Episode 1: The Heavens & History

FromThe Song of Urania

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Episode 1: The Heavens & History

FromThe Song of Urania

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Length:

31 minutes

Released:

Jan 29, 2021

Format:

Podcast episode

Description

How should we approach the history of astronomy? How have the questions that astronomers have asked changed through the ages? We look at some of these questions and sketch out the broad arc of this field from antiquity to the present day.

Released:

Jan 29, 2021

Format:

Podcast episode

Titles in the series (41)

A history of astronomy, from antiquity to the present.

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Episode 6: System of a B: We dive into the most sophisticated model of planetary and lunar motions that the Babylonians developed: System A and System B and see how the Babylonians used this method to predict eclipses, the length of months, and even measure the precession of... by The Song of Urania
40 min listen
Episode 7: Greek Tales of Ancient Nights & Days: As we start to examine the astronomy of Ancient Greece we hear of the myth cycles of Theseus and Perseus, episodes from both of which appear in the night sky. These myth cycles help us to understand the conception the ancient Greeks had to the... by The Song of Urania
53 min listen
Episode 3: When the Moon Disappears: We look at how the Babylonians associated the heavens with their gods and how Mesopotamian astrology developed after the Assyrian conquest. We hear some examples of astrological omens and see how Babylonians handled the most malevolent of omens, the... by The Song of Urania
42 min listen
Episode 2: The Stars over Babylon: What are the earliest records of constellations? How did the ancient Babylonians keep track of their progress through the year? And how do we know what we know about Babylonia? by The Song of Urania
46 min listen
Episode 1: The Heavens & History: How should we approach the history of astronomy?  How have the questions that astronomers have asked changed through the ages?  We look at some of these questions and sketch out the broad arc of this field from antiquity to the present day. by The Song of Urania
31 min listen
Episode 4: The Astronomical Diaries: We step back and look at Babylon's broader political history and see how Babylonian astronomy changes during the rise of the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the Persian Conquest. Then we look at some of the types of astronomical records the Babylonians... by The Song of Urania
52 min listen
Episode 8: The Bards Sing of the Skies: We outline the early development of Greek civilization after the Late Bronze Age Collapse and how the unique geography of Greece influenced its culture, and ultimately, its astronomy.... by The Song of Urania
51 min listen
Episode 14: The Atomic Philosophers: Two philosophers, Leucippus and Democritus, attempted to synthesize the monist theories of the earlier natural philosophers with the pluralist theories of Empedocles and Anaxagoras. To do this, they proposed a revolutionary idea — that all matter is made of atoms. by The Song of Urania
53 min listen
Episode 9: Thales, through a Glass Darkly: Thales was the first of the Greek astronomers and became known as one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Over the centuries many astronomical discoveries were attributed to him, but what was the reality and what was the hyperbole? by The Song of Urania
61 min listen
Episode 5: A System of Weights & Measures: We look at how the Babylonians represented information in their astronomical tablets by examining their number system and the unit system. Then we dive into the Babylonian discovery of the Saros cycle, which was a deep regularity in the pattern of... by The Song of Urania
43 min listen
Episode 11: The So-Called Pythagoreans: We turn to the enigmatic, charismatic philosopher Pythagoras and the following that he inspired. Though Pythagoras is today associated with the Pythagorean theorem, he developed a school whose secrets were jealously guarded. The Pythagoreans studied astronomy, mathematics, and music, but also developed a unique philosophy centering around numbers that heavily influenced Plato. by The Song of Urania
80 min listen
