The study shown that Ancient Babylonians are active and accomplished stargazers
30 Januari 2016 06:30
Brilio.net/en - Ancient Babylonians seemed to be more advanced that we have ever imagined. The civilization emerged in about 1,800 before Century (BC) and once lived in what is now Iraq and Syria used geometry to track Jupiter across the night sky.
According to research, the sophisticated branch of mathematics that deals with shapes was being used at least 1,400 earlier than previously thought. Before, the origins of this technique had been traced to the 14th Century.
I wasn't expecting this. It is completely fundamental to physics, and all branches of science use this method, says Profesor Mathieu Ossendrijver of the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany.
The study shown that Ancient Babylonians are active and accomplished stargazers. Fiveclay tablets engraved with their Cuneiform writing system have already indicated that these people were advanced in astronomy.
They wrote reports about what they saw in the sky, and they did this over a very long period of time, over centuries, says Ossendrijver.
And this latest study shown they were also highly accomplished mathematicians.Before, it had been thought that complex geometry was first used by scholars in Oxford and Paris during Medieval era. The sholars used curves to trace the position and velocity of moving objects.
But then scientists believe the Babylonians developed this technique around 350 BC.
The script in the Babylonian tablets reveals that they were used four-sided shapes, called trapezoids, to calculate when Jupiter would appear in the night sky, and also the speed and distance that it travelled.
This shape, a rectangle with a slanted top, describes how the velocity of a planet, which is Jupiter, changes with time," he says.
According to Ossendrijver, they have trapezoids where one axis, the horizontal side, represents time, and the other axis, the vertical side, represents velocity.
The area of trapezoid gives you the distance travelled by Jupiter along its orbit,he says. What is so special is this type of graph is unknown from antiquity, so making figures of motion in this rather abstract space of velocity against time, this is something very, very new.
Source:BBC
