The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy | 
 enlarge | Author: James Evans
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $75.00
Buy New: $45.00
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Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 224170
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 496
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.7
Dimensions (in): 11.2 x 8.6 x 1.3
ISBN: 0195095391
Dewey Decimal Number: 520.938
EAN: 9780195095395
Publication Date: October 1, 1998
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Amazon.com Review
In Ptolemy's The Almagest, the earth is placed at the center of the universe and the planets move in crystal spheres against a backdrop of fixed stars. While these ideas have been swept away since the scientific revolution, Ptolemy's influence on astronomy was profound and long--we'll be dealing with the Y3K problem before Copernicus's time of influence catches up. James Evans, historian and astronomer at the University of Puget Sound, believes that "staying close to the practice of astronomy means explaining a subject in enough detail for the reader to understand what the ancient astronomers actually did." As this unique book teaches you to do astronomy the old-fashioned way, you gain a profoundly deeper understanding of what the Greeks and their successors thought and did. "There is all the difference in the world between knowing about and knowing how to do," says Evans. The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy is truly hands-on history, and deserves to be widely imitated. --Mary Ellen Curtin
Product Description
The ancient astronomical tradition is one of impressive duration and richness--from planet observations by the Babylonians in the second millennium BC to the astronomical revolution of the sixteenth century. Richly illustrated, this book brings the reader into direct contact with ancient astronomy. Throughout the book two questions constantly recur: what evidence permits us to reconstruct the astronomy of the ancient past? How was astronomy actually practiced?
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
A great work of scholarship--and great fun November 6, 1998
28 out of 28 found this review helpful
An impressive compendium of thousands of years of astronomy--from Babylon to Copernicus. In tracing the history of star-gazing, Evans traces the history of science, showing how ideas arose, migrated, stood up or failed under testing, and were passed down through the centuries. One learns a deep respect for ancient astronomers. Almost 2,000 years before Columbus, Greek scientists had figured out that the world was round, and had even determined that the Earth was miniscule compared to the size of the universe. Evans is committed to the idea of learning by doing, so he gives detailed instructions on how to construct every instrument that ancient astronomers used--from sundials to astrolabes. The book is full of great science projects. I would strongly recommend this book for those interested in the history of science, ancient and medieval thought, backyard astronomy... even astrologers would benefit greatly from this book.
Fantastic! July 21, 2000
Helmer Aslaksen (Singapore)
20 out of 20 found this review helpful
The big problem when writing a book about history of science, is how much background to include. If you don't include any background, the ordinary reader will not really get what's going on. Evans has instead written what can best be described as a two-fold book. It's both an introduction to astronomy and an introduction to history of astronomy! His explanations, and particularly his illustrations, are excellent. Both his scholarship and his writing are exceptional! Read it!
Great Book, took the class from the author January 24, 2002
Justin A. Goodwin (Somerville, MA USA)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
This is great book. I got to take the class for which the book was the class book, and the author was the professor. Class time was used for discussing the history and practice of the ancient astronomers from the babylonians to copernicus. We then were able to take a lab time to go through the well written excerisize to actually do the astronomy as, say, the ancient greeks did it. You can learn how the ancient greeks were able to predict the position of the stars and planets using the principle that the earth is the center of the universe. I took the class 2 years ago, and every once and awhile i pull out the book just to read through or make a new astrolobe plate.
Excellent hands-on history of ancient astronomy June 27, 2008
Viktor Blasjo
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is an extremely useful book; by far the most user-friendly guide to ancient astronomy available. Both the technical and historical aspects are generally presented with admirable clarity. My only complaint is that the early chapters on pre-Ptolemaic ideas are too cursorily treated. Unlike the thorough discussion of Ptolemy's system and the outline of Copernicus' system, this early material is presented in recipe-book form with little emphasis on ideas. Consider for example the theory of the gnomon. Much time is spent discussing gnomon plots (i.e. plots of the shadow cast by a vertical stick in the course of a day) and their practical uses. But our curiosity is suppressed: looking at a sequence of gnomon plots over the course of a year (p. 54) one naturally wonders why the curves are hyperbolas, except the equinoxes where the curve is straight. Not even the latter is explained. This is very unfortunate because it would have paid off greatly to think about these interesting and natural questions at this stage, since the answers lead naturally to several ideas developed subsequently. Let's see how. Why hyperbolas? Because the sun moves in a circle, thus generating a cone with the tip of the gnomon as vertex; drawing the gnomon plot amounts to cutting this cone with a plane, so one gets a conic section. Why straight at the equinoxes? Because then the daily orbit of the sun contains the tip of the gnomon in its interior; drawing the gnomon plot amounts to cutting this plane with a plane, so one gets a line. These simple insights are very fruitful. They immediately suggest Ptolemy's equatorial ring (p. 206), for example. And they would have helped us greatly in the construction of the sundial (pp. 133-139), a very complicated construction which Evans pulls out of a hat in pure cookbook form. If we had taken the time to think about the gnomon plot earlier we could now have approached this construction much more naturally as follows. To create a sundial means putting hour marks on our gnomon plot. To do this we should divide the sun's daily orbit into 24 equal parts and figure out how to find the corresponding points on the plot. This is easiest at the equinoxes, since the orbit and the tip of the gnomon are then coplanar, as we saw. By contrast Evans goes straight for the much more complicated cases of the solstices, and then obtains the marks for the equinoxes as a by-product. This construction would have been natural instead of artificial if one had understood the equinox construction first, just as later the solar theory (being simple but having the essential ideas) is a good introduction to the planetary theory, as Evan emphasises. In fact, if we were willing to settle for an approximate sundial we could have avoided Evans complicated construction altogether by extrapolating the hour curves from equinox line by qualitative reasoning as follows. Since the sun's position at a given hour throughout the year are all coplanar, the hour curves on the dial will be straight lines. It is also easy to see that the noon hour line will be perpendicular to the equinox line, and that the other hour lines will deviate only slightly from this in a sun-feather pattern. This would give us a sundial that would be perfect around the equinoxes and accurate surely within an hour at the solstices. After this it would be easier to appreciate the full construction at the solstices.
Excellent reference book June 22, 2008
Mystery Writer (E. Hartford, CT)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy by James Evans is a wonderful, comprehensive study.It is beautifully illustrated with original drawings of early astronomical instruments and charts. I got a copy out of the library because I needed to learn about armillary spheres and astrolabes and and couldn't find much useful information anywhere else. I found it so interesting that I bought my own copy.
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