Massive Cosmic Explosion 'Struck Medieval Earth'

A massive burst of inter-stellar radiation may have stuck the Earth in the middle ages, researchers have announced. It is thought that the explosion occurred when two black holes or neutron stars collided somewhere in the Milky Way.

 The resultant gamma ray burst sent shockwaves through the galaxy, and hit our planet in the eighth century AD, the German team behind the study told the BBC. It is the latest development of the theory that the middle ages saw a spike in the amount of radiation that can now be found in trees and rocks.

 In 2012 a Japanese team found that ancient cedar trees had high levels of carbon-14, an isotope which is created when radiation strikes atoms in our upper atmosphere. Further research on radiation found in ice in the USA pinned the explosion down to between 774 and 775 AD.

An entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 774 reads: "This year also appeared in the heavens a red crucifix, after sunset; the Mercians and the men of Kent fought at Otford; and wonderful serpents were seen in the land of the South-Saxons." 

Click here to read this article from the Huffington Post 

Click here to read the article: A Galactic short gamma-ray burst as cause for the 14C peak in AD 774/5

Tycho Brahe was not killed by mercury poisoning, tests reveal

In 2010, Tycho Brahe was exhumed from his grave in Prague, an event which received extensive international media coverage. Since then, a Danish-Czech team of researchers has been working to elucidate the cause of Tycho Brahe’s death. The results of this intensive work now make it possible to rule out mercury poisoning as a cause of death.

 For over four hundred years, Tycho Brahe’s untimely death has been a mystery. He died on 24 October 1601 only eleven days after the onset of a sudden illness. Over the centuries, a variety of myths and theories about his death have arisen.

 One of the most persistent theories has been that he died of mercury poisoning, either because he voluntarily ingested large quantities of mercury for medicinal purposes, or because mercury was used to poison him. Rumours of death by poisoning arose shortly after Tycho Brahe’s death.

Brahe’s famous assistant Johannes Kepler has been identified as a possible murder suspect, and other candidates have been singled out for suspicion throughout the years, according to Dr Jens Vellev, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who is heading the research project.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Medieval bestseller explores morality through science

Imagine a stick partially submerged in a pool of water. It appears to be broken at the point where water meets air, but in fact it is in one piece. This optical illusion is called refraction: as light passes from one medium to another, it bends and changes speed based on each medium’s refractive index, causing the stick in water to appear bent.

 Most people are familiar with the scientific definition of refraction. But have you ever considered it as a moral concept? Say there’s a man on the street digging through a dumpster. You might see him as being “broken.” But as refraction teaches us, things are not always as they appear.

 The idea that scientific principles might also have philosophical applications is explored in The Moral Treatise on the Eye, a text written in the late 13th century by Peter of Limoges. The Moral Treatise is a compilation of short narratives, or exempla, meant to help preachers deliver sermons. Each chapter offers a piece of knowledge about the field of optics. Peter of Limoges first explains the concept scientifically, and then gives a moral or religious interpretation, like in the refraction example.

 “Peter quotes Paul, saying that we see things in this world through a dark veil, but in the next life, you’ll see things as they really are,” says Richard Newhauser, an English professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU. “In effect, what he’s saying is, in heaven there’s no reflection or refraction but only lines of direct sight.”

 The Moral Treatise on the Eye combines scientific thought with concepts of moral theology. This blending of disciplines is part of what appealed to Newhauser, who recently published a translation of the text with extensive explanatory footnotes.

Click here to read this article from Arizona State University

Ancient Egyptians Recorded Algol's Variable Magnitude 3000 Years Before Western Astronomers

A statistical analysis of a 3000-year old calendar reveals that astronomers in ancient Egyptian must have known the period of the eclipsing binary Algol.

The Ancient Egyptians were meticulous astronomers and recorded the passage of the heavens in extraordinary detail. The goal was to mark the passage of time and  to understand the will of the Gods who kept the celestial machinery at work.

Egyptian astronomers used what they learnt to make predictions about the future. They drew these up in the form of calendars showing lucky and unlucky days.

The predictions were amazingly precise. Each day was divided into three or more segments, each of which was given a rating lying somewhere in the range from very favourable to highly adverse.

One of the best preserved of these papyrus documents is called the Cairo Calendar. Although the papyrus is badly damaged in places, scholars have been able to extract a complete list of ratings for days throughout an entire year somewhere around 1200 BC.

