Related papers: Dante, astrology and astronomy
The concept of a random Lagrangian is proposed. It is considered as a basis for a new view of the old problems such as renormalization, nonzero vacuum energy and the anthropic principle. It gives rise to nontrivial consequences both in…
The question of annual stellar parallax is usually viewed as having been a "win-win situation" for seventeenth-century astronomers who subscribed to the Copernican view of universe in which the Earth orbits the Sun and the Sun is one of…
Despite centuries of close association, statistics and astronomy are surprisingly distant today. Most observational astronomical research relies on an inadequate toolbox of methodological tools. Yet the needs are substantial: astronomy…
The traditional cultures of Aboriginal Australians include a significant astronomical component, perpetuated through oral tradition, ceremony, and art. This astronomical knowledge includes a deep understanding of the motion of objects in…
Studies in Australian Indigenous astronomical knowledge reveal few accounts of the visible planets in the sky. However, what information we do have tells us that Aboriginal people were close observers of planets and their motions, noting…
This paper examines the theory of a Babylonian origin of Aryabhata's planetary constants. It shows that Aryabhata's basic constant is closer to the Indian counterpart than to the Babylonian one. Sketching connections between Aryabhata's…
Some of the assumptions of cosmology, as based on the simplest version of General Relativity, are discussed. It is argued that by slight modifications of standard gravitation theory, our notion of the sources of gravity {the right hand side…
Some European scholars in the second half of 18th century discussed the myth of Atlantis taking into account the studies of the evolution of the Earth and of the beginning and diffusion of civilization, in particular the beginning of…
Astrophysics = the star physics was beginning its development without a supporting of measurement data, which could not be obtained then. Still astrophysics exists without this support, although now astronomers collected a lot of valuable…
Astronomers occasionally detect an object having unexpected shape, unexplainable photometry, or unprecedented spectra that are inconsistent with our contemporary knowledge of the universe. Upon careful assessment, many of these anomalies…
Age dating starbursts is an exercise with many caveats. We attempt to summarise a discussion session that was lead along a rather optimistic guideline: the aim was to highlight that current age estimates, despite undeniable uncertainties,…
Anthropic models can give testable predictions, which can be confirmed or falsified at a specified confidence level. This is illustrated using the successful prediction of the cosmological constant as an example. The history and the nature…
Physical properties of stars such as luminosity, surface temperature, distance, or mass are measured from observations. These physical properties are of paramount importance to understand how stars are born, live, and die in the universe…
There are two broad opposing classes of attitudes to reality (realist vs idealist, material vs mental) with corresponding attitudes to knowledge (objective vs subjective, scientific vs romantic). I argue that these attitudes can be…
I discuss various aspects of archeoastronomy concentrating on physical artifacts (i.e., not including ethno-archeoastronomy) focusing on the period that ended about 2000 years ago. I present examples of artifacts interpreted as showing the…
One of the presuppositions of science since the times of Galileo, Newton, Laplace, and Descartes has been the predictability of the world. This idea has strongly influenced scientific and technological models. However, in recent decades,…
Physical cosmology tries to understand the Universe at large with its origin and evolution. Observational and experimental situations in cosmology do not allow us to proceed purely based on the empirical means. We examine in which sense our…
A group of line drawings in recent reports made by physics students during experimenting is investigated in order to describe the attitudes that can be related to the act of drawing. These attitudes represent time behavior and are related…
I discuss the classical cosmological tests-- angular size-redshift, flux-redshift, and galaxy number counts-- in the light of the cosmology prescribed by the intepretation of CMB anisotropies. The discussion is somewhat of a primer for…
A general sketch of how the problem of space dimensionality depends on Anthropic arguments is presented. A new argument in favor of a stable scenario for space dimensionality for a time scale longer than that required for the existence of…