Well, owing to the humungus response to my previous post regarding the ancient Greeks (1 comment hehehee) I thought doing another one would be appropriate owing to the fact of over whelming fan mail!

Right, the ancient Greek for today will be an astronomer named Hipparchus. Now the ancient Greeks were pre-occupied with mathematics, the subject, they thought, could answer literally everything, no matter what the problem, a mathematical solution could and would be found to solve it. An ardent supporter of mathematics being the universal panacea was a Greek philosopher Pythagoras, he saw it in music, and envisaged everything being described in terms of mathematical formulae. Spheres and circles of course would be the ideal candidates, readily 3 dimensional and the Moon being right above in the night sky, and local (astronomically speaking) was a perfect body to make mathematical calculations for purposes of measuring distance, so he set about measuring the distance between the Earth and the Moon. This however proved a nightmare! Pythagoras's original conception of how harmonious mathematics would be turned out imperfect numbers in his calculations, the numbers were not the simple ones he imagined would be at the root of everything.

As with all things, you may not discover the very thing you had set out to, but end up discovering something entirely different yet equally important! Enter Hipparchus, he noted that there were several observable facts that did not fall into the category of simple mathematical explanation. One of these was the obvious flaw in the so-called perfect composition of the night sky, he observed that not all stars that shone kept the same regular position as the vast majority did. These 'wandering stars' actually seemed to move independantly to the rest and actually double backed on themselves and would accasionally be brighter or darker in their light intensity. A clue to what Hipparchus was seeing still exists today in our description of the universe, the Greek word for 'wanderer' (planetos) gave rise to the name we still use, he thought he was observing stars, but in fact what he was looking at was a planet, probably Venus, or maybe Mars in a particular close orbit to Earth, and in those ancient times there were probably 5 planets visible to the naked eye.

Painstaking observations enabled the Greeks to plot the courses the planets took, and so duly noted that the paths the planets took were curved, so could they be segments of circles? After this discovery by Hipparchus, It was Plato who encouraged the schools of philosophy to explain how and why these 'wanderers' were adopting an erratic circular path?

Hipparchus had not set out to identify mathematics as a futile vocation, he was just interested in what those odd things were doing in the night sky and thus, discovered the planets. They were already there of course and had been for eons, but his keen nightly observations paved the way for future generations of ancient Greeks to further unravel the puzzle of the cosmos using such techniques as mathematics to prove the universe had a symmetry to it, and so ends another ancient tale of discovery…see you.