Click here to read this article from Technology Review

Early printed book contains rare evidence of medieval spectacles

Many scholars rank the invention of eyeglasses among the most important contributions to humankind in the last 2,000 years. Yet, the inventor of this now thoroughly quotidian piece of technology remains anonymous. Indeed the inventor (or inventors) will almost certainly never be known, given the numerous conflicting claims, lack of specificity, and scarcity of surviving documentation.

What scholars do know about the history of eyeglasses is that they were probably invented at the end of the thirteenth century by a craftsman living near Pisa. The evidence originates from a passage by Friar Giordano da Pisa who recounts having met the anonymous craftsman in 1286. A friend of Giordano named Friar Allesandro della Spina learned how to make them shortly thereafter and shared the secret with the public. A number of other possible inventors of eyeglasses have been posited over the centuries, all of which have finally been proven spurious in recent scholarship.

During the early period of the production of eyeglasses, they were referred to as vitreos ab oculis ad legendum (eyeglasses for eyes for reading) and oglarios de vitro (spectacles with glass lenses). Eventually these rather clunky terms were shortened to occhiali and ocularia. Either way, the evidence indicates that spectacles were probably invented in Italy at the end of the thirteenth century, and by the early fourteenth century, they were being produced and sold in Venice.

Click here to read this article from the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin

History of Math: The Chinese side of the equation

One of the more perplexing questions of history asks why China - the birthplace of many technological discoveries at the heart of civilisation - took so long to achieve industrial revolution, centuries after it had come and gone in the West.

Perhaps we should blame Emperor Kangxi. As China's longest serving leader - his 61-year rule ended in 1722 - Kangxi was politically astute and also a deeply curious man. For hours every day, he would discuss the latest advances in maths and sciences developing in Europe with visiting Jesuit missionaries, moving deftly between affairs of state and the life of the mind.

At the turn of the 18th century, China's own mathematics was languishing in the shadow of the all-important state examinations, which emphasised scholars' ability to write literary and political essays. Had Kangxi decided to make the Jesuits' knowledge central to the national education system, China's progress would likely have come much faster.

That is the argument of Siu Man-keung, a maths professor retired from the University of Hong Kong. Siu's theory is more than just an indulgence in the burgeoning "what if" trend of alternate history. He argues the story of China can't be told fully without grasping the role maths played across the centuries, and conversely, maths cannot be taught to Chinese pupils today without putting it in the historical context.

Click here to read this article from the South China Morning Post

The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci's Arithmetic Revolution by Keith Devlin – review

The story is extraordinary. Even as the world was mired in medieval darkness, with the crushing hand of religion blocking all scientific inquiry, a lone genius named Fibonacci appeared on the shores of the Mediterranean. Through magnificent creative struggles, he discovered a number with near magical properties.

It is an infinite sequence that begins 1.61803… and is sometimes known as the Golden Ratio; sometimes as the Divine Proportion. Mathematicians symbolise it by the Greek letter phi, and it can be used to produce the most beautiful rectangle humans can recognise: one that already was understood when the Parthenon was designed and, in times to come, would be incorporated by Leonardo da Vinci in his greatest works of art. It appears today in the proportions even of the humble credit card.

Or so the internet, and many popular books, would have us believe. In fact, the man referred to in so many accounts, originally Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci came long after his death, from his family's name), was not much of a genius. Nor was he living in an age of ignorance. Nor does the shape that came to be associated with his name actually appear in Greek sculpture, or Renaissance art, or our Mastercards today.

Click here to read this article from The Guardian

Viking navigation secrets explained?

Was it the hammer of the Gods that drove Viking ships to new lands, or the light-polarizing qualities of a crystal called Iceland Spar?

Ancient Viking mariners may have been able to navigate the high seas from Norway to North America centuries before Christopher Columbus thanks to a crystal "sunstone" GPS, according to new French research.

The crystal, called Iceland spar, is a transparent form of calcite that is sensitive to the polarisation of light and is commonly found in Scandinavia.

Click here to read this article from News.com.au

The Viking Sunstone Revealed?

To avoid getting lost on their voyages across the North Atlantic 1000 years ago, Vikings relied on the sun to determine their heading. (This was long before magnetic compasses had been invented.) But cloudy days could have sent their ships dangerously off course, especially during the all-day summer sun at those far-north latitudes. The Norse sagas mention a mysterious "sunstone" used for navigation. Now a team of scientists claims that the sunstones could have been calcite crystals and that Vikings could have used them to get highly accurate compass readings even when the sun was hidden.

