Reading: Astronomy.
2026-01-30 15:23![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asher553"And God said, 'Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens, to distinguish between the day and the night; and they shall be for signs and seasons, and for days and years." - Genesis 1:14.
"He counts the number of the stars, to all of them He calls by name." - Psalm 147:4.
Nowadays I don't think we usually think of the science of astronomy as proceeding directly from mathematics (or vice versa). We might think about observing the stars with a telescope in the backyard and of learning the constellations; or we might think about the nuclear fusion process that powers the stars, having learned something about it from a book or a science documentary on televison. We might think about space explorers in science and science fiction, and how man harnessed the power of the rocket to overcome gravity and explore space. If you were to ask me to design a scheme to organize books, I might start the sciences with Mathematics, and then go to Physics, and maybe I'd put Astronomy after that. But the Library of Congress system - designed by John Russell Young and Herbert Putnam at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century - puts Astronomy (QB) immediately after Mathematics (QA); Physics (QC) comes after that.
The astronomer Fred Hoyle explains (Astronomy, pp. 10-11) that if man had not been able to observe the sun, moon, and stars, he might not ever have evolved the idea of the compass directions, time, geometry, or mathematics itself. Mathematician Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man, p. 165) agrees: "Why did astronomy advance as a first science ahead of medicine? ... A major reason is that the observed motions of the stars turned out to be calculable, and from an early time ... lent themselves to mathematics. The pre-eminence of astronomy rests on the peculiarity that it can be treated mathematically; and the progress of physics, and most recently of biology, has hinged equally on finding formulations of their laws that can be displayed as mathematical models." When speaking of mathematical models in the life sciences, Bronowski is undoubtedly thinking of the skull of the Taung child, which led to JB's own interest in the broader evolution of science.
It was Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica which formulated the basic principles, not only of astronomy or of physics, but of mathematics itself (calculus) - prompted by a visit from the young Edmond Halley (TAOM, p. 233).
And when you think about it, astronomy, like mathematics, is not only in the heavens, but it is a thing very near to you. If you want to look at Mars with that backyard telescope, you've got to know where to aim it; and that entails learning how to use astronomical charts and right ascension and declination and sidereal time. And all of that, in turn, means thinking mathematically about your place in the universe. And not just with a telescope: understanding the cycles of the moon, and even the times of sunrise and sunset - that's astronomy too. And all of it proceeds from understanding the basic fact that you are standing on the surface of a sphere that is spinning and orbiting in space.
And even the measurement of that sphere leads us to mathematics (geometry, or geo-metry, the measurement of the Earth). And that brings us back to "universals of experience. There are two experiences on which our visual world is based: that gravity is vertical, and that the horizon stands at right angles to it." (TAOM, p. 157.) [589]
"He counts the number of the stars, to all of them He calls by name." - Psalm 147:4.
Nowadays I don't think we usually think of the science of astronomy as proceeding directly from mathematics (or vice versa). We might think about observing the stars with a telescope in the backyard and of learning the constellations; or we might think about the nuclear fusion process that powers the stars, having learned something about it from a book or a science documentary on televison. We might think about space explorers in science and science fiction, and how man harnessed the power of the rocket to overcome gravity and explore space. If you were to ask me to design a scheme to organize books, I might start the sciences with Mathematics, and then go to Physics, and maybe I'd put Astronomy after that. But the Library of Congress system - designed by John Russell Young and Herbert Putnam at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century - puts Astronomy (QB) immediately after Mathematics (QA); Physics (QC) comes after that.
The astronomer Fred Hoyle explains (Astronomy, pp. 10-11) that if man had not been able to observe the sun, moon, and stars, he might not ever have evolved the idea of the compass directions, time, geometry, or mathematics itself. Mathematician Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man, p. 165) agrees: "Why did astronomy advance as a first science ahead of medicine? ... A major reason is that the observed motions of the stars turned out to be calculable, and from an early time ... lent themselves to mathematics. The pre-eminence of astronomy rests on the peculiarity that it can be treated mathematically; and the progress of physics, and most recently of biology, has hinged equally on finding formulations of their laws that can be displayed as mathematical models." When speaking of mathematical models in the life sciences, Bronowski is undoubtedly thinking of the skull of the Taung child, which led to JB's own interest in the broader evolution of science.
It was Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica which formulated the basic principles, not only of astronomy or of physics, but of mathematics itself (calculus) - prompted by a visit from the young Edmond Halley (TAOM, p. 233).
And when you think about it, astronomy, like mathematics, is not only in the heavens, but it is a thing very near to you. If you want to look at Mars with that backyard telescope, you've got to know where to aim it; and that entails learning how to use astronomical charts and right ascension and declination and sidereal time. And all of that, in turn, means thinking mathematically about your place in the universe. And not just with a telescope: understanding the cycles of the moon, and even the times of sunrise and sunset - that's astronomy too. And all of it proceeds from understanding the basic fact that you are standing on the surface of a sphere that is spinning and orbiting in space.
And even the measurement of that sphere leads us to mathematics (geometry, or geo-metry, the measurement of the Earth). And that brings us back to "universals of experience. There are two experiences on which our visual world is based: that gravity is vertical, and that the horizon stands at right angles to it." (TAOM, p. 157.) [589]
