The Copernican Question - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Copernican Question write by Robert Westman. This book was released on 2020-04-21. The Copernican Question available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus publicly defended his hypothesis that the earth is a planet and the sun a body resting near the center of a finite universe. But why did Copernicus make this bold proposal? And why did it matter? The Copernican Question reframes this pivotal moment in the history of science, centering the story on a conflict over the credibility of astrology that erupted in Italy just as Copernicus arrived in 1496. Copernicus engendered enormous resistance when he sought to protect astrology by reconstituting its astronomical foundations. Robert S. Westman shows that efforts to answer the astrological skeptics became a crucial unifying theme of the early modern scientific movement. His interpretation of this long sixteenth century, from the 1490s to the 1610s, offers a new framework for understanding the great transformations in natural philosophy in the century that followed.
Copernicus and the Astrologers
Copernicus and the Astrologers - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Copernicus and the Astrologers write by Robert S. Westman. This book was released on 2016. Copernicus and the Astrologers available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
Before Copernicus
Before Copernicus - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Before Copernicus write by Rivka Feldhay. This book was released on 2017-06-12. Before Copernicus available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. In 1984, Noel Swerdlow and Otto Neugebauer argued that Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) explained planetary motion by using mathematical devices and astronomical models originally developed by Islamic astronomers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Was this a parallel development, or did Copernicus somehow learn of the work of his predecessors, and if so, how? And if Copernicus did use material from the Islamic world, how then should we understand the European context of his innovative cosmology? Although Copernicus’s work has been subject to a number of excellent studies, there has been little attention paid to the sources and diverse cultures that might have inspired him. Foregrounding the importance of interactions between Islamic and European astronomers and philosophers, Before Copernicus explores the multi-cultural, multi-religious, and multi-lingual context of learning on the eve of the Copernican revolution, determining the relationship between Copernicus and his predecessors. Essays by Christopher Celenza and Nancy Bisaha delve into the European cultural and intellectual contexts of the fifteenth century, revealing both the profound differences between “them” and “us,” and the nascent attitudes that would mark the turn to modernity. Michael Shank, F. Jamil Ragep, Sally Ragep, and Robert Morrison depict the vibrant and creative work of astronomers in the Christian, Islamic, and Jewish worlds. In other essays, Rivka Feldhay, Raz Chen-Morris, and Edith Sylla demonstrate the importance of shifting outlooks that were critical for the emergence of a new worldview. Highlighting the often-neglected intercultural exchange between Islam and early modern Europe, Before Copernicus reimagines the scientific revolution in a global context.
Astronomy and Astrology in the Islamic World
Astronomy and Astrology in the Islamic World - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Astronomy and Astrology in the Islamic World write by Stephen P. Blake. This book was released on 2016-04-08. Astronomy and Astrology in the Islamic World available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. It was the astronomers and mathematicians of the Islamic world who provided the theories and concepts that paved the way from the geocentric theories of Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD to the heliocentric breakthroughs of Nicholas Copernicus and Johannes Kepler in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Algebra, the Arabic numeral system, and trigonometry: all these and more originated in the Muslim East and undergirded an increasingly accurate and sophisticated understanding of the movements of the Sun, Moon, and planets. This nontechnical overview of the Islamic advances in the heavenly sciences allows the general reader to appreciate (for the first time) the absolutely crucial role that Muslim scientists played in the overall development of astronomy and astrology in the Eurasian world.
A Scheme of Heaven: The History of Astrology and the Search for our Destiny in Data
A Scheme of Heaven: The History of Astrology and the Search for our Destiny in Data - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook A Scheme of Heaven: The History of Astrology and the Search for our Destiny in Data write by Alexander Boxer. This book was released on 2020-01-14. A Scheme of Heaven: The History of Astrology and the Search for our Destiny in Data available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. An illuminating look at the surprising history and science of astrology, civilization’s first system of algorithms, from Babylon to the present day. Humans are pattern-matching creatures, and astrology is the universe’s grandest pattern-matching game. In this refreshing work of history and analysis, data scientist Alexander Boxer examines classical texts on astrology to expose its underlying scientific and mathematical framework. Astrology, he argues, was the ancient world’s most ambitious applied mathematics problem, a monumental data-analysis enterprise sustained by some of history’s most brilliant minds, from Ptolemy to al-Kindi to Kepler. Thousands of years ago, astrologers became the first to stumble upon the powerful storytelling possibilities inherent in numerical data. To correlate the configurations of the cosmos with our day-to-day lives, astrologers relied upon a “scheme of heaven,” or horoscope, showing the precise configuration of the planets at a particular instant in time as viewed from a particular place on Earth. Although recognized as pseudoscience today, horoscopes were once considered a cutting-edge scientific tool. Boxer teaches us how to read these esoteric charts—and appreciate the complex astronomical calculations needed to generate them—by diagramming how the heavens appeared at important moments in astrology’s history, from the assassination of Julius Caesar as viewed from Rome to the Apollo 11 lunar landing as seen from the surface of the Moon. He then puts these horoscopes to the test using modern data sets and statistical science, arguing that today’s data scientists do work similar to astrologers of yore. By looking back at the algorithms of ancient astrology, he suggests, we can better recognize the patterns that are timeless characteristics of our own pattern-matching tendencies. At once critical, rigorous, and far ranging, A Scheme of Heaven recontextualizes astrology as a vast, technological project—spanning continents and centuries—that foreshadowed our data-driven world today.
