Showing papers on "Cosmography published in 2004"

Iberian Science in the Renaissance: Ignored How Much Longer?

Abstract: The contributions of Portuguese and Spanish sixteenth century science and technology in fields such as metallurgy, medicine, agriculture, surgery, meteorology, cosmography, cartography, navigation, military technology, and urban engineering, by and large, have been excluded in most accounts of the Scientific Revolution. I review several recent studies in English on sixteenth and seventeenth century natural history and natural philosophy to demonstrate how difficult it has become for Anglo-American scholarship to bring Iberia back into narratives on the origins of “modernity.” The roots of this exclusion, to be sure, hark back to the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. The oversight is unfortunate for it has blinded scholars to the fact that the Iberians first created a culture of empirical, experimental, and utilitarian knowledge-gathering of massive proportions that did not get its cues from the classics or the learned, but from merchants, enterprising settlers, and bureaucrats. The Portuguese ...

Cosmography: Cosmology without the Einstein equations

Abstract: How much of modern cosmology is really cosmography? How much of modern cosmology is independent of the Einstein equations? (Independent of the Friedmann equations?) These questions are becoming increasingly germane -- as the models cosmologists use for the stress-energy content of the universe become increasingly baroque, it behoves us to step back a little and carefully disentangle cosmological kinematics from cosmological dynamics. The use of basic symmetry principles (such as the cosmological principle) permits us to do a considerable amount, without ever having to address the vexatious issues of just how much "dark energy", "dark matter", "quintessence", and/or "phantom matter" is needed in order to satisfy the Einstein equations. This is the sub-sector of cosmology that Weinberg refers to as "cosmography", and in this article I will explore the extent to which cosmography is sufficient for analyzing the Hubble law and so describing many of the features of the universe around us.

Copernican Cosmography in the First Mexican Physics Treatise

Abstract: Copernican Cosmography was used to discover the path linking Cebu islands and Acapulco via Kuro-Shivo Stream, as registered in Physica Speculatio, first physics book written in New Spain. Teaching and practice of Copernican theory were an outcome of both Spanish expansion into the Pacific Ocean and native elite instruction devised by Augustinian friars. Copernican cosmography was explained in Physica Speculatio's first edition in addition to the reference given by Alonso de la Veracruz about the use of Copernican theory to detect Pacific Islands in Physica Speculatio's Fourth edition. Also, Veracroce standpoint about the differences between physics and mathematics is discussed in terms of its relation to the rejection of the Copernican Theory as a Natural Theory.