TIL 5: Iambic pentameter

[Birdjaguar]

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky…
--William Wordsworth

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life…
--That Brit guy

Five is more than just a prime number. It is a classical number of importance. Tastes, senses, elements, digit, planets all come in fives. it infects poetry, religion, alchemy, biology, math, music, astronomy and our language too.

High Five!
Gimme five!

Previous threads:

The alpha version
The beta version
Today I Learned #3: There's a wiki for everything!
TIL 4: Somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I would just like to point out that there are more than five planets.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Five planets seems to us quite risible,
But erstwhile common sense: they're visible!

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Five planets seems to us quite risible,
But erstwhile common sense: they're visible!

Uranus is apparently barely visible to the naked eye. Conditions need to be optimum, though. You need excellent eyesight and it needs to not be at its dimmest.

So going by naked-eye visibility, there are 6. Seven if you count Earth (it's got naked-eye visibility from the International Space Station).

 

[Birdjaguar]

Uranus is apparently barely visible to the naked eye. Conditions need to be optimum, though. You need excellent eyesight and it needs to not be at its dimmest.

So going by naked-eye visibility, there are 6. Seven if you count Earth (it's got naked-eye visibility from the International Space Station).

Please note the use of the word "classical" in the OP. In addition Uranus's visibility is likely because of its already been discovered and people now know where to look when conditions are perfect. Prior to modern times is there any record of people seeing the planet and noting it?

You clearly missed the point.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Please note the use of the word "classical" in the OP. In addition Uranus's visibility is likely because of its already been discovered and people now know where to look when conditions are perfect. Prior to modern times is there any record of people seeing the planet and noting it?

You clearly missed the point.

I see no connection between "classical" and Uranus.

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus):

Before its recognition as a planet, Uranus had been observed on numerous occasions, albeit generally misidentified as a star. The earliest possible known observation was by Hipparchus, who in 128 BC might have recorded it as a star for his star catalogue that was later incorporated into Ptolemy's Almagest.[27] The earliest definite sighting was in 1690, when John Flamsteed observed it at least six times, cataloguing it as 34 Tauri. The French astronomer Pierre Charles Le Monnier observed Uranus at least twelve times between 1750 and 1769,[28] including on four consecutive nights.

William Herschel observed Uranus on 13 March 1781 from the garden of his house at 19 New King Street in Bath, Somerset, England (now the Herschel Museum of Astronomy),[29] and initially reported it (on 26 April 1781) as a comet.[30] With a homemade 6.2-inch reflecting telescope, Herschel "engaged in a series of observations on the parallax of the fixed stars."[31][32]

While Herschel would have used a telescope, you are not going to sit there and tell me that Hipparchus used one. Granted, it's listed as a "possible" sighting. But from the articles I've read, the general agreement is that it was seen by the naked eye but was assumed to be merely another star. Just because you misidentify an object you see, it doesn't mean you didn't see it.

Life is particularly stressful these days, Birdjaguar. I don't need snark or rudeness.

 

[Birdjaguar]

TIL that Hipparchos was a second century BCE Greek who built math and science ideas on those of the Babylonians.

Prior to early modern science and thinking there were five humors and five elements and five planets. Often the term "classical" is applied to many of things and thinking that predate the last five centuries or so.

You seem to be referring to this:
"Hipparchos was suggested in a 2013 paper to have accidentally observed the planet Uranus in 128 BC and catalogued it as a star, over a millennium and a half before its formal discovery in 1781."

Such a 2013 suggestion about an unreliable star chart that is 2000 years old does nothing to dismiss the notion that ancients knew of only five planets. Nor does one man's misread of a speck of starlight grant Uranus ancient planethood.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

TIL that Hipparchos was a second century BCE Greek who built math and science ideas on those of the Babylonians.

Prior to early modern science and thinking there were five humors and five elements and five planets. Often the term "classical" is applied to many of things and thinking that predate the last five centuries or so.

You seem to be referring to this:
"Hipparchos was suggested in a 2013 paper to have accidentally observed the planet Uranus in 128 BC and catalogued it as a star, over a millennium and a half before its formal discovery in 1781."