Episode 12: The Eleatic School & the Way of Truthiness: After the Median invasion, the Ionian philosopher Xenophanes, a student of the Anaximander, was forced to flee to Elea in Magna Graecia and brought the philosophy of the Ionians to the Eleans. His student, Parmenides, then founded the Eleatic School, which was skeptical of the senses, and argued that despite its appearance to the contrary, the Earth was round. Parmenides's student, Zeno, in turn developed his famous paradoxes to prove his teacher's assertion that motion was an illusion. by The Song of Urania
64 min listen
Episode 10: The Ionian School: Miletus became a wealthy Greek city during the Archaic Period and developed a thriving intellectual culture which included many of the most important pre-Socratic astronomers. We looked at Thales in the last episode and now we try to understand the astronomy of other members of the Ionian School — Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus. What did their astronomy have in common with each other and what are the connections between their ideas and the ideas of modern physics? by The Song of Urania
53 min listen
Episode 22: The Antikythera Mechanism & Friends: In the year 1900 a team of sea sponge divers stumbled upon a shipwreck from the late Hellenistic Era. Among the statues, coins, and jewellery, the salvage crew pulled out a small box covered in moss. Initially ignored, the contents of this box proved to be the most sophisticated mechanical device that survives from the ancient world. The Antikythera mechanism computed all the known motions of the heavens and its complexity was described by one scholar as "like finding a jet engine in King Tut's tomb." by The Song of Urania
57 min listen
Episode 24: Etruscan & Roman Astronomy: Rome, the great empire of the Mediterranean, is not known for its astronomy. But while it lagged behind other civilizations, it is a mistake to think that they were entirely uninterested in the subject. Astronomical references permeated the Roman calendar and one of Rome's longest lasting contributions to Western civilization, the Julian calendar, was devised by the Roman astronomer Sosigenes. by The Song of Urania
64 min listen
Episode 13: Ex Uno, Plura: As we transition from the Archaic Period of Greece to the Classical Period, two philosophers, Empedocles and Anaxagoras, rebel against the prevailing dogma of monism and present a new idea — that matter consists of mixtures of multiple fundamental elements. Thanks to William Little of Ohio State for help with the Latin to get the opposite of "E pluribus unum" for the title. If you would like to register for the Stellar Spectacles symposium that I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, go to www.asxsociety.com. by The Song of Urania
52 min listen
Episode 19: The Forerunners of Copernicus: At the dawn of the Hellenistic Age, two Greek astronomers developed radical new cosmologies. Heraclides of Pontica proposed that the Earth rotated on its axis and that Mercury and Venus revolved around the Sun instead of the Earth. Aristarchus of Samos went further and proposed that all the planets, including the Earth, revolved around the Sun. In addition, Aristarchus made the first quantitative measurement of the distances to the Sun and the Moon, along with their sizes. by The Song of Urania
66 min listen
Episode 27: Astronomica: In this episode we examine the work of two Roman astrologers to see how Roman astrology worked in practice: Marcus Manilius, who wrote Astronomica, and Firmicus Maternus, who wrote the Matheseos. by The Song of Urania
56 min listen
Episode 17: The Attic Calendar and its Discontents: We turn back the clock and see how a variety of Greek astronomers over the centuries contributed to the Greek calendar, and how Greek politicians ignored their developments. Then we see how the discovery that the seasons are not of equal lengths posed a problem for Eudoxus's theory of planetary motion. by The Song of Urania
60 min listen
Episode 15: On Plato's Broad Shoulders: Before leaving the world of the Pre-Socratics, we look briefly at the astronomy of Oenopides, which had a more observational character than many of his contemporaries. Then we turn to Plato, the first of the great astronomers in the Socratic tradition, whose astronomy synthesized the best ideas of his predecessors. by The Song of Urania
69 min listen
Episode 16: The Homocentric Spheres of Eudoxus: In working on the problem of doubling the cube, Plato's friend Archytas devised an ingenious solution that involved a three dimensional curve determined by the intersection of a torus with a cylinder. Archytas's student Eudoxus then seems to have been inspired by this solution to develop the first serious model of planetary motions in ancient Greece, his theory of homocentric spheres. by The Song of Urania
