* Scribes in Old Babylonian period knew Pythagoras's theorem 1,000 years before he did
* Cuneiform tablets in New York exhibition show sophistication of Babylonian mathematicians
* Interest in this strand of history growing
(CNN) -- Over 1,000 years before Pythagoras was calculating the length of a hypotenuse, sophisticated scribes in Mesopotamia were working with the same theory to calculate the area of their farmland.
Working on clay tablets, students would "write" out their math problems in cuneiform script, a method that involved making wedge-shaped impressions in the clay with a blunt reed.
These tablets bear evidence of practical as well as more advanced theoretical math and show just how sophisticated the ancient Babylonians were with numbers -- more than a millennium before Pythagoras and Euclid were doing the same in ancient Greece.
"They are the most sophisticated mathematics from anywhere in the world at that time," said Alexander Jones, a Professor of the History of the Exact Sciences in Antiquity at New York University.
He is co-curator of "Before Pythagoras: The Culture of Old Babylonian Mathematics," an exhibition at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York.
They are the most sophisticated mathematics from anywhere in the world at that time
--Curator Alexander Jones
"This is nearly 4,000 years ago and there's no other ancient culture at that time that we know of that is doing anything like that level of work. It seems to be going beyond anything that daily life needs," he said.
Many scribes were trained in the ancient city of Nippur in what is now southern Iraq, where a large number of tablets were discovered between the mid-19th century and the 1920s.
Typical problems they worked on involved calculating the area of a given field, or the width of a trench.
These problems, says Jones, required the kind of math training taught to American Grade 10 students, but not in a format we would now recognize.
"It's not like algebra, it's all written out in words and numerals but no symbols and no times signs or equals or anything like that," he said.
This system, and the lack of recognizable Western mathematical symbols such as x and y, meant that it was several years before historians and archaeologists understood just what was represented on these tablets.
It took a young Austrian mathematician in the 1920s, named Otto Neugebauer, to crack the mathematical system and work out what the ancient Babylonians were calculating. But despite his advances, it is only recently that interest in Babylonian math has started to take hold.
"I think that before Neugebauer and even after Neugebauer, there wasn't a lot of attention placed on mathematical training in Babylon even though we have this rich cuneiform history with the tablets," said Jennifer Chi, Associate Director for Exhibitions and Public Programs at Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.
When we think of ancient mathematics, the first names that come to mind are Pythagoras and Euclid. That shouldn't be the case.
One of the aims of the institute, she says, is to find interconnections between ancient cultures as well as look at what the institute sees as under-represented ancient cultures -- and the culture of ancient Babylonian math, she says, is ripe for popular revision.
"When we think of ancient mathematics, the first names that come to mind are Pythagoras and Euclid," she said, but that "this shouldn't be the case."
And though ancient Babylonia is often referred to in popular culture as a "lost" world, in fact much more evidence of mathematical learning from the period exists than from ancient Greece, said Chi.
Jones of New York University believes that there is much more that could be excavated but that, of course, current conditions in Iraq are not favorable. Still, there are enough tablets in collections across the world for mathematical historians to get stuck into.
For non-mathematicians, these tablets are a fascinating document of life in Mesopotamia. Most of the problems displayed are grounded in the everyday needs of ancient Babylonians.
But some tablets show the students engaging in what Jones calls "recreational math" -- math for math's sake.
"The only point of learning to do this kind of thing is really as a mental exercise, as a way of showing how smart you are," he said.
And it seems there is still more to learn from the Babylonians. Duncan Melville is a Professor of Mathematics at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, whose special interest is Mesopotamian mathematics.
According to Melville, teachers can continue to learn a thing or two about the way math was taught in Mesopotamia.
"You look at the way they set up their sequences of problems and it's all very carefully graduated, from simple problems to more complicated problems," he said.
"As a teacher of mathematics, it's very interesting to see how they organized their material," he continued. "There's still interesting things to learn from cutting-edge pedagogy 4,000 years ago."
With research continuing into this strand of ancient history, it remains to be seen whether Pythagoras's theorem will come to bear the name of an old Babylonian scribe instead.
From CNN December 18, 2010
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Electromagnetic Energy Naval Rail Gun
(Dec. 14) -- The world's most powerful gun is one step closer to becoming the super-weapon of the future.
The Navy on Friday demonstrated a record-setting 33-megajoule shot from its developmental electromagnetic rail gun, a weapon that will be able to shoot farther than conventional guns. This weapon of the future could someday go on U.S. Navy ships, but for right now, it's a science and technology project.
Normally, a ship-based weapon would require gunpowder or a rocket boost to shoot projectiles, but the electromagnetic gun is powered by an electric pulse generated by the ship. Since the projectiles travel at speeds of more than seven times the speed of sound, they don't even require high explosives to pack a big punch: The kinetic energy of the projectile is more than enough to create a lethal effect.