The trick for locating the position of the hidden sun is to detect polarization, the orientation of light waves along their path. Even on a cloudy day, the sky still forms a pattern of concentric rings of polarized light with the sun at its center. If you have a crystal that depolarizes light, you can determine the location of the rings around the hidden sun.

Click here to read this article from ScienceNow

Click here to access the article A depolarizer as a possible precise sunstone for Viking navigation by polarized skylight from the Royal Society

Conference on ‘Alchemy and Medicine from Antiquity to the Enlightenment’ taking place at University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is hosting an international conference – Alchemy and Medicine from Antiquity to the Enlightenment – which will include over 25 papes ranging from the ancient Greeks to the alchemical remedies of the fifteenth-century English royal physician John Argentein. The meeting will be the first of its kind to bring together leading experts on medieval and Renaissance medicine, such as Nancy Siraisi, recipient of a prestigious MacArthur grant at City University of New York, with the world’s foremost alchemy scholars, including William Newman, based at Indiana University and an expert on Isaac Newton’s alchemy.

The meeting will also reveal new findings by junior scholars – from Gabriele Ferrario, who is literally piecing together the secrets of Hebrew alchemy from fragments of manuscripts in Cambridge University’s Genizah collection, to Tuna Artun, a PhD student at Princeton University, who is tracing alchemy and medicine at the 17th-century Ottoman Court.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Scholar examines alchemy mystery from 16th-century England

It involves a printer, the far-reaching power of a monarch, possible censorship, three English alchemists dedicated to uncovering the secret of transmutation and a whole lot of unanswered questions. Earlier this summer, Dr. Teresa Burns, University of Wisconsin-Platteville Department of Humanities professor, presented a paper at the Western Michigan University International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo that helps to unravel a 16th-century mystery.

Burns’ topic, which examined the link between the 1591 publication and suppression of the first English printing of George Ripley’s “Compound of Alchemy” and what may have ended a planned long-distance partnership between John Dee and Edward Kelley just a few weeks after it began, was sponsored by Societas Alchimica, a society affiliated with UW-Platteville and led by Burns and colleague Dr. Nancy Turner as vice president and president respectively.

Click here to read this article from Early Modern England

Alchemists, ancient and modern

In certain southern English universities of medieval foundation it is still common for those students and academics whose disciplines require no more than lots of books, brains and a means of writing to sneer at the activities of a certain tribe who are known as “northern chemists”. Such troglodytes, as their nickname suggests, often come from unfashionable parts of the country. Worse, they think nothing of engaging in actual manual labour in their pursuit of knowledge. That sort of chap is not, my dear, you know, really quite one of us…

In the view of Lawrence Principe of Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, such thinking was also around in the 17th and 18th centuries. And it was, as he told this year’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, DC, one of the main reasons why modern minds equate the word “alchemist” with “charlatan”.

Click here to read this article from The Economist

The ‘mad’ Egyptian scholar who proved Aristotle wrong

Ibn al-Haytham’s 11th-century Book of Optics, which was published exactly 1000 years ago, is often cited alongside Newton’s Principia as one of the most influential books in physics. Yet very little is known about the writer, considered by many to be the father of modern optics.

January’s Physics World features a fanciful re-imagining of the 10-year period in the life of the medieval Muslim polymath, written by Los Angeles-based science writer Jennifer Ouellette.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Medieval Observatory discovered in Iran

Iranian archaeologists have discovered a 13th century observatory at the Ismailis stronghold of Alamut. It is believed this was used by the famous scientist and astronomer Khwaja Nasiruddin al-Tusi.

Hamide Chobak, manager of the Alamut site, told the Fars News Agency, ”During our excavations in the Alamut Castle we found some windows which we realized had not been used for scouting to protect anything. These windows open to the southeast, that is the direction that stars first come into sight.”

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

God's Philosophers by James Hannam – review

In canto XVII of Inferno, Dante anticipated the principle of Galilean invariance 300 years before Galileo. Even earlier, Islamic steelmakers in Damascus unwittingly exploited nanotechnology in the manufacture of sabres that became the envy of the world. So the middle ages weren't so medieval.

