wikipedia's 1,5 Mega-articles, we'd never sleep again.
Be content to fight entropy on those articles on your watchlist.
dab 20:47, 3 December 2006 (UTC).
Wikipedia is the most extensive work of
paraphrasing the world has ever seen ...
but, in the end,... it adds not a jot
to the sum total of human knowledge..
Nicholas Carr blog post, 26 April 2007.
The most fallacious thing in the world
is to organise our knowledge upon an assumption
without relising what we are doing.
Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, p. 23.
Historians are to nationalism
what poppy-growers ... are to heroin-addicts:
we supply the essential raw material for the market.
E. J. Hobsbawm, "Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today".
Let everyone in the parish turn his back on him;
have no communication with him, have no dealings with him.
You need never say an unkind word to him; but never say anything at all to him.
If you must meet him in fair, walk away from him silently.
Do him no violence, but have no dealings with him.
Let every man's door be closed against him; and make him feel himself
a stranger and a castaway in his own neighbourhood."
John Dillon, M.P. — Speech to the Land League 1881