Why does the Navy want it? Range and speed make the rail gun a particularly attractive weapon for the Navy, though other advantages include its accuracy and safety onboard a ship (because it doesn't require high explosives). "The 33-megajoule shot means the Navy can fire projectiles at least 110 nautical miles (126 miles), placing sailors and Marines at a safe standoff distance and out of harm's way, and the high velocities achievable are tactically relevant for air and missile defense," Rear Adm. Nevin Carr, chief of naval research, said in a release announcing the latest test.
How much does it cost? The Navy has budgeted about $250 million for the development of the prototype rail gun. It's impossible to say how much the final system would cost to buy. As with any new weapon system, the price tag is likely to be high, but advocates for the rail gun point out the projectiles would be cheaper than conventional missiles and ammunition.
When will the weapon be used on a ship? Not anytime soon. The Navy projects it won't be ready until sometime in the 2020 to 2025 time range, and that assumes the Navy pursues it beyond the prototype.
Filed under: Nation, Tech, AOL Original
The Navy on Friday demonstrated a record-setting 33-megajoule shot from its developmental electromagnetic rail gun, a weapon that will be able to shoot farther than conventional guns. This weapon of the future could someday go on U.S. Navy ships, but for right now, it's a science and technology project.
Normally, a ship-based weapon would require gunpowder or a rocket boost to shoot projectiles, but the electromagnetic gun is powered by an electric pulse generated by the ship. Since the projectiles travel at speeds of more than seven times the speed of sound, they don't even require high explosives to pack a big punch: The kinetic energy of the projectile is more than enough to create a lethal effect.
Why does the Navy want it? Range and speed make the rail gun a particularly attractive weapon for the Navy, though other advantages include its accuracy and safety onboard a ship (because it doesn't require high explosives). "The 33-megajoule shot means the Navy can fire projectiles at least 110 nautical miles (126 miles), placing sailors and Marines at a safe standoff distance and out of harm's way, and the high velocities achievable are tactically relevant for air and missile defense," Rear Adm. Nevin Carr, chief of naval research, said in a release announcing the latest test.
How much does it cost? The Navy has budgeted about $250 million for the development of the prototype rail gun. It's impossible to say how much the final system would cost to buy. As with any new weapon system, the price tag is likely to be high, but advocates for the rail gun point out the projectiles would be cheaper than conventional missiles and ammunition.
When will the weapon be used on a ship? Not anytime soon. The Navy projects it won't be ready until sometime in the 2020 to 2025 time range, and that assumes the Navy pursues it beyond the prototype.
Filed under: Nation, Tech, AOL Original
Sunday, December 5, 2010
New Life Form - Is God Dead?
AOL News Article, Dec. 5, 2010
Does a New Life Form Mean God Is Dead?
David Gibson
Religion Reporter
The discovery of what is apparently an entirely new form of life -- a bacteria based on toxic arsenic rather than phosphorus, one of the six building blocks of all life on Earth -- has set the scientific world abuzz, prompting White House inquiries to NASA and threatening to upend longstanding beliefs about biology.
But some say the announcement also signals an end to religious faith, or at least the beginning of the end, because it implies that life can spring forth unexpectedly on Earth or even on other planets, and in unexpected forms -- developments that seem to run counter to literal readings of biblical creation accounts.
"The polite thing to say is that discoveries such as this don't really impeach the credibility of established religion, but in truth of course they really do," David Niose, president of the American Humanist Association (AHA), a leading secularist organization, said of this week's revelations about the microbes discovered in Lake Mono in California.
"The fact that life can spring forth in this way from nature, taken in context with what else we've learned in recent centuries about space and time, surely makes it less plausible that the human animal is the specially favored creation of all-powerful, all-knowing divinity," Niose said.
Another shot in the Wars of Science and Religion? Maybe not.
The arsenic-based microbe discovery "sounds like a nice piece of work; we'll see where it goes from here," Brother Guy Consolmagno, a Jesuit and a planetary scientist at the Vatican Observatory, wrote in an e-mail to Politics Daily. (Yes, the Catholic Church was doing science long before Galileo.)
"But," he added, "any scientific discovery that broadens our knowledge of creation, deepens our understanding of the Creator."
Consolmagno, who a few weeks ago made news for saying he'd be delighted to find intelligent life on other planets, is typical of religious believers who don't see faith and science as natural enemies.
Even some vocal atheists who see belief and science as inevitable opponents -- with belief the problem, not the solution -- weren't buying the AHA's arguments about the discovery's importance.
"I regret to say that the American Humanists got the story wrong," PZ Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota and a famously trenchant critic of religion, told Politics Daily. Myers, who details his arguments at his blog, says the problem is their reading of the science.
"They say 'a new form of life has been discovered that apparently evolved outside the scope of all previously discovered life on Earth,' and this is not correct: the bacteria studied share a common ancestor with us, and the novelty of the discovery was not the organism, but that this entirely earthly organism was capable of incorporating arsenic into its chemistry. So no, their claims of its significant impact on our understanding of the history of life on Earth are overblown."
