Stats for nerds
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What Hacker News says
- It was actually extremely complex and sophisticated. Getting accurate measurements was seriously tricky and making sense of them involved doing complex calculations (particularly spherical trigonometry) by hand. Some phenomena, like the precession of the equinoxes, required aggregating observations which had been taken over several centuries.
A good book to get a sense of this complexity is “The Light Ages” by Seb Falk.
- We are usually not aware of the degree in which Classical and Medieval thought provided the foundations of our modern world. For example, the concept that the universe can be studied by human reason and described with mathematics started as a philosophical/religious idea.
If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend that you check out “The Light Ages” by Seb Falk.
- The book The Light Ages by Seb Falk:
> In The Light Ages, Cambridge science historian Seb Falk takes us on an immersive tour of medieval science through the story of one fourteenth-century monk, John of Westwyk. From multiplying Roman numerals to navigating by the stars, curing disease, and telling time with an ancient astrolabe, we learn emerging science alongside Westwyk, while following the gripping story of the struggles and successes of an ordinary man in a precarious world. An enlightening history that argues that these times weren’t so dark after all, The Light Ages shows how medieval ideas continue to color how we see the world today.
* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/50489364-the-light-ag...
* https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324002932
Has a chapter or two of keeping the calendar:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liturgical_year
and actual time for daily services:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liturgy_of_the_Hours
It should also be noted that for time periods measured over millennia, one may also keep in mind that there are subtle changes in the night sky because of the wobbling of the Earth on its axis of spin:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_precession
So that (e.g.) the North Star that we have today (Polaris) is not what not the same as in the past, and will change in the future:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_star
The Hoover Dam in the US actually makes use of this astronomical fact in a monument to indicate to possible future generations when it was built:
> But that point near Polaris, which we call the North Star, is actually slowly moving and tracing a circle through the night sky. While Polaris is our North Star, Hansen’s terrazzo floor points out that the North Star of the ancient Egyptians, as they built the great pyramids, was Thuban. And in about 12,000 years, our North Star will be Vega. The workings of this precession are best explained with an animation, as in figure 1. Here you can see how the axis of the earth traces a circle in the sky over the course of 25,772 years.
* https://medium.com/the-long-now-foundation/the-26-000-year-a...
- The Middle ("Medieval") Ages had a lot going on:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God%27s_Philosophers
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2071784.God_s_Clockmaker
The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science by Seb Faulk was recently (2020) published and won a few awards (lots of interview on YouTube):
* https://twitter.com/Seb_Falk
Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution and The Rise of Early Modern Science by Toby Huff:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toby_Huff
If you're doing philosophy and science, you may be curious about law: see The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession by Brundage:
- "There's no shortage of myths about the Middle Ages, like the oft-repeated — and easily debunked — notion that everyone back then thought the Earth was flat. Another common misconception is that scientific progress largely went dark during this era, snuffed out by the medieval church. But if you ask University of Cambridge historian Seb Falk, the reality is far brighter. Falk, who researches the history of science in the later Middle Ages, has more recently focused on how — and by whom — science was actually done in medieval times. His latest book, The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science, gives an insider’s look through the tumultuous life of a single 14th-century monk and astronomer, John Westwyk."