61 min listen
Episode 23: The Culmination of Ancient Greek Astronomy: During the half millennium of the Roman Era in Ancient Greece, only two astronomers made any major advances. At the beginning of the Roman Era, Posidonius measured the size of the Earth and discovered the relationship between the Moon and the tides. But the triumph of Greek astronomy came 300 years later with the intricate planetary model of Ptolemy, which stood unchallenged for some 1400 years. by The Song of Urania
72 min listen
Episode 25: The Stars of Bethlehem: This month the full moon falls on Three Kings' Day, traditionally a day that celebrates the adoration of the magi, so we investigate the famous Star of Bethlehem story. Through the centuries there have been dozens of astronomical and astrological theories put forward as to what the Star of Bethlehem was. We look at a few of the more prominent theories and their shortcomings, finishing with what is plausibly the leading candidate, the astrological theory of Michael Molnar, though as we'll see, this explanation, too, is not without its problems. by The Song of Urania
68 min listen
Episode 26: Matters of Life & Death in Roman Astrology: As Rome expanded to the East, the cultural influence of the Greeks deepened, and this included a strong interest in astrology. Despite resistance from conservative Romans, by the Imperial Era, astrology played a critical role in Roman politics, both as a tool to support conspirators attempting to assassinate emperors, and wielded by emperors as a way to eliminate challenges to their power. by The Song of Urania
75 min listen
Episode 28: The Stars in Stone: We turn the clock back to the astronomy of the Paleolithic and Neolithic. Clues about humanity's interest in the heavens during the Paleolithic can be seen in linguistic, mythological, and archaeological evidence. In the Neolithic, groups of people constructed tens of thousands of megaliths across Europe, many of which had astronomical connections. by The Song of Urania
54 min listen
Episode 20: The Theory of Epicycles & Deferents: In the Hellenistic Era the astronomer Apollonius of Perga (maybe) developed the model of epicycles and deferents that was to dominate Western astronomy for more than 1500 years. Around the same time, Eratosthenes, woh was the head librarian at the Library of Alexandria, developed a novel technique to measure the circumference of the Earth and arrived at a suspiciously accurate result. by The Song of Urania
47 min listen
Episode 35: The Vedanga Jyotisha & Beyond: We delve into the contents of the Vedanga Jyotisha, the earliest Indian text to deal explicitly with astronomy. Then we turn to early Hindu cosmology and their explanations for various celestial phenomena, from the phases of the Moon to solar eclipses. Lastly, we briefly cover the unique cosmology of the Jains. by The Song of Urania
32 min listen
Episode 18: Aristotle, Plato's Other Student: Two of Plato's students were notable astronomers. We looked at one of them, Eudoxus, in the last two episodes. In this episode we turn to Plato's other student, Aristotle. Aristotle embellished Eudoxus's model of planetary motion, but also developed a comprehensive physics and cosmology that ultimately became the standard model of the universe during the High Middle Ages. by The Song of Urania
78 min listen
Episode 30: Egypt in a Nut-Shell: We turn to ancient Egypt, one of the oldest and most beguiling of the ancient civilizations. Egypt is particularly notable for the sheer conservatism of its civilization and changed little in more than two millennia. After a brief overview of its geography, history, and textual sources, we look at Egyptian conceptions of the creation, structure, and end of the universe. by The Song of Urania
48 min listen
Episode 21: Hipparchus the GOAT: After briefly examining the astronomy of Timocharis and Aristyllus, who developed the first known stellar catalog, we turn our attention to Hipparchus, who I claim was the greatest astronomer of ancient times. Hipparchus made major developments in virtually every area of astronomy known to him. His measurement of the lengths of the year and month were of unprecedented accuracy, he measured the distance to the Moon, and he developed a star catalog that was an order of magnitude larger than the earlier catalog of Timocharis and Aristyllus, which he was able to use to discover the precession of the equinoxes. by The Song of Urania
70 min listen

