WAS IT THE CRIME OF CLAUDIUS PTOLEMY?

 

    “This is the story of a scientific crime. By this, I do not mean a crime planned with the care and thoroughness that scientists like to think of as a characteristic of their profession, nor do I mean a crime carried out with the aid of technological gadgetry like hidden microphones and coded messages on microdots. I mean a crime committed by a scientist against his fellow scientists and scholars, a betrayal of the ethics and integrity of his profession that has forever deprived mankind of fundamental information about an important area of astronomy and history.”  

[Robert R. Newton; THE CRIME OF CLAUDIUS PTOLEMY, Preface]

 

The above devastating criticism from Robert R. Newton’s Preface is directed to Ptolemy’s main astronomical work which is usually called the Syntaxis.  In chapter XIII of his book R. Newton expresses his firm opinion in connection with the entire Syntaxis that all the “observations” of Ptolemy in relation with the Sun and the Moon are fabricated, they are the results of retro-calculations (thus we have a case of forgery).  

 R. Newton also accuses the astronomer Ptolemy that his data, taken by him from earlier authors, was also partly forged. The academic science did not pay too much attention to Newton’s critical remarks since our scientists are very sure that the inaccuracy of Ptolemy’s data is purely the result of measuring errors which show the limited measuring possibilities of Ptolemy’s own life-time.   

Recently when we have at hand my Hungarian calendar and Seleucid code there is a completely new perspective to investigate and explain the “inaccurate character” of data recorded in the Syntaxis.

 In the earlier chapters of my book the Reader was informed about an astonishing fact that as a result of erroneous synchronization there was done a fatal mistake when the Seleucid dates were wrongly placed on the astronomical time axis, that is the mentioned dates were misplaced by 2424 synodical months (let me call this time length as Hunnivari’s cycle). Accepting this revealed misplacement we have also a possibility to check the data of Syntaxis. For me it is not so difficult to perform the checking since we generally have the dates with day exactness. 

 But before we are going to deal with the dates of data in Syntaxis we must answer one basic question, “For Ptolemy who lived in emperor Hadrian’s times, was there a real possibility to retro-calculate with day and hour exactness the occurrence of a lunar eclipse which had happened 850 years earlier than his own life-time and was he capable, at the same time, to properly calculate the duration of the same lunar eclipse?”

Without data of observations how could Ptolemy built up his monumental system which covers the time-interval from  Nabonassar to the reign of king Antonius, the Roman emperor?

It is complete nonsense! It cannot be said in good faith and it is absurd to claim.  By the way, is it a reality today for a physicist-astronomer who has the latest model of computers to retro-calculate properly and to determine correctly the data of a lunar eclipse which occurred 2800 years ago? No, he cannot do that at all as it will be convincingly proved in the later parts of this book! 

At this point we can consider another aspect and we can ask a disturbing question, “What would be the standpoint of the modern physics and astronomy in case the works of Ptolemy, the Almagest or the Syntaxis (which are in publications since 1515) would have been lost forever, or if fatal mistakes would be done by the numerous transcribers (during the passed time of 1300 years)? Would the scientists of NASA estimate, with such self-assurance, the phases of the Moon which are at a distance of 2000 years from us in the past? When we know very well that the synodic month is a measuring unit of very uncertain length?”

„For the year 2000, the length of the mean synodic month (New Moon to New Moon) is 29.530588 days (=29d12h44m03s). However, the length of any one synodic month can vary from 29.26 to 29.80 days due to perturbing effects of the Sun on the Moon's eccentric orbit.”

http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/phase/phase2001gmt.html 

 

 Nevertheless, our scientists mislead the general public maintaining that they can retro-calculate with the exactness of a second and they can determine the sky positions as far deep in the past as 2800 years. 

 I think it is just enough to remind my Readers about the uncertainty around the delta-T. As far back as 2800 years this uncertainty can cause a mistake of several hours when we try to guess the occurrence of a solar eclipse, especially when we try to determine its location.

The main factor which causes the impossibility of the exact retro-calculation is the irregular movement of the Moon. The phases of the Moon cannot be retro-calculated exactly, we can only guess them!

“The fact that the angular velocity of the moon goes through an oscillation, having a place where it is a minimum (apogee) and another where it is a maximum (perigee), has been known for a long time. The Babylonians knew of this oscillation in velocity and had well-developed methods of including it when they calculated ephemerides of the Moon. By following perigee and apogee over long periods of time, they also knew that the positions of the lunar perigee and apogee moved steadily through the heavens, and this knowledge passed to the Greek astronomers.” (Newton, p. 110) 

However, at NASA, they pretend as if everything is in complete order.  Dating back 4000 years (2000 BCE), they give us the values of the Moon’s phases with a minute exactness and those Moon phases determine the time and place of the historical lunar and solar eclipses.  On page 191 of Ptolemy’s  modern English edition the anomaly of Moon is demonstrated by the means of three Babylonian eclipses.

The main question for my investigation is, “Are we dealing with retro-calculated, that is with forged data, or do we have records of genuine contemporary observations?”