Myers does see a silver lining of sorts (at least from his non-believer's point of view) because the discovery "does represent an incremental increase in our understanding, just as science does every day."
"The point should be that the whole of science provides a direct challenge to religious belief, not that any one event is so definitive," Myers said.
Brother Guy would disagree with that assertion, but he pointed out that for the AHA and similar groups, "obviously this is no 'proof' since obviously they'd decided years ago, for whatever other reasons, that there was no God."
Faith, it seems, comes in many forms.
Niose of the American Humanist Association did concede that it is "unlikely that this discovery will change the minds of those who insist on a literal interpretation of the Bible."
"To them, the world is about 6,000 years old and evolution is a hoax, and no amount of scientific evidence will change that. For the rest of us, however, this discovery is indeed profound, and it adds to the mountains of evidence that already point to the humanistic lifestance as being our best hope."
Maybe the true test of the impact of the discovery will come in a few years time, when we can see whether there are more tourists visiting Lake Mono looking for the arsenic-eating bugs or more pilgrims checking out the full-scale replica of Noah's Ark that a well-known creationist group said this week it will build in northern Kentucky -- at a cost of $150 million, including taxpayer subsidies.
Given the success of the group's Creation Museum, which drew its millionth visitor last spring, it'd be wise not to bet against the Ark.
David Gibson »
Does a New Life Form Mean God Is Dead?
David Gibson
Religion Reporter
The discovery of what is apparently an entirely new form of life -- a bacteria based on toxic arsenic rather than phosphorus, one of the six building blocks of all life on Earth -- has set the scientific world abuzz, prompting White House inquiries to NASA and threatening to upend longstanding beliefs about biology.
But some say the announcement also signals an end to religious faith, or at least the beginning of the end, because it implies that life can spring forth unexpectedly on Earth or even on other planets, and in unexpected forms -- developments that seem to run counter to literal readings of biblical creation accounts.
"The polite thing to say is that discoveries such as this don't really impeach the credibility of established religion, but in truth of course they really do," David Niose, president of the American Humanist Association (AHA), a leading secularist organization, said of this week's revelations about the microbes discovered in Lake Mono in California.
"The fact that life can spring forth in this way from nature, taken in context with what else we've learned in recent centuries about space and time, surely makes it less plausible that the human animal is the specially favored creation of all-powerful, all-knowing divinity," Niose said.
Another shot in the Wars of Science and Religion? Maybe not.
The arsenic-based microbe discovery "sounds like a nice piece of work; we'll see where it goes from here," Brother Guy Consolmagno, a Jesuit and a planetary scientist at the Vatican Observatory, wrote in an e-mail to Politics Daily. (Yes, the Catholic Church was doing science long before Galileo.)
"But," he added, "any scientific discovery that broadens our knowledge of creation, deepens our understanding of the Creator."
Consolmagno, who a few weeks ago made news for saying he'd be delighted to find intelligent life on other planets, is typical of religious believers who don't see faith and science as natural enemies.
Even some vocal atheists who see belief and science as inevitable opponents -- with belief the problem, not the solution -- weren't buying the AHA's arguments about the discovery's importance.
"I regret to say that the American Humanists got the story wrong," PZ Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota and a famously trenchant critic of religion, told Politics Daily. Myers, who details his arguments at his blog, says the problem is their reading of the science.
"They say 'a new form of life has been discovered that apparently evolved outside the scope of all previously discovered life on Earth,' and this is not correct: the bacteria studied share a common ancestor with us, and the novelty of the discovery was not the organism, but that this entirely earthly organism was capable of incorporating arsenic into its chemistry. So no, their claims of its significant impact on our understanding of the history of life on Earth are overblown."
Myers does see a silver lining of sorts (at least from his non-believer's point of view) because the discovery "does represent an incremental increase in our understanding, just as science does every day."
"The point should be that the whole of science provides a direct challenge to religious belief, not that any one event is so definitive," Myers said.
Brother Guy would disagree with that assertion, but he pointed out that for the AHA and similar groups, "obviously this is no 'proof' since obviously they'd decided years ago, for whatever other reasons, that there was no God."
Faith, it seems, comes in many forms.
Niose of the American Humanist Association did concede that it is "unlikely that this discovery will change the minds of those who insist on a literal interpretation of the Bible."
"To them, the world is about 6,000 years old and evolution is a hoax, and no amount of scientific evidence will change that. For the rest of us, however, this discovery is indeed profound, and it adds to the mountains of evidence that already point to the humanistic lifestance as being our best hope."
Maybe the true test of the impact of the discovery will come in a few years time, when we can see whether there are more tourists visiting Lake Mono looking for the arsenic-eating bugs or more pilgrims checking out the full-scale replica of Noah's Ark that a well-known creationist group said this week it will build in northern Kentucky -- at a cost of $150 million, including taxpayer subsidies.
Given the success of the group's Creation Museum, which drew its millionth visitor last spring, it'd be wise not to bet against the Ark.
David Gibson »
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