Mad Hamish posted:

Look, no-one ever said that Ap/ep is smart.

skasion posted:

Pliny seems to assume that all the stars (including the planets and moon) are spheres, as he explicitly says is the case with the earth.

He says the moon is lit by reflected light from the sun and correctly argues that full moon can only occur when the moon and sun are on opposite sides of the earth. He claims Posidonius calculated the moon is 2,000,040 stadia from earth, which I don’t know how he calculated it but it’s actually not that bad a guess—comes out to around 230,000 (modern) miles, the correct answer is like 239,000.

More unfortunately, he also argues that the spots on the moon are bits of earth it sucks up while drinking the oceans, and that the moon must be bigger than the earth, because otherwise it wouldn’t be possible for the moon to fully eclipse the sun.

Source is Natural History Book 2, the whole book is about astronomy and contains many more baffling moon facts!

Tunicate posted:

Anaxagorus is the guy who figured out the moon reflected sunlight (circa 400s BC), and gave the correct explanation for eclipses. He claimed that the moon was just a big rock that had gotten flung off the earth into space, determined that it was at least as big as the Peloponnesus (based on the shadow that it cast during the eclipse of 478) and that meteorites were other big rocks that broke off heavenly bodies and fell to earth.

He went further and said that the sun was a giant spinning mass of white hot metal at least 18 times bigger than the moon, and the other stars were the same thing but further away

Having argued that the moon and sun were not gods, he got run out of Athens for impiety.

Kylaer posted:

Anaxagorus owned.

And technically he's right, the moon is bigger than the Peloponnesus and the sun is more than 18 times bigger than the moon

Brawnfire posted:

Trees aren't real except for the giant trees whose stumps became mountains

Benagain posted:

I thought this was the Elden Ring thread for a second

Btw if anyone interested hasn't found it yet Tarnished Archaeologist is a grad student applying archaeology principles to Elden Ring to draw conclusions and is a fun watch

Mad Hamish posted:

There's a scene in Horizon: Zero Dawn where Sylens is explaining Earth's technological past to Aloy, shows her a hologram of a globe, and smugly tells her that the Earth is round, not flat like he assumes she believes. She swiftly counters this by telling him that obviously the Earth is a sphere because it casts a circular shadow on the moon during an eclipse.

Arglebargle III posted:

The one that seems most miraculous is the Terra Australis theory, where ancient greeks (????) assumed that there must be a counterbalanced land mass at the south pole because it just didn't seem reasonable that all the land mass is in the northern hemisphere. 2/3 of the land is in the northern hemisphere but what do you know their totally specious reasoning turned out to accurately predict the existence of Antarctica.

Raenir Salazar posted:

Is there a good book on how ancient Rome (Republic?) managed and supplied it armies? Things like procurement of supplies and equipment, and then when out campaigning how armies were managed lead up to a battle? Like the whole process of mustering, equipping, training, keeping replenished, marching, forming up and battling?

skasion posted:

Logistics of the Roman Army at War by Jonathan P Roth. Covers First Punic War to Third Century Crisis…not really sure why it doesn’t go later since there’s a lot of interesting logistical stuff you could analyze from the later empire. Anyway, awesome book, loads of primary source translations

Kylaer posted:

Any idea what their thoughts on gravity were?

skasion posted:

I guess you could use parallax to calculate the distance to the moon. You need some kind of star occultation so you can observe position relative to the background, but that’s easy, moon occults various planets every year. If you can do that with angle measurements in two different places at the same time, and you know how far apart the two places are (not too bad with Roman road markers), I think you can estimate the distance with trigonometry. The hard part is synchrony. maybe with fancy water clocks?

FreudianSlippers posted:

think giants are real but trees aren't.

Nessus posted:

I remember hearing about some Greek who arranged for simultaneous readings to be taken in Alexandria and somewhere in Athens and used that to derive a pretty close estimate of the Earth's circumfrence. Is this the same thing you're talking about?

the yeti posted:

Trees aren’t real taxonomically

FishFood posted:

I love taxonomy, where mammals are fish and crocodiles are more bird than lizard.

Arglebargle III posted:

One guy in the 17th century accidentally discovered the speed of light observing the moons of Jupiter but it took someone else reviewing his observations much later to realize the significance of his findings.

Arglebargle III posted:

One guy in the 17th century accidentally discovered the speed of light observing the moons of Jupiter but it took someone else reviewing his observations much later to realize the significance of his findings.

quote:

As a young child, the future Emperor Ming of Jin was seated in the audience chamber with his father when a messenger arrived from the distant city of Chang'an. His father took the opportunity to ask him, "Which do you suppose is farther away: Chang'an, or the Sun?"

The boy replied, "It must be the Sun; people arrive here from Chang'an, but no one has ever come here from the Sun."

Impressed by his son's reasoning, at a feast the following day his father asked him the same question again. Yet this time the future Emperor replied, "I think Chang'an is farther."

His father blanched and said, "Why is your answer different from yesterday?"

The boy replied, "Because you can see the Sun from here, but you can't see Chang'an." Such was his precociousness.

Tulip posted:

Which church? I usually think people mean the Catholic Church when they say "the Church" capital-C and the Catholics are pretty into universal human rights, but also they would absolutely not give a poo poo about Englishmens' rights in specific since the English do not have any particularly privileged position in Catholicism, so is this an Anglican-Catholic difference?

Taishi Ci posted:

feedmegin posted:

I was thinking of Catholics in France specifically - and I would invite you to consider whether 'universal' for them at the time included the perfidious Musselman, the atheist or indeed (as we can see from the middle ages on numerous occasions) Jewish people. As I say, rights for Christians in Christendom is a different matter and obviously goes back a lot further - but you gotta be Christian first.

The 'Englishmens' rights' thing is separate, this is the whole Norman Yoke idea the Levellers etc come up with during/before/after the English Civil War, and yes the Catholic Church obviously doesn't give a fig about that idea.

Tulip posted:

lol hell yes, this is the kind of advanced sycophancy I live for

Why did you use the present tense to discuss events from 1000 years ago? Why are you talking about the impact of Enlightenment ideas on medieval thought?

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Would an anglo-saxon and a fresh-off-the-boat viking have been able to understand each other at all?

FishFood posted:

Ehhhh, I don't think that's quite right. The North German languages were and are pretty distinct from those on the continent. English's creolization and grammar simplification happened upon contact with Norse languages, which implies that they were not very mutually intelligible at all.