Many books describing the history of... often emphasize Europe as its center and origin. In some Western countries, this has led to a belief in the supremacy of the white race to this day.
However, the earliest history of the activity of Homo sapiens to discover patterns and principles in the world around him shows that by no means the specific characteristic was "the white race", in our case the Greeks, for example.
While the Greeks focused on geometric principles for celestial patterns, such as angles and circles, Chinese astronomers looked for mathematical principles for these patterns.
The first great Chinese thinker, Confucius (551-478 BC), was not a system builder like Pythagoras or Aristotle.
What was central to Confucius was the worship of the cosmos through the worship of its parts. The notion of a God or first-mover does not exist in China.
Heaven was in a sense the Chinese God, and the emperor was the son of heaven and the head of the state religion.
There were, however, several cosmological schools. For example, the Gui Tian school imagined heaven as a hemisphere over a domed earth.
The Hun Tian school, on the other hand, envisioned a spherical earth floating in a celestial sphere.
And the Xuan Ye school placed the heavenly bodies in an empty and infinite space.
However, these conceptual models were far removed from the observed patterns of planetary motion, and to our knowledge, no attempts have been made to describe and predict the celestial patterns with the ideas of these schools.
The oldest surviving Chinese document of a systematic description of planetary motions is the Wu Xing Zhan, or "Forecast of the Five Stars," meaning the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter.
These planets are regularly visible in the night sky as bright stars. It is an anonymous text discovered at the opening of a Han tomb in 1973 and is dated to 168 BC.
Although there are some earlier documents describing planetary patterns, they do not contain any instructions on how to calculate the positions of the planets.
That is possible with the 'Forecast of the Five Stars'. The text contains tables with observations of the times and positions of rising and fall of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury, always explicitly stating their cyclic patterns.
In addition, the text also contains a predictive model for each planet: an initial state is chosen, namely 246 BC,
at which the cyclical planetary movements begin and from which the positions of the planets can be calculated at later dates.
The year 246 BC. does not appear to have been chosen by chance: it corresponds to the first year of the reign of the Qin king who would become the first emperor of unified China a quarter of a century later.
"Forecast of the Five Stars" is elaborated into a principle-based system by Liu Hong (c. 129-210 AD). Liu Hong's theory was so advanced that it was immediately adopted by the Imperial Government of the Eastern Han Dynasty.
From patterns to principles. With its great precision, Liu Hong's model stands on the same level as the models of Hipparchus and Ptolemy.
In the fourth century AD. there is the astronomer Yu Hsi in China, but just like in Europe the further improvement of astronomy comes more or less to a halt.
In Europe, research picks up again in the Renaissance with the likes of Galileo and Kepler.
Many books describing the history of... often emphasize Europe as its center and origin. In some Western countries, this has led to a belief in the supremacy of the white race to this day.
However, the earliest history of the activity of Homo sapiens to discover patterns and principles in the world around him
shows that by no means this was the specific characteristic of "the white race", in our case the Greeks, for example.
This early history shows that Homo sapiens, where ever on this planet he lived, was capable of the same things.
There is no historical proof of the natural supremacy of any specific group of Homo sapiens over others.
Thank you for your attention again.....
The Discussion
[13:21] oola Neruda: Native Americans had ways of marking solstice etc.
[13:21] .: Beertje :. (beertje.beaumont): why was the astronomy coming to an end those days?
[13:21] oola Neruda: I've seen a petroglyph by them of a Super Nova
[13:21] herman Bergson: I don't know Beertje
[13:22] .: Beertje :. (beertje.beaumont): and that was not for years but for ages
[13:22] herman Bergson: it did not come to an end actually...it just stopped in its development
[13:22] oola Neruda: at some points...the church interfered
[13:22] herman Bergson: May be one reason....but in China seemed to have happened the same....
[13:23] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): ok
[13:23] herman Bergson: Maybe they became more interested in astrology???
[13:23] herman Bergson: And they already had the calculation system for it
[13:23] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): ah
[13:24] oola Neruda: farmers need to know the "seasons"... the dates
[13:24] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): very important yes
[13:25] herman Bergson: That they could calculate, I assume....dates of seasons etc...based on the appearance of certain planets in the sky
[13:26] Marlena Rickettsi (marlenalilly): What of the Babylonians?
[13:26] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): yes i think thats how they did it.
[13:26] herman Bergson: You could wonder about what questions people motivated to be interested in the celestial bodies and their movements....
[13:26] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): There is a book in Sweden called "bondepraktikan" describing things like that
[13:27] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): farming/astrology
[13:27] oola Neruda: sailing... therefore knowing which direction you are going
[13:27] oola Neruda whispers: or...
[13:27] herman Bergson: Were they religious, looking at forecasting the future, questions liker that?
[13:27] oola Neruda: follow the North Star...
[13:28] oola Neruda: navigation ..... of all sorts
[13:28] herman Bergson: yes practical things like that perhaps....
[13:28] herman Bergson: The way WE question the universe is completely different
[13:29] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Farmer's_Almanac
[13:29] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): i think its this one of this is the english version of it but its the same thing
[13:29] herman Bergson: We have a Dutch version too, Bejiita :-)
[13:30] herman Bergson: But what is clear is that homo sapiens was as clever in those days as he is now
[13:30] herman Bergson: Whether living in Europe or in China
[13:30] oola Neruda: without fancy equipment...
[13:31] herman Bergson: yes...only the conditions and circumstances were different
[13:31] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): ㋡
[13:31] herman Bergson: so...no white supremacy there :-)
[13:32] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): it workes the same way everywhere cause everyone realized this is how its working
[13:32] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): this is how its done
[13:32] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): to get it right
[13:32] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): farming is a very good example,le if this
[13:34] herman Bergson: it is interesting to observe that people in those days could develop methods and theories for which we now still need a lot of time to study and understand them
[13:35] herman Bergson: Well... I guess we've learned enough for today ^_^
[13:35] herman Bergson: Thank you all again for your participation..^_^
[13:35] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): ㋡
[13:35] oola Neruda: thank you for your research
[13:36] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): YAY! (yay!)
[13:36] herman Bergson: See you next Thursday :-)
[13:36] .: Beertje :. (beertje.beaumont): thank you Herman
[13:36] herman Bergson: Class dismissed....
[13:36] bergfrau Apfelbaum: Thank you Herman and class!
[13:36] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): off to the plupptable!
[13:36] Particle Physicist Bejiita (bejiita.imako): ㋡
