Conveners
Copernico e il nuovo Cosmo / Copernicus’ Changeover From the Old to the New Cosmos
- Chairperson: Mauro Gargano
Copernico e il nuovo Cosmo / Copernicus’ Changeover From the Old to the New Cosmos
- Chairperson: Flavia Marcacci
Copernico e il nuovo Cosmo / Copernicus’ Changeover From the Old to the New Cosmos
- Chairperson: Flavia Marcacci
Around 1518, the Ferrara humanist Celio Calcagnini (1479-1541) wrote an original defense of Earth's motion, Quod caelum stet, terra moveatur vel de perenni motu terrae (The Heavens Stand, the Earth Moves, or the Perennial Motion of the Earth). It was a short but complex philosophical treatise, written in a sophisticated style, on a topic of undoubted interest to the history of cosmology. It...
Copernicus' contribution played, of course, a central role in the birth of modern heliocentric astronomy. However, it is enhanced in our shared culture, even beyond its enormous value, due to three factors. First, the oblivion of the influence - explicitly admitted by Copernicus - of ancient ideas about the Earth's motions. Second, the underestimation of other modern contributions, such as the...
Owen Gingerich, recently passed away, has been one of the most important historians of astronomy between the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. Teacher of history of astronomy at the Harvard University (1967-2000) contributed with fundamental studies from the astronomy of ancient Greece to the birth of astrophysics.
His most important job has been the search and study of the copies of...
In this paper, it will be discussed the work of two important scholars, Nicolaus Copernicus and Amerigo Vespucci, and their possible relation.
Copernicus was born in Poland and studied in Italy, and Vespucci was born in Italy and worked in Spain and Portugal. Copernicus became a medical doctor and an astronomer and finally prepared the way toward a heliocentric world system. Vespucci became...
The talk elucidates the context of transformation of astronomical knowledge in the years when Nicholas Copernicus' work saw the light of day, the Revolutionibus orbium coelestium of 1543. In particular, it is intended to show that the publication took place at the beginning of a period in which the processes of transformation, dissemination and accumulation of scientific knowledge had taken...
Eccentric-epicycle constructions are the basic machinery used by Ptolemy (II cent. CE) in the Mathematical Syntaxis to account for Sun, Moon, and planetary phenomena. In Ptolemy's astronomy, these kinds of diagrams represent the geocentric configurations of heavenly bodies in space, i.e. the variable spatial relationship between a moving body and the fixed Earth. However, there are reasons...
Nicolaus Copernicus is unanimously acknowledged as the father of modern astronomy. Giuseppe Toaldo (1719-1797), the first director of the Astronomical Observatory of Padua, credited him as a testimonial of the new science, immortalizing him with a full-length, life-size portrait in the pictorial cycle that decorates the Paduan Observatory. This series of frescoes recounted the progress of...
During the 16th century, the disagreement between the dates of the Julian calendar, which had been in use since 46 BC, and the vernal equinox necessitated a correction to the computational rules used to regulate the flow of time. Luigi Lilio using imprecise astronomical data contained in “The Alfonsine Tables”, was able to elaborate a calendar that has stood the test of time: the Gregorian...
The concept of information was introduced in the middle of the last century by Shannon and since then an entire branch of research has been developing into what is called Mathematical Theory of Communication which deals with studying the amount of information exchanged in a communication channel.
In this presentation we want to use the concept of information to analyze the conceptual change...
