Related papers: Thinking about Archeoastronomy
It is important to be clear as to whether a theory such as evolutionary archaeology pertains to biological evolution, in which acquired change is obliterated at the end of each generation, or cultural change, in which acquired change is…
We provide a brief, and inevitably incomplete overview of the use of Machine Learning (ML) and other AI methods in astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology. Astronomy entered the big data era with the first digital sky surveys in the early…
Half a century has passed since the foundation of nuclear astrophysics. Since then, this discipline has reached its maturity. Today, nuclear astrophysics constitutes a multidisciplinary crucible of knowledge that combines the achievements…
Astronomy is entering a new era of discovery, coincident with the establishment of new facilities for observation and simulation that will routinely generate petabytes of data. While an increasing reliance on automated data analysis is…
Modern astronomy has been rapidly increasing our ability to see deeper into the universe, acquiring enormous samples of cosmic populations. Gaining astrophysical insights from these datasets requires a wide range of sophisticated…
If one wants to translate the heliocentric picture of planets moving uniformly on circular orbits about the sun to the perspective of a terrestrial observer, using classical (ancient) geometric means only, one is naturally led to the…
The architectural complexes composed by the two main pyramids of Giza together with their temples are investigated from an inter-disciplinary point of view, taking into account their astronomical alignments as well as their relationships…
The next decade affords tremendous opportunity to achieve the goals of Galactic archaeology. That is, to reconstruct the evolutionary narrative of the Milky Way, based on the empirical data that describes its current morphological,…
In the last decade a new generation of telescopes and sensors has allowed the production of a very large amount of data and astronomy has become, a data-rich science; this transition is often labeled as: "data revolution" and "data…
The changing heavens have played a central role in the scientific effort of astronomers for centuries. Galileo's synoptic observations of the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus starting in 1610, provided strong refutation of Ptolemaic…
This article is the written version of the closing talk presented at the conference `A Century of Cosmology' held at San Servolo, Italy, in August 2007. I focus on the prospects of constraining fundamental physics from cosmological…
For generations, people have complained that things used to be better in the past. In this paper, we investigate this change by specifically looking at creativity in astronomy. To do this,we explore if older constellations reflected a…
The cosmic Middle Ages, spanning the last 8-10 Gyr of the Universe, is a critical period in which massive early-formed systems coexist with global star formation quenching in less massive galaxies, yet galaxies experience further dynamical,…
NGST offers unprecedented opportunities for charting the `dark ages' beyond the limits of the deep optical surveys conducted with HST. An equally important motivation, however, is a detailed physical understanding of the later stages of…
Scientific discussions of the arrow of time often get quite confusing due to highly complex systems they deal with. Popular literature then often coveys messages that tend to get lost in translation. The purpose of this note is to demystify…
Historical materials are abundant. Yet, piecing together how human knowledge has evolved and spread both diachronically and synchronically remains a challenge that can so far only be very selectively addressed. The vast volume of materials…
We summarize the first exploratory investigation into whether Machine Learning techniques can augment science strategic planning. We find that an approach based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation using abstracts drawn from high impact astronomy…
World population and the number of cultural artifacts are growing exponentially or faster, while cultural interaction approaches the fidelity of a global nervous system. Every day hundreds of millions of images are loaded into social…
This paper aims at presenting a brief overview of astronomical exchanges between the Eastern and Western parts of the Islamic world from the 8th to 14th century. These cultural interactions were in fact vaster involving Persian, Indian,…
We present a perspective of strange quark matter research in the 1991-2001 decade focused on astrophysics topics, with particular attention to open problems. We outline the basic concepts and developments in the field, paying attention to…