In 1988, Otto Neugebauer, the great historian of astronomy, was sent a photograph of a fragment of Greek papyrus that had a few numbers written in a column on it. The sender, a classicist, had no clue about the meaning of this bit of papyrus and wondered if Neugebauer had any ideas. The eighty-nineyear-old scholar recomputed the line-to-line differences of the numbers, found their maximum and minimum limits, and determined that this papyrus had to be a translation of part of “Column G” of a Babylonian cuneiform tablet on which was written a Babylonian “System B” lunar ephemeris! (An ephemeris is a tabular system for computing the location of a heavenly body for every time in a particular period.) How could Neugebauer make this Sherlock Holmesian deduction? Elementary: he recognized that what was written in Greek (a sequence of sexagesimal—not decimal—numbers) was part—column G!—of a highly accurate calculation of the moon’s location that had been worked outby the Babylonians. There are lots of different ways of calculating an ephemeris, and Neugebauer knew that anyone working out their own ephemeris independently, using their own system, would not have come up with exactly the same numbers, though they might have been close. The Babylonian system B was excellent, so the design had been gratefully conserved, in translation, with all its finegrainedparticularities (Neugebauer, 1989).
Source:
Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Book Intuition Pumps