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Episode 41: Liu Xin's Theory of Everything: After Wang Mang deposed the Han Dynasty and instituted his new Xin Dynasty, he needed to promulgate a new calendar to mark the occasion. One of his court astronomers, Liu Xin, developed a new calendar that integrated the lunar and solar cycles with the planetary cycles and imbued it with numerological significance. We then talk about how Huan Tan, another astronomer of the era, would have gone about measuring the lunar mansions. by The Song of Urania
47 min listen
Episode 40: Emperor Wu's Woo: We learn about the political events and omens that led to the calendar reform of 104 BC. by The Song of Urania
55 min listen
Episode 39: The Guest Stars: We turn to the ways that the Chinese Emperor's astronomers predicted and interpreted eclipses, as well as the so-called "guest stars" that they occasionally reported observing in the skies. Then we discuss the role of the planets, particularly Jupiter. Towards the end we hear a few examples of astronomy in Chinese folklore. by The Song of Urania
51 min listen
Episode 38: The Organization of Heaven & Earth: This month we turn to the astronomy of China in the early Imperial Era. We look at the way that the Emperor's astronomers were organized within the imperial bureaucracy and then walk through the three significant cosmological theories of the era. by The Song of Urania
44 min listen
Episode 37: The Mandate of Heaven: We start to explore the relationship between the heavens and the Earth in Ancient China, along with the role of astronomers. One of the most important concepts in Chinese political thought to emerge from this was the Mandate of Heaven. Finally, we look at the oldest record of Chinese astronomy, the story of the astronomers Xi and Ho. by The Song of Urania
54 min listen
Episode 36: Aryabhata & the Siddhantas: In our final episode on ancient Indian astronomy, we tour the five astronomical Siddhantas, and then meet some of the astronomers whose names and works survive to us, most importantly, the great Aryabhata. by The Song of Urania
49 min listen
Episode 35: The Vedanga Jyotisha & Beyond: We delve into the contents of the Vedanga Jyotisha, the earliest Indian text to deal explicitly with astronomy. Then we turn to early Hindu cosmology and their explanations for various celestial phenomena, from the phases of the Moon to solar eclipses. Lastly, we briefly cover the unique cosmology of the Jains. by The Song of Urania
32 min listen
Episode 34: What Happened in Harappa: India developed one of the most advanced astronomies of any of the ancient cultures, even rivaling European astronomy in its accuracy by the 18th century. We look at how the geography of India influenced its history and then turn briefly to the little we know about the astronomy of the Harappan Civilization. Finally we end with the astronomy of the Rigveda. by The Song of Urania
38 min listen
Episode 33: How the Moon Became Blue: We take a break from the main narrative in honor of this month's blue moon and turn to a somewhat more frivolous topic — how the term "blue moon" came to mean the second full moon in a calendar month. by The Song of Urania
35 min listen
Episode 32: All Along the Watchers of the Hour: This month we tour the astronomers of ancient Egypt from the Old Kingdom to the last native Pharaoh of Egypt just prior to Alexander's conquest. We look at how astronomers fulfilled their primary responsibility of keeping track of time during the night so that the priests could perform the appropriate rituals in the temple. Finally, we end our journey through Egypt with their calendar, arguably the most reasonable calendar any civilization has ever used. by The Song of Urania
57 min listen
Episode 31: We Need to Talk About Khufu: Before getting back into Egyptian astronomy proper, we start by looking at Nabta Playa, a site of megalithic activity in the Nubian desert during the late neolithic. Then we turn to the megaliths the Egyptians are best known for — the pyramids. The pyramids have remarkably precise alignments to the cardinal directions and the techniques the Egyptians used to set these alignments remains a mystery. Finally, we look at the largest of the pyramids, Khufu's pyramid, whose so-called ventilation shafts have a possible astronomical connection. by The Song of Urania
34 min listen
Episode 30: Egypt in a Nut-Shell: We turn to ancient Egypt, one of the oldest and most beguiling of the ancient civilizations. Egypt is particularly notable for the sheer conservatism of its civilization and changed little in more than two millennia. After a brief overview of its geography, history, and textual sources, we look at Egyptian conceptions of the creation, structure, and end of the universe. by The Song of Urania
