Putting this in Against the Mainstream rather than General Astronomy because it's "alternative" and "theoretical", and ATM is where all the "alternative" "theoretical" Big Brains hang out.

Sic 'em!



I am reading Fomenko's History: Fiction or Science? for this thread, and I'm only on the Preface and already I need help.

Fomenko says his basic premise is as follows:
Okay, so, basically this is all gibberish to me. I understand words like "graph" and "celestial", but the rest of it? Oy. I am not a "math" person, let alone a "gravitational theory" person. Most of the time I have no idea of what y'all are talking about in Against the Mainstream, so...

1. Is there a version of this in, oh, say, Fifth-Grader terms? Speak slowly, and use little words, with lots of diagrams on the blackboard and demonstrations involving oranges and popsicle sticks.

2. More importantly, has he got a point? Is his "history is fiction" theory founded on some very real problems with this Robert Newton/Theory of Lunar Motion stuff, or is he simply misunderstanding or misconstruing it at some crucial point? He really is apparently an eminent Russian mathematician and statistician, so he's not just some crankdot nutter with a website and a theory.

(Based on what I understand of the quote.)

Classical mechanics (Newton's formula for gravity and Newton's laws for diynamics) is used to describe the motion of the Moon around the Earth.
Describing the motion, means knowing the position and the velocity as a function of time.
Knowing the acceleration of the Moon in its orbit (as a function of time), allows us to predict the motion of the Moon.

In order to be able to describe the motion over centuries, we need observations from the past.
Eclipses are events that have been recorded: knowing the dates of eclipses, means that we have some observations of the position of the Moon on those dates.

Of course, the problem is how accurate those recorded dates are (this is an experimental problem).
If Robert Newton thought the dates were accurate, probably he was mistaken: the fact that he obtained a leap in the acceleration parameter should have made him suspicious about the dates he used.

I cannot comment on the corrections made by Morozov.

Anyway, what is described looks more like this: Newton thought the dates were accurate, but they actually were not.

Though you are not a "math person", I found this review:
Martin C. Gutzwiller, "Moon-Earth-Sun: The oldest three-body problem" , Rev. Mod. Phys. 70, 589–639 (1998),
about the problem of Lunar Motion, from (Sir Isaac) Newton to modern days.


EDIT to add: I have not followed the other thread.

__________________
papageno


"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?" - Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes)

"It's all about context!" - Vince Noir (The Mighty Boosh)

"I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about!" - Zapp Brannigan (Futurama)

Eclipse dating is tricky stuff.

Basically, you run the model backwards, and try to see if any eclipse is visible near where your historical source describes an eclipse. Sometimes, there are multiple choices. In the case of the deceleration of the earth's rotation, a particular eclipse might have been visible, but only if the earth were a couple hours off in its rotation schedule. By adding up a few of those effects, researchers were able to determine that the earth had been slowing down (tidal braking).

As we've discovered these past half dozen years, the process is not steady. I'm not sure if Fomenko's D'' is referring to that, I'll look into it.

All of it? I'm not sure what this coefficient D" is, but I can certainly understand that over tens of centuries dating conventions and calendar systems have not stayed constant, so as papageno said, "...the fact that he obtained a leap in the acceleration parameter should have made him suspicious about the dates he used..." rather than a significant modification to the laws of gravitation that affected only this particular situation. Or to boil it down to fifth-grade terms, "Eclipse dating is tricky stuff," as A Thousand Pardons says.
Well, I'm not up on "Robert Newton's Theory of Lunar Motion". As A Thousand Pardons notes, there may be some real considerations about lunar motion not present in Fomenko's argument. Then again, Fomenko could certainly have a point. I am reminded of Stephen Jay Gould's fairly persistent caution to check your original sources yourself, because he would often find inaccurate citations where careless researchers would perpetuate errors in the literature because they would just copy the previous researcher's results rather than checking the calculations from the original text (or whatever). Sounds like this could easily be a matter of using inaccurate data. Garbage in, garbage out.

I'm not sure that collecting several such anecdotes justifies posing the sweeping question History: Fiction or Science? I'm less sure that many people consider history as "science" anyway. Recorded history is always subject to interpretation and coloring. But if you read the lines and take into account everything between the lines, one should get a fair idea of the historical facts.

__________________
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Well, you know that, and I know that, but apparently Fomenko doesn't know that. From what I can see so far of his theory, he's saying that since these calculations somehow show that the dates figured for ancient eclipses were wrong, and that the calculations show that the glitch/error in dating occurs in the Middle Ages, that that means that ever since the Middle Ages, everything as regards "historical dating" is wrong.

So everything apparently hinges on whether the calculations are wrong, on whether Robert Newton was onto something.