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Register a new userAstronomical arguments in Newtons Chronology
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Yael Naze
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In his Chronology, Newton uses astronomical evidence to support its extreme rejuvenation of ancient times. These elements, having a scientific varnish, provide some credibility to the work. They have been fiercely debated for a century, with a gradual undermining of Newtons assumptions. However, this has not dented the prestige of the English scientist. ----- Dans sa Chronologie, Newton utilise des preuves astronomiques pour appuyer son rajeunissement extreme des epoques anciennes. Ces elements, au vernis scientifique, donnent une credibilite certaine a lensemble. Ils ont donc ete aprement discutes, les debats sapant petit a petit les hypotheses du savant anglais pour finalement porter un coup mortel a lensemble. Cela na toutefois pas entame le prestige du savant anglais.
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Eirene Laskarina, empress of John III Batatzes of the exiled Byzantine Empire of Nicaea (1204--1261 CE), was an important Eastern Mediterranean figure in the first half of the thirteenth century. We reassess the date of Eirenes death, which has been variously dated between late 1239 and 1241, with the understanding that narrowing the range in which this event occurred contributes much to understanding the political situation in the area around 1240. George Akropolites, a famous official of the Empire, gives an account that connects Eirenes death to a comet that appeared six months earlier, thus pointing to two comet candidates that were visible from the Eastern Mediterranean between 1239 and 1241, one recorded on 3 June 1239 and the other on 31 January 1240. Recent historians prefer the former, based on historical circumstances and without a critical assessment of the comet records. We revisit the historical records and reveal that the 3 June 1239 candidate was not a comet. On the other hand, the other candidate, sighted on 31 January 1240, was a comet, as supported by multiple historical records in multiple regions, and is also a good fit with Akropolitess narrative. Therefore, we conclude that Eirene died six months after the comet that was seen on 31 January 1240, which places her death in the summer of 1240. Given that the date of her death is crucial for determining some other contemporary events across the Eastern Mediterranean, our results offer a solid basis for further research on the thirteenth-century Eastern Mediterranean.
In February 1700, Isaac Newton needed a precise tropical year to design a new universal calendar that would supersede the Gregorian one. However, 17th-Century astronomers were uncertain of the long-term variation in the inclination of the Earths axis and were suspicious of Ptolemys equinox observations. As a result, they produced a wide range of tropical years. Facing this problem, Newton attempted to compute the length of the year on his own, using the ancient equinox observations reported by a famous Greek astronomer Hipparchus of Rhodes, ten in number. Though Newton had a very thin sample of data, he obtained a tropical year only a few seconds longer than the correct length. The reason lies in Newtons application of a technique similar to modern regression analysis. Newton wrote down the first of the two so-called normal equations known from the ordinary least-squares (OLS) method. In that procedure, Newton seems to have been the first to employ the mean (average) value of the data set, while the other leading astronomers of the era (Tycho Brahe, Galileo, and Kepler) used the median. Fifty years after Newton, in 1750, Newtons method was rediscovered and enhanced by Tobias Mayer. Remarkably, the same regression method served with distinction in the late 1920s when the founding fathers of modern cosmology, Georges Lemaitre (1927), Edwin Hubble (1929), and Willem de Sitter (1930), employed it to derive the Hubble constant.
A general sketch on how the problem of space dimensionality depends on anthropic arguments is presented. Several examples of how life has been used to constraint space dimensionality (and vice-versa) are reviewed. In particular, the influences of three-dimensionality in the solar system stability and the origin of life on Earth are discussed. New constraints on space dimensionality and on its invariance in very large spatial and temporal scales are also stressed.
Some scientists take themselves and their work very seriously. However, there are plenty of cases of humour being combined with science. Here I review some examples from the broad fields of physics and astronomy, particularly focusing on practical jokes and paper parodies. This is a mostly serious overview of a non-serious subject, but Id like to claim that there is in fact some connection between humour and creativity in the physical sciences.
A general sketch of how the problem of space dimensionality depends on Anthropic arguments is presented. A new argument in favor of a stable scenario for space dimensionality for a time scale longer than that required for the existence of human or another kind of highly-evolved life on Earth is proposed.
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