Apr 6, 2015 Easter eggs are not unique to Christendom, but find a match in the eggs painted by ancient Zoroastrians and modern Persians on occasion of Nowruz – the beginning of the new year, celebrated on the spring equinox. For the student of ancient religions they are a…
Apr 3, 2015 In 1742, the French natural philosopher John Theophilus Desaguliers (1683-1744) formulated some of the first generalisations regarding the electrification of air. That – as well as Halley’s work, presumably, although he did not cite it – inspired Pontoppidan, writing in 1755, to propound an electric nature…
Apr 1, 2015 Astronomical bodies such as the earth, the moon, the sun or any other moons, planets and stars are too large or too distant for direct experimentation with their global properties, even in the Space Age. A terrella (Latin for ‘earthlet’, ‘earthkin’ or ‘little earth’) is an…
Mar 30, 2015 The astronomical subdiscipline of comparative planetology is an offspring of the wealth of in situ measurements obtained by space probes. An improved understanding of the physical and chemical conditions prevailing on other planets and moons in the solar system not only helps to place terrestrial systems…
Left: The ‘sun disc’ or ‘disc of Shamash’, a detail from the ‘sun-god tablet’ (c. 860-850 BCE), discovered in a foundation deposit in the Temple of Shamash at Sippar, ‘Iraq. Courtesy British Museum, London, United Kingdom. © Marinus Anthony van der Sluijs. Right: The total solar eclipse of 18 July…
Left: Bone pendant from Saint-Marcel (Argenton-Sur-Creuse, Indre, France) Right: Bone pendant from the Grotte Des Espélugues (Lourdes, Hautes-Pyrénées, France) Jan 06, 2014 Reproduced above are images of two engraved pendants made of reindeer bone, from prehistoric sites in France. Both objects are attributed to the Magdalenian culture, which subsisted in the…
Jan 01, 2015 By what physical mechanism do planets and moons orbit around their larger hosts? Before Newton’s theory of gravity burst onto the scene, the so-called ‘vortex theory’ of the French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650), first proposed in the 1630s, was much in vogue. Invoking experimental analogues in fluid…
Dec 22, 2014 The melting of the glacial ice sheets in North America, Europe and elsewhere was a stochastic process. Long periods of slow melting alternated with bursts of accelerated melting. Between the Late Glacial Maximum and the early Holocene, global sea level rose by 100 to 130…
Dec 19, 2014 On the surface, the idea that the sun could reverse its apparent direction and be seen to move from west to east might seem bizarre in the extreme, but exactly this is what several ancient traditions claim to have happened in the past. In the 5th…
Dec 17, 2014 Direct statements concerning dramatic changes in the appearance of planets are few and far between in ancient sources. A classic example is a fragment from the obscure Greek astronomer Castor of Rhodes (1st century BCE), as cited by his contemporary, the Roman grammarian Marcus Terrentius Varro,…
