Particular devotion was given to the movements of Jupiter, which they identified with their chief god Marduk , and Venus, associated with Ishtar , their goddess of war and love.
The movements of Jupiter, Venus, and the other planets were believed to be messages from the gods rather than the gods themselves and were very important in Babylonian religion. Priests would then perform various rituals, attempting to prevent the disaster. Because the movements of the planets and stars were so important, Babylonians began to develop an exact science to analyze their positions.
They began to examine the same planets and stars in the sky at different times of year and in different places. They created MUL.
Babylonia would eventually fall to the Persians in BC and lose its power and independence, but its people would always be fascinated by the stars, and a newer group of scholars in Greece would learn from them.
The Greek scholars brought changes to the study of the stars. They were famous for their schools of higher knowledge, which were rather different from ours. Students would gather around a teacher, perhaps in a beautiful grove, and ask questions and discuss among themselves what might be the answers and the best ways to figure out those answers. Many of today's colleges still aspire to this way of learning.
Over the centuries, this model of discovery and debate brought many changes and new discoveries to the study of astronomy. Thales of Miletus was one of the first great mathematicians of Western civilization and the first BC to successfully predict the timing of an eclipse. Because the telescope had not yet been invented, many early debates centered around heavenly bodies that could easily be seen from Earth and what the structure of the solar system was.
Heracleides of Pontus first proposed the concept that the Earth made a daily rotation, although he also believed that the Sun and the other planets orbited the Earth each day. Aristarchus of Samos was the first Greek philosopher to believe the solar system was organized around the Sun, rather than the Earth. Ptolemy was an astronomer and mathematician. He believed that the Earth was the center of the Universe.
The word for Earth in Greek is geo, so we call this idea a "geocentric" theory. Even starting with this incorrect theory, he was able to combine what he saw of the stars' movements with mathematics, especially geometry, to predict the movements of the planets.
His famous work was called the Almagest. To make his predictions true, he decided that the planets must move in epicycles smaller circles and the Earth itself moved along an equant.
None of this was true, but it made the math work for his predictions. This flawed view of the Universe was accepted for many centuries. He is sometimes called the grandfather of science. He, too, believed in a geocentric Universe and that the planets and stars were perfect spheres, though Earth itself was not. He further thought that the movements of the planets and stars must be circular since they were perfect and, if the motions were circular, then they could go on forever.
Today, we know that none of this is the case, but Aristotle was so respected that these wrong answers were taught for a very long time. Outside of astronomy, Aristotle was a champion observer. He was one of the first to study plants, animals, and people in a scientific way, and he did believe in experimenting whenever possible and developed logical ways of thinking.
This is a critical legacy for all the scientists who followed him. Another Greek, Eratosthenes c. He is also known as the Father of Geography. You can read more about him in Measuring the Earth. People across the Western world had little time for the deep thought and theory they once did, and interest in astronomy was lost in many places.
But a new culture would preserve the knowledge of the Greek astronomers and make new discoveries from the heavens as well. The time of the Islamic astronomers had begun. The foundation of Islamic astronomy was the work of Ptolemy.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, the text of the Almagest was translated from Greek into Arabic by AD and became influential among Islamic astronomers. Ibn Yunus AD corrected this to 1 degree every 70 years, which has been used ever since.
The sophisticated geometry the Babylonians once used, ignored by the Greeks, was adopted and surpassed by Yunus, who used trigonometry to calculate 40 planetary conjunctions and 30 solar eclipses. One of the most important works of Islamic astronomy was the Book of Fixed Stars.
The Arabic constellations were traditionally used by Bedouin travelers who needed to cross long distances over land, especially the Silk Road trade route. The Book of Fixed Stars was the most in-depth description of the night sky available, and it was also one of the first star catalogs to feature illustrations to make reading easier.
The Arabic names of many stars would be retained as the book became influential in the Western world, and, to this day, most bright stars still have names derived from Arabic. He believed that each star had some influence over a specific aspect of the Universe, and that their precise movements would influence human behavior and natural events.
As Islamic star catalogs, astrological texts, and translations of the work of Greek philosophers became available in Latin, a new age of learning and discovery began across Europe. An interest in classical philosophy and science was rekindled, and the Renaissance began.
This period would see new astronomers rise up and challenge the centuries-old geocentric theory, aided by the invention of the telescope. Astronomers would see the Universe in far more detail than ever before.
A little over years ago, Nicolaus Copernicus came up with a radical way of looking at the Universe. His heliocentric system put the Sun helio at the center of our system.
He was not the first to have this theory. Earlier starwatchers had believed the same, and, in fact, Copernicus cited Aristarchus of Samos as an inspiration, but it was Copernicus who brought it to the world of the Renaissance and used his own observations of the movements of the planets to back up his idea. His ideas, including the revelation that the Earth rotates on its axis, were too different for most of the scholars of his time to accept. They used only parts of his theory.
Those who did study his work intact often did so in secret. They were called Copernicans. Born in Pisa, Italy, approximately years after Copernicus, Galileo became a brilliant student with an amazing genius for invention and observation. This idea of a global coordinates system was highly influential, and we use a similar system today. However, he is most known for refining the cycles and epicycles that made the geocentric theory of the universe tenable for 14 centuries, as established in his book The Almagest on the motions of the stars and planets.
This is the theory which Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton eventually overthrew more than a thousand years later. For this reason Ptolemy is a controversial figure in the history of science.
Robert Newton argues in his book The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy , that despite his skill as an astronomer, Ptolemy was simply an astronomical fraud. Newton says that Ptolemy simply fitted his measurements to his theories, rather than vice versa, often adapting observations made centuries before his time.
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