5 ms·
The "yourself" part of the title is actually a lie, you need a bunch of trusted people spread over a large geographical area (as large as the moon itself) to ma
by Thomashuet 5y ago
The "yourself" part of the title is actually a lie, you need a bunch of trusted people spread over a large geographical area (as large as the moon itself) to make observations for you. When reading the title I understood the "yourself" as without having to trust anyone else and I was very much disappointed by the suggested method.
- metacritic12 5y agoAristarchus's method [1] is actually something you can do yourself, and indeed was the historical way the size of the moon was discovered. I personally found that far more satisfying as you're relying on far less complexity to prove the point. [1] https://www.eg.bucknell.edu/physics/astronomy/astr101/specials/aristarchus.html#:~:text=The%20jump%20Aristarchus%20made%20from,measure%20both%20for%20the%20Moon https://www.eg.bucknell.edu/physics/astronomy/astr101/specia....
- scatters 5y agoRight, and I think that explains why the Greeks didn't use it; the world accessible to their civilisation extended maybe 2000 km north to south, from the shores of the Black Sea to Nubia. Maybe the Romans could have managed it, but only just (you try making astronomical observations on demand in northern England). Indeed, were there any premodern civilisations with a sufficient span of latitudes to perform this method? If there were, they'd have also been able to measure the distance to the Sun using the method of observing transits of Venus.
- daniel-cussen 5y agoOlmecs and Mayans. They did all kinds of things with nothing, like just nothing. They tried to publish their works but the a Spanish bishop burned every codex. He tracked every codex down, too, presumably by interrogations. Four survived. We're currently in the Mayan Dark Ages in that sense, there's stuff they had we still can't do. They were a millennium ahead of Eurasian math, finding zero in 200BC versus 800AD.
- jacobr1 5y ago> there's stuff they had we still can't do I'm skeptical, how would we know that? Are there vague inscriptions of things like Fermat's margin notes that imply missing knowledge?
- labster 5y agoWe still don’t have vertical basketball hoops. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Ballgame https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Ballgame
- daniel-cussen 5y agoThose were the real ballers of the new world. That would have made great television!
- daniel-cussen 5y agoNo, it's not that. So a lot of mathematical research is serial, so an extra millennium has worth that multitudes of mathematicians (in the last 150 years, for instance) lack. It's also very hierarchical, and Maya were the civilization that most put emphasis on mathematics. Although yes, there's practically nothing left, the length of year figure they had, very little else.
- adolph 5y agoA timekeeping mechanism of sufficient quality shared among the locations is also necessary right? Also the civilization would need to have their latitudinal territory in alignment with the specific time of the transit. In 1663 Scottish mathematician James Gregory had suggested in his Optica Promota that observations of a transit of the planet Mercury, at widely spaced points on the surface of the Earth, could be used to calculate the solar parallax and hence the astronomical unit using triangulation. Aware of this, a young Edmond Halley made observations of such a transit on 28 October O.S. 1677 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus#1761_and_1769 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus#1761_and_1769