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7 hours ago by gdjskshh

> five-phase reconstruction of the development of the imagery on the disc seems to be the likeliest sequence for the disc’s development. In the earliest version, an elaborately encoded image reflects sophisticated astronomical knowledge. In subsequent stages this was forgotten and replaced by traditional knowledge, which was focused on the interaction of the heavenly bodies and the horizon; and finally, this reduced knowledge gave way to mythology

It's interesting that the oldest part of the artifact has the most advanced astronomical information.

3 hours ago by JoeAltmaier

A modern person interprets this as a sky map. But it some round and cresent shapes on a field of dots. Not sure they drew the sky like that in the Bronze age? What evidence is there, that it's supposed to represent the sky?

The stars are no evidence. A bunch of dots can be stretched to fit any star configuration you please.

And there are way too many crescents. What, did we have three moons back then? And none of them are shaped anything like the actual moon looks at any time.

Hm.

13 hours ago by optimalsolver

Would you have deduced that stars are distant suns if you'd lived in the ancient world?

Apparently the only pre-modern people (i.e. pre-Giordano Bruno) recorded as making the claim were Anaxagoras, and Aristarchus of Samos, but their ideas were completely rejected by contemporaries.

In retrospect, it just seems so blindingly obvious that I'm tempted to believe that I too would have seen through the Aristotelean BS. But surely there must be aspects of reality that will seem similarly obvious to future generations, and yet I don't feel any insights coming on.

I should say, Aristarchus is the ideal of maximizing information from minimal data:

>Aristarchus of Samos (Samos is a Greek island in the Aegean Sea) lived from about 310 to 230 BC, about 2250 years ago. He measured the size and distance of the Sun and, though his observations were inaccurate, found that the Sun is much larger than the Earth. Aristarchus then suggested that the small Earth orbits around the big Sun rather than the other way around, and he also suspected that stars were nothing but distant suns, but his ideas were rejected and later forgotten, and he, too, was threatened for suggesting such things

http://solar-center.stanford.edu/FAQ/Qsunasstar.html

10 hours ago by dr_dshiv

A Pythagorean. The pythagoreans taught that there were 10 celestial bodies, but they could only observe 9, so they proposed a counter earth that could not be seen — behind the sun. Aristotle mocks them for this idea, but the idea implies rotation around the sun.

9 hours ago by fph

Does it? If the sun were rotating around the Earth, there could still be another planet behind it, rotating synchronously with it.

At least from the point of view of the Greek, who didn't know how gravitation works in detail.

7 hours ago by dr_dshiv

Possibly. But I believe the mechanism for the movement of the planets was believed to be crystal spheres.

Another possibility is that the Pythagoreans actually described the earth rotating around a central fire or Hestia. If that wasn’t the sun, it might have been the center of the earth — and the counter earth was actually the antipodes.

When you see the source texts describing these things, it is terribly vague. Yet, Copernicus described himself as bringing back the Pythagorean ideas—

4 hours ago by gedy

> The state of Saxony-Anhalt registered the disc as a trademark, which resulted in two lawsuits. In 2003, Saxony-Anhalt successfully sued the city of Querfurt for depicting the disc design on souvenirs. Saxony-Anhalt also successfully sued the publishing houses Piper and Heyne over an abstract depiction of the disc on book covers.

> The defenders argued that as a cult object, the disc had already been "published" approximately 3,500 years earlier in the Bronze Age and that consequently, all protection of intellectual property associated with it has long expired.

This is really silly, and disappointed if this is valid under DE/EU law. This is our shared history, not a trademark

12 hours ago by theginger

Archaeometallurgical, If we allow words with 94 bits of entropy why do we need some words with 3 or 4 different different meanings?

44 minutes ago by WorkerBee28474

Because we value conciseness over preciseness.

If given enough time and use, we would probably shorten "Archaeometallurgical" to "arcmet" or even "arc" in speech.

12 hours ago by optimalsolver

Because we get to have sentences like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...

12 hours ago by undefined
[deleted]
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