Pyramids and the speed of light

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: Harte


Pretty hard to think of using arc seconds for ancient astronomy when the best the human eye can discern is something a bit more than half an arc minute.

Not impossible with a decent device.
Unfortunately, no angle measuring device from Babylonia has ever been found - which matches up well with the utter absence of any mathematics involving angles (other than right angles.)

Harte

a reply to: Harte

Not impossible with a decent device.

Like a telescope?
Indeed. A decent device such as that enabled Galileo to make the precise observations he did (as crude as his telescope was). Without it, not so much.

originally posted by: Harte

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: Harte


Pretty hard to think of using arc seconds for ancient astronomy when the best the human eye can discern is something a bit more than half an arc minute.

Not impossible with a decent device.
Unfortunately, no angle measuring device from Babylonia has ever been found - which matches up well with the utter absence of any mathematics involving angles (other than right angles.)

Harte

Do you mean an astronomical compass or sextant sort of device?

originally posted by: Hanslune

originally posted by: Harte

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: Harte


Pretty hard to think of using arc seconds for ancient astronomy when the best the human eye can discern is something a bit more than half an arc minute.

Not impossible with a decent device.
Unfortunately, no angle measuring device from Babylonia has ever been found - which matches up well with the utter absence of any mathematics involving angles (other than right angles.)

Harte

Do you mean an astronomical compass or sextant sort of device?

The full Moon covers 30 arcseconds of sky.

One-thirtieth of the diameter of the full Moon would be what you would need to resolve.

That's doable, maybe. But arcseconds for something like construction, no. And it wouldn't be necessary anyway.

Harte

a reply to: Harte

The full Moon covers 30 arcseconds of sky.

Correction. Arc minutes. About 1/2º. That's 1,800 arc seconds.

Degrees are stupid.

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: Harte

The full Moon covers 30 arcseconds of sky.

Correction. Arc minutes. About 1/2º. That's 1,800 arc seconds.

Degrees are stupid.

OOPS! LOL

Harte

a reply to: Phage

The transit of Venus across the sun was credited to Scottish mathematician James Gregory in 1663.
You really don't need much of a telescope for that kind of an observation though, maybe just a long tube with a sheet to record the sun disc image.
Same holds true for eclipses you can get some pretty fine resolution data in a deep dark cave.
Averaging many position sightings of the same location perhaps over a few years you can obtain an accurate ground position fix for latitude.

They would have waited 365 days between solstice cycles and IIRC the number 21 was a special rune for the ancients at least by the time John got a hold of it.

a reply to: Cauliflower
The human eye cannot resolve anything at less than something over half an arc minute, 30 arc seconds.

The point was about the precision of astronomical observations in reference to early use of arc seconds for astronomy. I'm not clear on the point you are making.

a reply to: Phage

A 3 foot reflection of the suns solar disc on a cave wall is not direct observation.

a reply to: Cauliflower

I agree. Nor can it resolve something less than 30 or 40 arc seconds.

What's your point? How can a 3 foot reflection of the Sun be cast on a cave wall?

a reply to: Phage

The sun was likely the only object bright enough for them to get arc second accuracy.
Still would have been fuzzy, but they could mark just a sliver of a large reflected disc image which would be extremely accurate.

a reply to: Cauliflower

Reflected how, exactly? A reflecting telescope? The Sun has the same apparent diameter as the Moon, about 1,800 arc seconds. Of which the human eye can discern 40 or so.

And what does measuring the apparent width of the Sun have to do with astronomy?

Still not getting your point.

a reply to: Phage

You have never watched an solar eclipse reflected in a box with a hole?
That sun disc is only an inch across because the box is two feet wide.
A deep dark cave can give you a much larger disc image.

a reply to: Cauliflower

A deep dark cave can give you a much larger disc image.

False.

