Related papers: Astronomical arguments in Newton's Chronology
This historical essay describes the struggle to understand how the sun shines. The story begins with the disagreement between Kelvin and Darwin over the age of the sun in the middle of the 19th century and continues through the revelations…
Abundance ratios of radioactive to stable neutron-capture elements in very metal-poor stars may be used to estimate the age of our Galaxy. But extracting accurate ages from these data requires continuing work on many fronts: a)…
Celebrating 170th anniversary of the discovery of Neptune, I review the story of the discovery that startled the world. The story is an interplay of scientific triumph and human weakness and an example of how science works in a…
Sundials and gnomons pointing out dates and times are a beautiful reminder of how we understand the movement of the Sun and use it to structure day and year. They also encapsulate the basic astronomical knowledge and concepts of the…
The possible discovery of astronomical effects due to precession - such as the shift in the declination of heliacal raising of bright stars or the precession of the equinoxes - is reviewed for various ancient cultures in the world. Although…
An overview of the experimental and observational status in gravitational physics is given, both for the known tests of general relativity and Newtonian gravity, but also for the increasing number of results where these theories run into…
The past fifty years have been an epoch of impressive progress in the field of astronomical technology. Practically all the technical tools, which we use today, have been developed during that time span. While the first half of this period…
Theoretical analysis proves that human survivability is dominated by an unusual physical, rather than biological, mechanism, which yields an exact law. The law agrees with all experimental data, but, contrary to existing theories, it is the…
The modern usage of the words astronomy and astrology is traced back to distinctions, largely ignored in recent scholarship. Three interpretations of celestial phenomena (in a geometric, a substantialist and a prognostic versions) coexisted…
We consider the little-known anthropic argument of Fontenelle dealing with the nature of cometary orbits, given a year before the publication of Newton's Principia. This is particularly interesting in view of the rapid development of the…
In this note we shall give a new proof to a quadrature formulae due to Newton.
We investigate the structure common to causal theories that attempt to explain a (part of) the world. Causality implies conservation of identity, itself a far from simple notion. It imposes strong demands on the universalizing power of the…
Oceanic planets formed by type Ia supernovae become spectacularly abundant as stars cease to shine. However, the timing may not be altogether inappropriate. Neutrino annihilation might thermally regulate iron-cored water-worlds, sustaining…
Perhaps more than other physical sciences, astronomy is frequently statistical in nature. The objects under study are inaccessible to direct manipulation in the laboratory, so the astronomer is restricted to observing a few external…
We introduce a logic for reasoning about evidence, that essentially views evidence as a function from prior beliefs (before making an observation) to posterior beliefs (after making the observation). We provide a sound and complete…
An age-old controversy in mathematics concerns the necessity and the possibility of constructive proofs. The controversy has been rekindled by recent advances which demonstrate the feasibility of a fully constructive mathematics. This…
We introduce a logic for reasoning about evidence that essentially views evidence as a function from prior beliefs (before making an observation) to posterior beliefs (after making the observation). We provide a sound and complete…
Isaac Newton, in popular imagination the Ur-scientist, was an outstanding humanist scholar. His researches on, among others, ancient philosophy, are thorough and appear to be connected to and fit within his larger philosophical and…
It is argued that some of the recent claims for cosmology are grossly overblown. Cosmology rests on a very small database: it suffers from many fundamental difficulties as a science (if it is a science at all) whilst observations of distant…
A time-dependent model of space-time is used to suggest simple explanations for the increasing of the Astronomical unit, as well as the increasing of the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The Pioneer anomaly is also considered.