The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
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Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
#2[flagged]
Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
#3How did ancient cultures know when the solstice was? If you didn't tell me it was the 21st, I don't know how I'd be able to tell you other than by carefully measuring the sunrise and sunset times
Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
#4[flagged]
Although western centrism is definitely a thing, the link you provided states that temple, for example, was started in the 16th century. The article link is about something from 2800BC
Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
#5How did ancient cultures know when the solstice was? If you didn't tell me it was the 21st, I don't know how I'd be able to tell you other than by carefully measuring the sunrise and sunset times
To tell it accurately of course takes work.
However if you live in the open, or have daily access to the open sky, after a while you are bound to notice.
We are so used to having a ceiling above us, so used to constructions blocking our view of the sky that this seems a feat.
I was the same till I got access to the sky. Then ... oh wait ... the sunset is shifting towards those landmarks every day. Oh wait, now its turning around to go the other way.
The total span of movement is so large, that its hard to miss unless you are on a featureless landscape or in the open sea.
I am super impressed by humans noticing and separating the planet's from the stars. Look at those stars they don't twinkle and they move funny. I guess the planets drew attention because of their brightness and by their lack of twinkle.
Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
#6my modern equivalent(I needed last year for surfing (after i needed to cut a surf trip short as it became night))
Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
#7How did ancient cultures know when the solstice was? If you didn't tell me it was the 21st, I don't know how I'd be able to tell you other than by carefully measuring the sunrise and sunset times
Probably easier to measure the location of sunsets and sunrises rather than the time?
Edit: Obviously somewhere like here in Scotland observing the sunrise is easier said than done - particularly at this time of year!
Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
#8my modern equivalent(I needed last year for surfing (after i needed to cut a surf trip short as it became night)) https://daylight.franzai.com/
and yes, the maths fails when you are super super high north or south
Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
#9[flagged]
Although western centrism is definitely a thing, the link you provided states that temple, for example, was started in the 16th century. The article link is about something from 2800BC
The article is about more than just that one monument and has a few contemporary examples as well.
Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
#10[flagged]
Depends on the details of how you define calculus. Archimedes was doing integration, Descartes was evaluating slopes and tangents of algebraic curves. Isaac Barrow had a good grasp of fundamental theorem of calculus -- that differentiation and integration are inverse operations. Brook Taylor did Taylor series before Newton.
Newton and Leibnitz get credit because they placed calculus as a general technique that is immensely broadly applicable not just for extrapolating the tangent function or the sin function as a series, but to any function that's smooth in some sense.
They worked out the details that do not depend on the specifics of the function and called them out as rules/results of broad applicability. Especially how to push the differential and integral operations through +,-,×,÷ and function composition sign. It did not matter what the function was as long as it was built up from those operations.
I am familiar with the work of Kerala school and also of Aryabhatta's work on using differential coefficients to extrapolate the sin function (this being much before Kerala school), his work on difference equations.
Rather than getting caught up with us versus them narratives , spend some time learning about the beauty of math and how different cultures have thought about them in such creative ways. Otherwise you risk sounding ignorant and rageful conspiracy monger.
The inaccuracies in the Hindu calendar is and was a lot more than the Julian calendar. The Julian calendar assumed that a year was 365 1/4 the day. This is slightly inaccurate and therefore there was a need to correct for the leap day that's added every 4 years by skipping it every 100 years, adding it back every 400 years. At time of Gregorian correction it was off by 10~11 days because of an error of 10 minutes in their estimate of the length of an year.
Hindu civilization's estimate of the length of an year, although remarkably accurate for its time, was less accurate than the estimate of 365 1/4th. Usually the length of an year has been overestimated, making the Hindu calendar lose accuracy quicker. These errors were order of a day per year versus off by about 10 minutes like the Julian calendar.
This was less of a problem historically because Ujjain observatory would correct the calendar time time using accurate observation of the Equinox. Since the fall of Ujjain observatory the Hindu calendar has been accumulating drift error for centuries.