Talk:History of astronomy

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On what currency note was the satellite Aryabhata Printed?

Do your own research.

Sagan and the like

See http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Nave-html/Faithpathh/galileomyth.html . Sagan said that Galileo was in a dungeon.

See "The Sleepwalkers", published in 1959, on page 492. Koestler says, "The "formal prison" took the form of a sojourn at the Grand Duke's Villa at Trinita del Monte".

Galileo seems to have been in an ordinary apartment for a day, before he moved to the Duke's Villa.

Is it really the "oldest of the natural sciences"?

How about a reference? Jyg (talk) 06:35, 15 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It also depends on the time period in which you think the natural sciences began. Did astronomy as a natural science already begin in the 6th century BC with Thales? Did the natural sciences begin in the 4th century BC with Aristotle? Did astronomy as a natural science begin in the 16th century with Copernicus? Or in the early 17th century with Kepler? Or in the late 17th century with Newton? Can you already speak of astronomy as a natural science in prehistory? Was Ptolemy already a scientist? These are tricky questions. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 05:02, 8 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Astronomy is commonly called the oldest science, at least in popular media. Personally, I think that's silly -- agriculture is 10,000s of years older, isn't that a science? But perhaps they mean people have been looking at stars since the dawn of time? That seems less than serious, akin to "the world's oldest profession."

Not sure why you're skipping thousands upon thousands of years of astronomy by the Egyptians and Babylonians, especially since most Greek astronomy was plundered from Babylon, including 800+ years of eclipse and planetary data. And Thales seems to have learned astronomy from Babylon. Having visiting Babylon, per one source. Even the famed Antikythera mechanism used Babylonian System A calculations.

Why would the science not be a science until the 1600s? That makes no sense to me. If scientific data has been gathered for thousands of years, and that data analyzed and made into complex mathematical models that are testable and falsifiable, and those models are highly accurate, how is that science not science? Skintigh (talk) 03:59, 5 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Acme of corruption? WTF?

Article seems to think geocentric models are evil, which is silly, and seems to blame Ptolemy for inventing them, which is false, and seems to misunderstand the history of astronomy, and then blames unnamed historians for these ahistorical statements. All to dismiss arguably the most important astronomer for thousands of years.

Regarding the geocentric model, unless you believe the ancient Greeks were launching spacecraft to explore other planets, it was 100% irrelevant if the "center of the universe" was the Earth or Sun. (...both of which are wrong, BTW, as the sun orbits the center of the galaxy. Though, in a way, every point is the center of the universe, so geocentrism was also right). They are simply different frames of reference for the same thing, and the math works out exactly the same. There was no way to test which one was "right" until millennia later. Thus, with exactly zero input on the subject by science, and exactly zero real-world importance, it came down to a guess based on philosophy.

To say Ptolemy corrupted all astronomy because he didn't make a non-scientific guess on an irrelevant subject the right way seems absurd. It seems like saying Newton was "the acme of corruption of physics" because he guessed wrong about how many angles could dance on the head of a pin.

Anyway, if you want to trash Ptolemy, talk about his plagiarism of data he claimed to record... hundreds of years before he was born. Or problems and solutions he copied... poorly. Skintigh (talk) 03:43, 5 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The starting point

I don't understand this revert. It is merely placing the context in which the study of astronomy first started, and it is referenced even if most of the things pointed are quite obvious (after all, Wikipedia:You do need to cite that the sky is blue). Which is the "opinion"? Cambalachero (talk) 00:53, 25 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

New World astronomy

Even though Wikipedia has an article entitled Maya astronomy, there seems to be no section on New World astronomy. Kdammers (talk) 16:14, 5 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]