Alexandria in Egypt, the Native Town of the Natural Sciences
Alexandria in Egypt, the Native Town of the Natural Sciences Dieter LELGEMANN, Germany (dedicated to B.L. van der Waerden) Key words: Alexandrians, Aristarchos, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, Apollonios, Ptolemy, heliocentric hypothesis, epicycle and mobile eccentric, distance earth/sun, Equant and Keplerian motion SUMMARY Looking at Alexandria as the native town of natural sciences the most interesting question will be: What happened to the heliocentric idea of Aristarchos of Samos? Has the group of the famous Alexandrian scientists, Aristarchos of Samos, Archimedes of Syracuse, Eratosthenes of Kyrene and Apollonius of Perge, be able to develop this idea further to a complete methodology of celestial mechanics? Did they at least have had the mathematical tools at hand? Did some Greeks use the heliocentric concept? The paper will give a possible answer to those questions: It was not only possible for them, it is also likely that they did it and that this methodology was used by all “other astronomers” at the time of Hipparch. WSHS 1 – History of Technology 1/15 Dieter Lelgemann WSHS1.3 Alexandria in Egypt, the Native Town of the Natural Sciences From Pharaohs to Geoinformatics FIG Working Week 2005 and GSDI-8 Cairo, Egypt April 16-21, 2005 Alexandria in Egypt, the Native Town of the Natural Sciences Dieter LELGEMANN, Germany (dedicated to B.L. van der Waerden) 1. INTRODUCTION Natural sciences in the modern sense started in Alexandria in the third century b.c. with the foundation of the Museion by king Ptolemy I and probably by the first “experimental physicist” Straton of Lampsakos (330-270/68 b.c.), later elected as third leader (after Aristoteles and Theophrastus) of the Lyceum, the philosophical school founded by Aristoteles.
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