Almost the only annoying thing about James Hannam's admirable book is his opening insistence on a conspiracy of "popular opinion, journalistic cliche and misinformed historians" to denigrate the middle ages, and he cites the compass, Columbus and the 1455 printed Bible of Gutenberg as advances of the middle ages. In this conspiracy, whenever someone discovered evidence of reason or progress in the 14th or 15th centuries, he writes "it could easily be labelled 'early-Renaissance' so as to preserve the negative connotations of the adjective 'medieval'." The OED gives no dates for the medieval period, but it tells me that the Renaissance began in Italy in the 14th century.

Click here to read the review from the Guardian 

When Baghdad was centre of the scientific world

The Bab al-Sharji district in the centre of Baghdad derives its name, which means east gate, from the medieval fortifications of the city. These walls were probably built around the first half of the 10th century. During the brief British stay at the end of the first world war, its gatehouse was used as a garrison church. Nothing of those medieval walls, or the east gate, remains today; I remember Bab al-Sharji as a sprawling, noisy and bustling square, with its food stalls and secondhand record shops scattered around the busy bus depot and taxi ranks.

But its name is a reminder of the expansion and transformation of this proud city over the years since its foundation in AD762 as the new seat of power of the mighty Abbasid empire. Indeed, no other city on Earth has had to put up with the levels of death and destruction that Baghdad has endured over the centuries. And yet, as the capital of one of the world's great empires, this was the richest, proudest, most supercilious city on the planet for half a millennium.

Click here to read the full article from The Guardian

Book on medieval astrology wins award

Dr. Scott Hendrix, assistant professor of history at Carroll University, has published a new book that has been awarded the D. Simon Evans Prize for “Outstanding Contributions to Medieval Studies.”

How Albert the Great’s Speculum Astronomiae Was Interpreted and Used by Four Centuries of Readers: A Study in Late Medieval Medicine, Astronomy and Astrology was published this year by The Edwin Mellen Press.

Click here to read the full article on Medievalists.net

Historian Wins Grant for Study of Medieval Automata

Elly Truitt, Assistant Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College, has received a Scholar’s Award from the National Science Foundation to fund a year’s time doing research for and writing her new book, tentatively titled Magical Mechanisms: Automata in the Medieval West.

“Automata—artificial objects that are, or appear to be, self-moving—were culturally significant in medieval Europe,” says Truitt in describing her research subject. “They appear as diplomatic gifts from distant rulers to European courts; in stories and legends and chronicles of distant lands and times; as manifestations of esoteric and sometimes forbidden knowledge; in courtly settings of great luxury; attached to monumental clockworks; as examples of technological innovation, and in the service of the Church.”

Click here to read this article on Medievalists.net

God’s Philosophers: How the medieval world laid the foundations of modern science

The Royal Society has unveiled its longlist for Prize for Science Books, the world’s most prestigious award for science writing, which includes a book about science in the Middle Ages. God’s Philosophers: How the medieval world laid the foundations of modern science, by James Hannam, debunks many of the myths and stereotypes about science and technological advancement during the Middle Ages, and profiles some of the important thinkers of period, such as Thomas Aquinas, Nicole Oresme and William of Ockham.

The five-member committee who made the choice said that Hannam's book "is a revelation, contradicting the popular idea of the Middle Ages as the “dark” ages, mapping key progressions during an era none of us associate with scientific advances and celebrating the lesser known mathematicians, 'philosophers' and anatomists on whose shoulders modern science stands."

Eleven other books also made the longlist, including Darwin’s Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England by Steve Jones. This year’s longlist includes eight authors who are new to the prize, three who have been previously shortlisted and one previous winner (Jones, who won in 1994).

Maggie Philbin, Chair of the judges, said: “There were some fascinating books in this year’s entries, all of which explore science in very different ways. Narrowing it down to just twelve was very challenging and left us with a wonderful, diverse longlist that we’re all looking forward to really getting our teeth into. "

The shortlist will be announced on 24th August 2010. The winner will be announced at a ceremony at the Royal Society on 21st October 2010 and awarded £10,000. The authors of each shortlisted book will receive £1000.

God’s Philosophers has received very positive reviews since being released last year. James Hannan has also set up a website Medieval Science and Philosophy and a Facebook page to promote his book.

Click here to see the full list of books up for this year's prize

See also the Medievalists.net page for Aladdin’s Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe Through the Islamic World

Source: Royal Society

Copernicus reburied in Poland

The remains of Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th century astronomer who first theorized that the earth revolved around the sun, were reburied on Saturday in the cathedral of Frombork in northern Poland.

