Feb. 01, 2016 Ancient Babylonians tracked astronomical movements with great sophistication 1,400 earlier T

Feb. 01, 2016

Ancient Babylonians tracked astronomical movements with great sophistication 1,400 earlier

اقتباس :: The tablet is proof that Babylonians had the same general knowledge as Europeans who employed similar devices fifteen centuries later. Photo courtesy Trustees of the British Museum/Mathieu Ossendrijver
LOS ANGELES, CA: The tablet is proof that Babylonians had the same general knowledge as Europeans who employed similar devices fifteen centuries later.
"That is a truly astonishing find," Mathieu Ossendrijver, a professor at Humboldt University in Berlin says. The tablet establishes the fact that Babylonians knew the area under the curve of a graph of velocity against time represented distance traveled.

Photo courtesy Trustees of the British Museum/Mathieu Ossendrijver; NASA.
"It's a figure that describes a graph of velocity against time," he said. "That is a highly modern concept."

"I think it's quite a remarkable discovery," Alexander Jones, a professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University says. "It's really quite clear from the text."

In what today is Iraq, Ancient Babylon, south of Baghdad, was at one time a thriving metropolis. Babylon enjoyed highly advanced science and mathematics for an ancient society. Babylonian mathematicians were able to calculate the area of a trapezoid, and divide a trapezoid into two smaller trapezoids of equal area.

On some surviving tablets, there appears to be some trapezoid calculations related to astronomical observations. Babylonians for the most part used their mathematical skills for workaday solutions, such as sizing up an area of land.

It was only until the Fifties of the 20th century that Austrian-American mathematician and science historian, Otto E. Neugebauer, described two of them. Ossendrijver has since discovered two more.
A visitor drew Ossendrijver's attention to a photograph of a tablet with impressions of cuneiform script pressed into clay. The tablet did not mention trapezoids, but recorded the motion of Jupiter. The numbers matched those on the tablets with the trapezoid calculations.

When Jupiter first appears in the sky, it moves at a given velocity that is congruent to the background stars. As both Earth and Jupiter continually move in their orbits, to observers on Earth, Jupiter appears to slow down, and 120 days after it becomes visible, it comes to a standstill and reverses course.

Ossendrijver went to the British Museum, where the tablets were. A close-up look of the new tablet confirms that the Babylonians were calculating the distance Jupiter traveled in the sky from its appearance to its position 60 days later.

(California Network) -