Such a 2013 suggestion about an unreliable star chart that is 2000 years old does nothing to dismiss the notion that ancients knew of only five planets. Nor does one man's misread of a speck of starlight grant Uranus ancient planethood.

Uranus has always been a planet. The fact that we didn't know it for sure until the 18th century is irrelevant.

 

[Plotinus]

Classically, there are seven planets: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Classically, there are seven planets: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

Dear sir, you have ruined my fiver. Were the sun ad moon called planets or were they thought of as something different from the other five?

 

[Plotinus]

Well, now you're asking. I think the answer is yes, they were called planets, but I'm having a hard time finding an explicit statement of this. Plato, in the Timaeus, refers to "the sun and moon and five other stars, which are called the planets", but it's unclear whether he's calling all seven of them "planets" or just the last-mentioned five!

Still, planet, in antiquity, didn't mean the same thing as it does today. It just meant an object that moves differently in the sky from the "fixed" stars. So by that definition, the Sun and Moon are certainly planets, though obviously that seems odd to us given that we use the word "planet" to mean something that revolves around the Sun. Different classical writers had different views of the order of these objects. The Greeks all agreed that the Moon is closer to the Earth than all the others (because all the others can, on occasion, be seen passing behind it), and that Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are in that order moving away from the Earth (the Babylonians were more confused about this), but the location of the Sun was tricky. Plato and Aristotle place it next up after the Moon, but Ptolemy puts it in between Venus and Mars. And that seems to me at least implicitly to make it a planet, as its sphere is among the others.

(I did, by the way, find the following passage from Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding, Bk VIII ch 9: "...the clock struck five just as Mr. Jones took his leave of Gloucester; an hour at which (as it was now mid-winter) the dirty fingers of Night would have drawn her sable curtain over the universe, had not the moon forbid her, who now, with a face broad and as red as those of some jolly mortals, who, like her, turn night into day, began to rise from her bed, where she had slumbered away the day, in order to sit up all night. Jones had not travelled far before he paid his compliments to that beautiful planet..." - so at least in the eighteenth century the Moon could be called a "planet", even though by then classical cosmology had long since been superseded!)

 

[Valka D'Ur]

@Birdjaguar, just read up on astrology as it was in classical, medieval, and Renaissance times. Astrology was considered science, and the Sun and Moon were considered planets. Johannes Kepler was both an astrologer and an astronomer (astrology paid better). Thankfully he finally left astrology behind.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Still, planet, in antiquity, didn't mean the same thing as it does today. It just meant an object that moves differently in the sky from the "fixed" stars.

Yes, the word planet derives from the Greek word for "wandering." The wandering in question was, as you say, as against the "fixed stars," which move maintaining the same configuration relative to one another across the night sky. Moon through Saturn move around within that fixed backdrop.

The planets were thought to be crystaline spheres, concentric with the earth. I'm not sure how they conceived the little speck we see relative to that whole sphere, but it was really the sphere that was understood to be the planet. And the sphere's motion was thought to give what we see as the planet its trajectory. Elaborate systems of cycles and epicycles were devised to predict that motion (which became tons easier when we imagined them (and us on earth) all rotating around the sun instead.) The spheres produced a music that was inaudible to fallen human ears (Adam and Eve could hear it before they sinned), and the planets' motion was regarded as a dance, also.

Dante (the author) makes this the setting for his Paradiso. Dante (the pilgrim, his self-inset avatar) flies up through these spheres and meets various categories of virtuous figures in each sphere (e.g. holy warriors, crusaders, in the sphere of Mars). Above the fixed stars was the Primum Mobile, which imparted motion to the whole system, and the empyrean, which was outside of even that: the pure and incorruptible realm of God Himself. The whole Ptolemaic system was gorgeously imagined. It's a shame in some ways that we lost it, sublime as the image that replaced it may be in its own right.

Later today, I'll give y'all some iambic pentameter to read that draws on the old conception.