48 min listen
Episode 29: The Astronomy of Saharan and Sub-Saharan Africa: The oldest plausible astronomical artifacts known are African, as are many of the oldest megaliths, around 10,000 of which dot the Sahara and whose orientations are astronomical in character. We then briefly survey some of the creation stories and sky myths from a number of the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, we turn to a few of the more unique calendars in the region. by The Song of Urania
51 min listen
Episode 28: The Stars in Stone: We turn the clock back to the astronomy of the Paleolithic and Neolithic. Clues about humanity's interest in the heavens during the Paleolithic can be seen in linguistic, mythological, and archaeological evidence. In the Neolithic, groups of people constructed tens of thousands of megaliths across Europe, many of which had astronomical connections. by The Song of Urania
54 min listen
Episode 27: Astronomica: In this episode we examine the work of two Roman astrologers to see how Roman astrology worked in practice: Marcus Manilius, who wrote Astronomica, and Firmicus Maternus, who wrote the Matheseos. by The Song of Urania
56 min listen
Episode 26: Matters of Life & Death in Roman Astrology: As Rome expanded to the East, the cultural influence of the Greeks deepened, and this included a strong interest in astrology. Despite resistance from conservative Romans, by the Imperial Era, astrology played a critical role in Roman politics, both as a tool to support conspirators attempting to assassinate emperors, and wielded by emperors as a way to eliminate challenges to their power. by The Song of Urania
75 min listen
Episode 25: The Stars of Bethlehem: This month the full moon falls on Three Kings' Day, traditionally a day that celebrates the adoration of the magi, so we investigate the famous Star of Bethlehem story. Through the centuries there have been dozens of astronomical and astrological theories put forward as to what the Star of Bethlehem was. We look at a few of the more prominent theories and their shortcomings, finishing with what is plausibly the leading candidate, the astrological theory of Michael Molnar, though as we'll see, this explanation, too, is not without its problems. by The Song of Urania
68 min listen
Episode 24: Etruscan & Roman Astronomy: Rome, the great empire of the Mediterranean, is not known for its astronomy. But while it lagged behind other civilizations, it is a mistake to think that they were entirely uninterested in the subject. Astronomical references permeated the Roman calendar and one of Rome's longest lasting contributions to Western civilization, the Julian calendar, was devised by the Roman astronomer Sosigenes. by The Song of Urania
64 min listen
Episode 23: The Culmination of Ancient Greek Astronomy: During the half millennium of the Roman Era in Ancient Greece, only two astronomers made any major advances. At the beginning of the Roman Era, Posidonius measured the size of the Earth and discovered the relationship between the Moon and the tides. But the triumph of Greek astronomy came 300 years later with the intricate planetary model of Ptolemy, which stood unchallenged for some 1400 years. by The Song of Urania
72 min listen
Episode 22: The Antikythera Mechanism & Friends: In the year 1900 a team of sea sponge divers stumbled upon a shipwreck from the late Hellenistic Era. Among the statues, coins, and jewellery, the salvage crew pulled out a small box covered in moss. Initially ignored, the contents of this box proved to be the most sophisticated mechanical device that survives from the ancient world. The Antikythera mechanism computed all the known motions of the heavens and its complexity was described by one scholar as "like finding a jet engine in King Tut's tomb." by The Song of Urania
57 min listen
Episode 21: Hipparchus the GOAT: After briefly examining the astronomy of Timocharis and Aristyllus, who developed the first known stellar catalog, we turn our attention to Hipparchus, who I claim was the greatest astronomer of ancient times. Hipparchus made major developments in virtually every area of astronomy known to him. His measurement of the lengths of the year and month were of unprecedented accuracy, he measured the distance to the Moon, and he developed a star catalog that was an order of magnitude larger than the earlier catalog of Timocharis and Aristyllus, which he was able to use to discover the precession of the equinoxes. by The Song of Urania