The tilt of the earth has significance to where great pyramid located.
earth tilt divide by Longitude great pyramid
23.5/29.9792 = 0.78387
(previous calculated frequency) 0.01111 * 0.78387/ (1/root 2) * (2^8) = 3.1529 (very close to pi 3.141592)

a reply to: AthlonSavage

Does the idea of least significant digit mean anything to you?
Probably not, if you're into numerology.

299792458 (Units meters per sec)
divide earth radius
6371,000 (Unit meters)
= 47.055 (Units meters per sec / meters = 1/seconds)
therefore
1/47.055 seconds = 0.02125 seconds
in a single nautical miles 1852 meters and earth has 21600 nautical miles
earth has 86400 seconds in 24 hours
86400/21600 = 4 seconds

0.02125/4 x 1852 = 9.8393 metres
9.8393 metres x 2 ^ 5 = 314.86
interesting gravity is 9.8 m/s and pi = 3.14159. So did the original ones take into consideration the speed of light and radius of earth when coming up with the measurement units for nautical mile and length of a metre.

so if we take 29.9792458 as literally representing velocity 299792458
then ever single degree equals 10000000 m/s
10000000 m/s divide by 60 (because 60 nautical miles in a single degree)
= 166666.66666
devide by 60 again = 2777.777
divide by 6 = 462.92 (coincidentally speed of rotation of earth.)
where 60 x 60 x 6 = 21600 (coincidentally number of nautical miles in earth)
three 6s number of beast.
so many coincidences that I think that modern man has ripped off the ancient metric systems and resold them as originating somewhere by magic from the renaissance age.

The age of plagiarism we live in.

plagiarism

originally posted by: AthlonSavage

divide by 6 = 462.92 (coincidentally speed of rotation of earth.)

Really at that specific latitude?

originally posted by: Harte

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous

originally posted by: Harte

originally posted by: Cauliflower
Arc seconds were first recorded in Babylonian astronomy 3000 BC.

I don't think that's true.
Got a reliable source?

originally posted by: bloodymarvelouswww.storyofmathematics.com...

You've got to figure that only a very tiny fraction of their material survived, though. We're just lucky some of it was on clay tablets that could survive thousands of years intact.

If they'd written it on paper, or skins, or cloth, like most cultures, the we wouldn't have anything at all. So there could be other civilizations contemporary to them or even earlier than them, for all we know.

Yes, I think I said something like that: "there's no record of them using these to measure angles with."
They divided the circle into multiples of 60, but they didn't measure angles using that. In fact, their mathematics shows nothing about angles and their relationships, thought there is a large amount of material about triangles - all of it concerned with the side lengths and none of it about the angles in a triangle.

So it's logical to hypothesize that they had no angular mathematics at all, and thus never "recorded" arcseconds.

It's just that the (semi) modern invention of the arcsecond as an angle measure (such as for analyzing the sky) descends from the Babylonian division of a circle.

One speculative hypothesis can't refute another speculative hypothesis. It's possible you are right, but equally likely that you are wrong.

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous

Earliest use of degrees that we know of is Ptolemy. The Babylonians divided a circle into 360 parts, and probably the subdivisions minute and second. But there's no record of them using these to measure angles with.

Unless you have found something.

Harte

Ptolemy probably got most of his ideas from Babylonian documents, which got them from Sumerian ones.

Somebody did. It's thought that Ptolemy's work is based on earlier Greek works now lost.

But there's no doubt that the sexagesimal system used in angle measurement (and in time measurement) originates with Mesopotamian cultures. But no reason to think the Mesopotamians used it to measure angles.

Harte

But ... also no reason to doubt it...

The argument against 29.9792458 being chosen on purpose for the GP is that the random probability such that the ancients "used meters and degrees" is low.

However, I think I have managed to establish that the probability that they used degrees is not very low. It's not 100% certain either. But it's not "lottery jackpot" odds uncertain either. It falls within a range that makes it suitable for use as an ATS fringe hypothesis.

That's all it needs to do here.

And of course since a meter is approximately one 40 millionth the circumference of the Earth, that part isn't a problem to begin with.