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Confessions of a Homeschool Dad
Nov. 30, 2006
We Never Realize How Little We Know
We're still figuring out how they did things before computers were around. Apparently, we forget that there were plenty of extraordinarily smart and talented people around before our own lifetimes.
Here's a device that could track the sun, moon, and all visible planets through their irregular orbits.
Keep in mind that the Earth, which is itself orbiting the Sun, is constantly changing its position relative to all of these cellestial objects and, since they are orbiting the Sun in a different track, so are they.
About this device (apparently), Cicero "wrote that Posidonius had made an instrument 'which at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the sun, the moon and the five planets that take place in the heavens every day and night.'"
In the never-ending conceit that "we're smart and everyone before us is a cute, well-meaning, ignorant Neanderthal", the LA Times article concludes with, "Historians have generally dismissed Cicero's words as extravagant or even mythic, but the new discoveries suggest he may have been correct."
Hmmmm....I wonder what, or who, else that the "ancients" wrote about might be correct...
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