70 min listen
Episode 20: The Theory of Epicycles & Deferents: In the Hellenistic Era the astronomer Apollonius of Perga (maybe) developed the model of epicycles and deferents that was to dominate Western astronomy for more than 1500 years. Around the same time, Eratosthenes, woh was the head librarian at the Library of Alexandria, developed a novel technique to measure the circumference of the Earth and arrived at a suspiciously accurate result. by The Song of Urania
47 min listen
Episode 19: The Forerunners of Copernicus: At the dawn of the Hellenistic Age, two Greek astronomers developed radical new cosmologies. Heraclides of Pontica proposed that the Earth rotated on its axis and that Mercury and Venus revolved around the Sun instead of the Earth. Aristarchus of Samos went further and proposed that all the planets, including the Earth, revolved around the Sun. In addition, Aristarchus made the first quantitative measurement of the distances to the Sun and the Moon, along with their sizes. by The Song of Urania
66 min listen
Episode 18: Aristotle, Plato's Other Student: Two of Plato's students were notable astronomers. We looked at one of them, Eudoxus, in the last two episodes. In this episode we turn to Plato's other student, Aristotle. Aristotle embellished Eudoxus's model of planetary motion, but also developed a comprehensive physics and cosmology that ultimately became the standard model of the universe during the High Middle Ages. by The Song of Urania
78 min listen
Episode 17: The Attic Calendar and its Discontents: We turn back the clock and see how a variety of Greek astronomers over the centuries contributed to the Greek calendar, and how Greek politicians ignored their developments. Then we see how the discovery that the seasons are not of equal lengths posed a problem for Eudoxus's theory of planetary motion. by The Song of Urania
60 min listen
Episode 16: The Homocentric Spheres of Eudoxus: In working on the problem of doubling the cube, Plato's friend Archytas devised an ingenious solution that involved a three dimensional curve determined by the intersection of a torus with a cylinder. Archytas's student Eudoxus then seems to have been inspired by this solution to develop the first serious model of planetary motions in ancient Greece, his theory of homocentric spheres. by The Song of Urania
61 min listen
Episode 15: On Plato's Broad Shoulders: Before leaving the world of the Pre-Socratics, we look briefly at the astronomy of Oenopides, which had a more observational character than many of his contemporaries. Then we turn to Plato, the first of the great astronomers in the Socratic tradition, whose astronomy synthesized the best ideas of his predecessors. by The Song of Urania
69 min listen
Episode 14: The Atomic Philosophers: Two philosophers, Leucippus and Democritus, attempted to synthesize the monist theories of the earlier natural philosophers with the pluralist theories of Empedocles and Anaxagoras. To do this, they proposed a revolutionary idea — that all matter is made of atoms. by The Song of Urania
53 min listen
Episode 13: Ex Uno, Plura: As we transition from the Archaic Period of Greece to the Classical Period, two philosophers, Empedocles and Anaxagoras, rebel against the prevailing dogma of monism and present a new idea — that matter consists of mixtures of multiple fundamental elements. Thanks to William Little of Ohio State for help with the Latin to get the opposite of "E pluribus unum" for the title. If you would like to register for the Stellar Spectacles symposium that I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, go to www.asxsociety.com. by The Song of Urania
52 min listen
Episode 12: The Eleatic School & the Way of Truthiness: After the Median invasion, the Ionian philosopher Xenophanes, a student of the Anaximander, was forced to flee to Elea in Magna Graecia and brought the philosophy of the Ionians to the Eleans. His student, Parmenides, then founded the Eleatic School, which was skeptical of the senses, and argued that despite its appearance to the contrary, the Earth was round. Parmenides's student, Zeno, in turn developed his famous paradoxes to prove his teacher's assertion that motion was an illusion. by The Song of Urania
64 min listen

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Episode 1: The Heavens & History

Episode 1: The Heavens & History

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Titles in the series (41)

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