World's Challenging Approaches -4 |LGSM|30-09-2017|16:00Z

[IAHM-COL]

We doing the over the hill and nose dive approaching?

[SHM]

If you want it, I wouldn't say No

[Octal450]

Damn! I'll have to try that at a later time.

Kind Regards,
Josh

[SkyBoat]

Hi guys- I'm going retro and flying the Boeing 727-200. Of course, it has a bunch of improvements thanks to it0uchpod's ongoing work to make the plane more realistic.

Here's just a bit of background on Aristarchus of Samos, who lived from c. 310-c. 230 BCE. He was a mathematician and astronomer who was a native of Samos. Although he wrote a number of works, only one has survived, On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon. I have this book in my library and it is a fascinating treatise. Aristarchus' place in the history of science, and really the world is that he figured out that the Sun is the center of the Solar System, that the Earth orbits around the Sun, and that the Moon orbits around the Earth. Even though other astronomers at the time agreed with him, the Greek politicians and religious orders found this to be an affront. After all, any fool can see the Sun and the Moon rise in the east and set in the west, so obviously the Earth is at the center. Nevertheless, he lived to a ripe old age of 80, as best our records can estimate. Other astronomers were not so lucky, but that's another story. It would not be until 1543, when Nicolas Copernicus' On the Revolutions was published that the geocentric view of the universe would begin to actually be refuted, and still decades later, when in 1610, Galileo pointed a very rudimentary telescope (a Dutch invention, by the way) at Jupiter and discovered it had moons, shattering the scientific and religious doctrine that all heavenly bodies orbited around the Earth. It took basically 19 centuries for the geocentric model to be supplanted by the heliocentric model. One has to wonder about a history in which Aristarchus' discoveries were universally accepted, but that is not the reality.

What Aristarchus got wrong (and without the aid of a telescope, virtually no one blames him for it) was the distance from the Earth to the Moon and the Moon to the Sun. His Solar System was WAY too small. This is largely because he used an early form of trigonometry to try to explain why there are total eclipses. And because the moon is visibly virtually the same diameter in the sky as the sun, he tried to calculate how big the Sun had to be and how far away to create a total solar eclipse, and not having the benefit of telescopic observation to measure the true diameter of the Sun, he just got the calculation wrong. However, in his defense, he did postulate that the stars were likely other suns and were at some great distance, although it was beyond his ability to measure that. Here's his statue on the Island of Samos, now celebrating their most famous astronomer and cosmologist, even if it was nearly twenty-five centuries late.


Image courtesy of Pintrist.

Aristarchus' diagram of the heliocentric universe:


Image courtesy of Konstable, Theories of Aristarchus.

[KL-666]

Thanks for that explanation, Skyboat. I once already knew that the Greek found out about the roundness of the earth and heliocentrism. But somehow over time the constant commercial? push of the story that that Galileo found it out first got the better of me.

Thanks again for reminding me.

Kind regards, Vincent

[123apple]

IAHM-COL,

Whoop whoop, pull up! Terrain! Pull up. Don't sink! Too low terrain



Skyboat, thanks very informative post

[123apple]

By the way... Is that your copy? Do you read it in Greek?!

[SkyBoat]

@123apple--

No, that is an illustration from the original text. My copy is in English. I don't read Greek, especially classical Greek, and heavy with mathematics, on top of that. I can read a bit of New Testament Greek, since my bachelor's degree major was Biblical Studies.

There were a couple of dozen Greek mathematician/astronomers working on this issue over a period of about 600 years, both before and after Aristarchus lived. He happened to be the first one to write a full treatise on the subject, although others were already beginning to ponder the possibility of the Earth revolving around the Sun. Now, without a telescope it wasn't impossible to scientifically prove that the solar system is heliocentric . Copernicus did it using the much more advanced mathematics of his day (he lived from 1473 to 1543). One big problem, however, was their belief that the orbits of the planets had to be circular, as in divinely perfectly circular. Even Copernicus' model suffered from this error. It wasn't until a few decades later when Johannes Kepler (around 1601) had the insight that the orbits are elliptical, even by small measure, that all of a sudden the visual observations of the planets, with their apparently speeding up and slowing down and going through retrograde (stopping and appearing to move in the opposite direction) in the night sky accounted precisely for the movement seen by the observations staring at these "wandering goats" as the Babylonians called them. But it would take a telescope to be able to view the four largest moons of Jupiter (which are called the Galileans) and the observation of the phases of Venus (that has no moon), which can be seen through a scope but not by the naked eye, that sealed the fate of the geocentric model. Touted by the Roman mathametican/astronomer/scientific genius Ptolomy and then later declared doctrine by the Holy Roman Church, the geocentric model essentially was frozen in time for about 1300 years. It took about a century to die, but by the time of Isaac Newton, in the mid-1700s, there were more and more high-powered telescopes (including Newton himself inventing the Newtonian Reflector, the basis of all modern visual observatories), the scientific question had been put to rest. Aristarchus was fully vindicated!

Solving the the question of the form and structure of the solar system didn't end the quest for understanding the universe. It turned out to be just the beginning. WOW!, were there surprises to come--and right through this very moment, they show no sign of slowing down.

[123apple]

Ok, thanks
YV-LEGO

[SHM]

Samos has been updated

Huge thanks to Israel for the terragear magic.




For those using terraGIT

Code: Select all

git pull
install/tile e020n30


does the magic.

For those not using terraGIT

Code: Select all

git clone https://github.com/FGMEMBERS-TERRAGIT/terraGIT.git
cd terraGIT
install/tile e020n30


creates a copy of the scenery for Samos.
Need to be pointed to FG to use as scenery with priority over terrasync, or disabling terrasync.