Scientists have been examining Copernicus’s skull and leg bones since they were discovered by archaeologists three years ago in an unmarked grave in the cathedral. Testing revealed that the body was of a 70 year old man, and that he had a broken nose, which would have the same age and condition of the Polish scientist when he died. Furthermore, DNA taken from teeth and bones matched hairs that were found in one of his books, and they ultimately concluded that they had found Copernicus.

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was a church cannon and doctor living in northern Poland, who spent years studying astronomy. His book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), was published just before his death in 1543 and is considered one of the most important works in the history of astronomy. But it also was considered heretical by the Catholic Church because it implied that the Earth and humanity were not at the centre of the universe.

The Catholic church is now more supportive of Copernicus - the local archbishop Wojciech Ziemba, said the Church was honouring the man because of "his hard work, devotion and above all of his scientific genius."





See also: Nicolaus Copernicus, Astronomer and Physician

Sources: Radio Poland, Associated Press

University of Toronto scholars win Mellon Foundation fellowships

University of Toronto medieval historian Nicholas Everett and Walid Saleh, a scholar of religion and Near and Middle Eastern civilizations, have each been selected to receive a highly competitive New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation to pursue cross-disciplinary research. It is the first time the fellowships, created in 2002, have been awarded outside of the United States.

The New Directions Fellowships are unique in that they enable young humanists to explore new lines of research by gaining additional expertise in a field outside of their area of specialization. For Nicholas Everett, who holds a PhD in history, the fellowship means he can do research shedding new light on the history of medicine and science by undertaking specialized coursework in pharmacology and toxicology.

"There has been an explosion of interest in the medicinal potential of plant, mineral and animal products of the last decade. This renewed scientific interest in natural product pharmacy provides opportunities for a more sophisticated understanding of human interaction with the natural world in the past, and the rationale behind historical traditions of drug use, discovery and theory," Everett says. "By understanding the chemistry of natural drugs and the processes they affect, historical texts on pharmacy can be read more sensitively, claims more effectively evaluated and traditions better understood and explained."

Everett will draw upon his training to pursue three themes in the history of pharmacy which recent discoveries in biochemistry, pharmacology and neuroscience place in a new light: notions of taste and smell in relation to health and pharmacy; traditions of compound drugs; and what constituted proof or the authority to declare a drug effective or safe in the pre-modern world. Tracing these themes across different periods and cultures, says Everett, will make important contributions to our understanding of both the history of science and the history of medicine.

Walid Saleh will use his fellowship to undertake a comprehensive unified history of the Arabic Bible in the Middle East where three of the world's major religions - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - began and still co-exist side by side. It's a research direction that arose quite serendipitously. "While researching the history of Quranic interpretation, my main field, I came across al-Biqa`i (d. 1480) who used the Hebrew Bible and the four Gospels to interpret Biblical references in the Qur'an. This was an unprecedented use of these two scriptures in Islam," says Saleh. The fortunate find led him to realize that no comprehensive study of the history of the Bible in the Islamic religious imagination had been done. "Such a study is essential since the Arabic Bible represents a truly Jewish-Christian-Islamic event in the collective religious history of the Middle East. The presence of active members of the three communities side by side make for a fascinating relationship to the Bible, with each religious community aware of the other's views of the same book," says Saleh. In particular, Saleh plans to undertake serious training in Jewish study, including Biblical Hebrew, so as to chart a detailed history of the ways in which Islamic religious tradition interacted with the Bible and how each religion's interpretation of the Bible affected and influenced the other.

"Scholarship that crosses disciplinary boundaries holds tremendous potential," says Meric S. Gertler, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto. "Some of the most exciting discoveries and insights occur when different fields intersect. We are delighted that the Mellon Foundation is not only enabling these two outstanding humanists to pursue their innovative research but is, through the New Directions program, fostering a standard of excellence for cross-disciplinary research more generally."

The Mellon Foundation has long been known for its support of the humanities, arts and higher education. The New Directions Fellowships assist faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences by enabling them to acquire substantive and methodological training outside of their discipline so they are able to work with sophistication on the specific research problems that interest them most. Recipients of the fellowships are relatively early in their careers, having have received their PhD between five and 15 years previously, and so the fellowships are viewed as long-term investments in a scholar's intellectual range and productivity.

Source: University of Toronto