 

[Plotinus]

Aristotle argued that there is no music of the spheres, disappointingly. We often assume that, before Copernicus, everyone believed in "the" geocentric system, but in fact there was quite a lot of disagreement about the details.

Also it's worth mentioning that heliocentrism, in itself, doesn't really make it easier to understand the motions of the planets than geocentrism. The Copernican system needs a complex system of epicycles just as the Ptolemaic one does. Things only became simpler once Kepler realised that the planets move in ellipses, not circles at all, and that realisation required modern advances in optics that revealed the inaccuracies of the old epicycles theory. Until that time, Ptolemy's methods fitted the observations perfectly well, and indeed more or less as well as Copernicus's.

I did manage to root out the following two passages explicitly numbering seven planets. Pliny ("Natural History" II.4) and Isidore of Seville ("Etymologies" III.32):

Upheld by the same vapour between earth and heaven, at definite spaces apart, hang the seven stars which owing to their motion we call "planets", although no stars wander less than they do. In the midst of these moves the sun, whose magnitude and power are the greatest, and who is the ruler not only of the seasons and of the lands; but even of the stars themselves and of the heaven. Taking into account all that he effects, we must believe him to be the soul, or more precisely the mind, of the whole world, the supreme ruling principle and divinity of nature.

The philosophers have proposed seven heavens belonging to the universe, that is, seven planets, from the coordinated motion of their spheres.

The Pliny passage is especially interesting as he agrees with Ptolemy in placing the Sun in the middle of the planets, but he also disagrees with Ptolemy and with Aristotle in making the Sun the source of motion of the other planets. Aristotle, of course, thought that the "first mover" was on the outside of the system, transmitting motion from one sphere to the next towards the Earth.

 

[Birdjaguar]

@Valka D'Ur just read up on Babylonian astronomy to learn about the origins of of western astronomy and astrology.

@Plotinus It appears that we have to back way before the Greeks to see where they sourced their view of the heavens. But it does seem that seven objects formed the basis. even though the sun and moon were thought of as not quite the same.

"The word "star" (mul in Sumerian; kakkabu in Akkadian[93]) was inclusive to all celestial bodies, stars, constellations, and planets. A more specific term for planets existed however (udu.idim in Sumerian; bibbu in Akkadian, literally "wild sheep"[93]) to distinguish them from other stars (of which they were a subcategory): unlike the stars thought to be fixed into their location, the planets were observed to move. By the 3rd millennium BC, the planet Venus was identified as the astral form of the goddess Inanna (or Ishtar), and motifs such as the morning and evening star were applied to her. Jupiter became Marduk (hence the name "Marduk Star", also called Nibiru), Mercury was the "jumping one" (in reference to its comparatively fast motion and low visibility) associated with the gods Ninurta and Nabu, and Mars was the god of pestilence Nergal and thought to portend evil and death. Saturn was also sinister. The most obvious characteristic of the stars were their luminosity and their study for the purposes of divination, solving calendrical calculations, and predictions of the appearances of planets, led to the discovery of their periodic motion. From 600 BC onwards, the relative periodicity between them began to be studied.[94]"

Ancient near eastern cosmology - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Manfred Belheim]

TIL that quite a lot of people think the Mandela Effect is actually A Thing. As in not just "misremembering", but some sort of fractured reality due to the Large Hadron Collider. I genuinely did not know that and am having trouble reconciling this with assumed human intelligence.

 

[Samson]

TIL that quite a lot of people think the Mandela Effect is actually A Thing. As in not just "misremembering", but some sort of fractured reality due to the Large Hadron Collider. I genuinely did not know that and am having trouble reconciling this with assumed human intelligence.

How do you know? How does one know if the misremembering Mandela Effect is actually A Thing? Have you actually met someone who does not remember Nelson Mandela was president of SA, but was aware of things at the time?

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Have you actually met someone who does not remember Nelson Mandela was president of SA, but was aware of things at the time?

Have I met people who didn't know much about global politics, but were still a conscious sentient being? Yes, I think I've met quite a lot of those.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Nelson Mandela designed the Hadron Collider, if I recall correctly.

 

[Farm Boy]

Spoiler it all blurs together after a while :