Historical Eclipses and Earth's Rotation
F. Richard Stephenson
See message #1 of this thread.Ptolemy's Almagest and Fomenko's Opinion About It"PTOLEMY'S CRIME"?
and Especially: Some Words About Precession
by B. Lukács
This title comes from Newton (but not I. but R. R.), whose book has the title "The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy" [11]. His claim goes back to Delambre (1819) who believed that Ptolemy fabricated some solar eclipse data without observing the eclipses. I cannot decide if Ptolemy falsified or not and do not want to.
Another accusations from the 80's tell that Ptolemy's Stellar Catalog contains a lot of stars whose positions he did not observe. The idea is the following. Hipparchus discovered the precession. Then Ptolemy calculated that the precession between Hipparchus and himself must be 2°40', and for a lot of stars he simply took Hipparchus' positions + this precession shift while he declared that he reobserved them. The modern authors claim that they detected this practice from anomalous distribution of measurement errors + lack of any peculiar motion (which did not exist in Greek theory) + the incorrect value of precession. The literature is big, not unequivocal but fairly convincing.
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Gods |
Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. |
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