Jupiter Babylonians tracked with advanced geometry – Digital Journal Juarez

Madrid – In autumn last year, Mathieu Ossendrijver became convinced that I had found something that changed the history of science. This doctor in astrophysics had for years trying to decipher a clay tablets written in Babylon between the years 350 and 50 before the Common Era, says this day the Spanish newspaper El Pais. Seemed to speak of astronomy and polygons, but they were so broken that it was completely impossible to understand.

The find in the archives of the British Museum in London of another of these texts written in mud has now made it possible to decipher the entire message. In a study released today in Science, Ossendrijver explained that the tablets show that the Babylonians were the first to use geometry to describe the motion of a planet. This implies that 14 centuries ahead of Europeans, hitherto considered discoverers of such mathematical operations.

“The fifth tablet was the key,” explains Ossendrijver the phone from his office at the Humboldt University Berlin. The Babylonian civilization emerged in Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq, and is well known their advanced knowledge of mathematics and astronomy. So far all his astronomical texts, often written with a stylus on clay, were based on arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division).

The starting point of this new research were two boards archived the British and described in 1955. They seemed to talk about trapezoids, but its meaning was not clear. Ossendrijver said he placed two tablets in the London museum that also mention trapezes, apparently applied to astronomical measurements, but its meaning still eluded him.

Already in 2015, a colleague working in Austria you He showed photos of another tablet on which the German thought he saw something definitive. The astronomer returned to the British capital, translated the text and compared with the other four. Last September 2015 became convinced that this was a description of Jupiter totally ahead of its time.

The fifth tablet represents the path of the planet in the sky using traps. The area of ​​the first trapezium allows its position within 60 days. Last twice as long, 120 days, the planet as seen from Earth stops its apparent breakthrough in the sky and begins to recede, making it possible to reconstruct the movement trapezes throughout the year. Furthermore, the text explains how to divide the first trapezoid in two identical area to know that the sun takes 28 days to cover half of his first term.

The use of geometry in astronomy “is very new “stresses Ossendrijver, since it means an abstract representation of time and speed. This would be different from the way the Greeks applied geometry to physical space, he says. In fact, until now, he explains astronomer, it was thought that these techniques were not used until the fourteenth century by mathematicians at Oxford and Paris, who used them in ballistics. “To find applications in astronomy probably have to wait for the time of Isaac Newton,” said the astronomer.

The discovery was featured on the cover of Science magazine, which highlights that “changes books story “and shows the” laggards “who were European in this field.

The study shows that the Babylonian astronomers” could propose an astronomical problem, develop abstract thinking to solve and then contrast it in real and observable framework “said John Steele, a researcher at Brown University and an expert in this field. They used geometry in an abstract sense to set the time and speed, in this case a planet, Jupiter, representing Marduk The main Babylonian god.

How could miss that knowledge for 14 centuries? It is impossible to know, says Ossendrijver. What it is clear is that the same thing may be happening today because of the destruction of heritage in Mesopotamia. “It’s not just the heritage of Iraq, but of European, the root of astronomy, our own culture is threatened,” he laments.

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