[D66] Lunar Real

[A. OUT]

https://literatuurmuseum.nl/artikelen/de-maan-zie-zie-wat-mag-er-achter-zijn

De maan: een heldere vensterschijn,

een opengeschoven raamgordijn,

zie, zie, wat mag er achter zijn?



On 20-07-19 10:19, A. OUT wrote:
> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ancient-greek-philosopher-was-exiled-claiming-moon-was-rock-not-god-180972447/
> 
> An Ancient Greek Philosopher Was Exiled for Claiming the Moon Was a
> Rock, Not a God
> By
> David Warmflash
> smithsonianmag.com
> 5 min
> View Original
> 
> 2,500 years ago, Anaxagoras correctly determined that the rocky moon
> reflects light from the sun, allowing him to explain lunar phases and
> eclipses
> 
> Close to the north pole of the moon lies the crater Anaxagoras, named
> for a Greek philosopher who lived in the fifth century B.C. The eponym
> is fitting, as Anaxagoras the man was one of the first people in history
> to suggest the moon was a rocky body, not all too dissimilar from Earth.
> Streaks of material thrown out during the impact that formed the crater
> extend 560 miles southward to the rim of another crater, this one named
> for Plato.
> 
> Like Plato, Anaxagoras the scholar did most of his work in Athens, but
> the similarities between the two men stop there. Influenced strongly by
> the Pythagoreans, Plato posited a mystical universe based on sacred
> geometric forms, including perfectly circular orbits. Plato eschewed
> observation and experimentation, preferring to pursue a pure knowledge
> he believed was innate in all humans. But Anaxagoras, who died around
> the time Plato was born, had a knack for astronomy, an area of study
> that requires careful observational and calculation to unlock the
> mysteries of the universe.
> 
> During his time in Athens, Anaxagoras made several fundamental
> discoveries about the moon. He reiterated and expended upon an idea that
> likely emerged among his predecessors but was not widely accepted in
> antiquity: that the moon and sun were not gods, but rather objects. This
> seemingly innocuous belief would ultimately result in Anaxagoras’ arrest
> and exile.
> 
> Piecing together the lives of early philosophers such as Anaxagoras, who
> is thought to have written just one book, lost to us today, can be a
> major challenge for historians. Modern scholars have only “fragments” to
> describe the life of Anaxagoras—brief quotes from his teachings and
> short summaries of his ideas, cited within the works of scholars from
> later generations, such as Plato and Aristotle.
> 
> Through persistent observation, Anaxagoras came to believe that the moon
> was a rock, not totally unlike the Earth, and he even described
> mountains on the lunar surface. The sun, he thought, was a burning rock.
> In fragment 18, Anaxagoras says, “It is the sun that puts brightness
> into the moon.” While Anaxagoras was not the first to realize that
> moonlight is reflected light from the sun, he was able to use this
> concept to correctly explain additional natural phenomena, such as
> eclipses and lunar phases.
> 
> Hailing from Clazomenae in the Ionian lands east of the Greek mainland,
> Anaxagoras grew up during the Ionian Enlightenment, an intellectual
> revolution that began around 600 B.C. As a young man, he saw Athens and
> Sparta align to drive the Persian Empire out of Ionia. When he relocated
> to Athens, Anaxagoras and his contemporaries brought philosophy to the
> budding Athenian democracy. Although many Greek philosophers of the
> sixth and fifth centuries B.C. believed in one or a few fundamental
> elements—such as water, air, fire and earth—Anaxagoras thought there
> must be an infinite number of elements. This idea was his way of
> resolving an intellectual dispute concerning the nature of existence
> that had emerged between the naturalistic-minded philosophers of Ionia
> to the east and the mystical-minded philosophers to the west, in
> Greek-colonized Italy, such as Pythagoras and his followers.
> 
> Daniel Graham, a professor of philosophy at Brigham Young University and
> one of the few Anaxagoras experts in the world, says that of the
> Italian-based philosophers, Parmenides in particular influenced
> Anaxagoras and his ideas about astronomy.
> 
> “Anaxagoras turns the problem of lunar light into a problem of
> geometry,” Graham says. He noted that when the moon is on the opposite
> side of the Earth than the sun, the full face is illuminated,
> “[producing] a model of the heavens that predicts not only phases of the
> moon, but how eclipses are possible.”
> 
> The moon’s phases, Anaxagoras realized, were the result of different
> portions of the celestial object being illuminated by the sun from
> Earth’s perspective. The philosopher also realized that the occasional
> darkening of the moon must result from the moon, sun and Earth lining up
> such that the moon passes into the Earth’s shadow—a lunar eclipse. When
> the moon passes directly in front of the sun, the skies darken during
> the day, a phenomenon Anaxagoras also described and we now call a solar
> eclipse.
> 
> Anaxagoras also wrestled with the origins and formation of the moon, a
> mystery that still challenges scientists today. The philosopher proposed
> that the moon was a big rock which the early Earth had flung into space.
> This concept anticipated a scenario for the moon’s origin that physicist
> George Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, would propose 23 centuries later.
> Known as the fission hypothesis, Darwin’s idea was that the moon began
> as a chunk of Earth and was hurled into space by the Earth’s rapid
> rotation, leaving behind the Pacific basin. (Today, many astronomers
> believe that a Mars-sized body slammed into the early Earth, expelling
> material that then coalesced into the moon, though other theories exist
> for the origin of our natural satellite.)
> 
> By describing the moon as a rock of terrestrial origin, and the sun as a
> burning rock, Anaxagoras moved beyond earlier thinkers, even those who
> realized the moon was a kind of reflector. This forward thinking got
> Anaxagoras labeled as a chief denier of the idea that the moon and sun
> were deities.
> 
> Such an idea should have been welcome in democratic Athens, but
> Anaxagoras was a teacher and friend of the influential statesman
> Pericles, and political factions would soon conspire against him. In
> power for over 30 years, Pericles would lead Athens into the
> Peloponnesian wars against Sparta. While the exact causes of these
> conflicts are a matter of debate, Pericles’ political opponents in the
> years leading to the wars blamed him for excessive aggression and
> arrogance. Unable to hurt the Athenian leader directly, Pericles’
> enemies went after his friends. Anaxagoras was arrested, tried and
> sentenced to death, ostensibly for breaking impiety laws while promoting
> his ideas about the moon and sun.
> 
> “In the Athenian democracy, with its ‘democratic’ trials before large
> juries on criminal charges being brought by private citizens—there was
> no district attorney—all trials were basically political trials,” Graham
> says. “They were often disguised as being about religion or morality,
> but they aimed at embarrassing some public figure by going after him
> directly if he was vulnerable, or a member of his circle if he was not.
> If you wanted to attack Pericles, but he was too popular to attack
> directly, you found the weakest link in his group. As a foreigner and
> intellectual with unorthodox new ideas, Pericles’ friend and ‘science
> advisor’ Anaxagoras was an obvious target.”
> 
> Still holding some political sway, Pericles was able to free Anaxagoras
> and prevent his execution. Though his life was spared, the philosopher
> who questioned the divinity of the moon found himself in exile in
> Lampsacus at the edge of the Hellespont. But his ideas regarding
> eclipses and lunar phases would live on to this day, and for his
> recognition of the true nature of the moon, a lunar crater, visited by
> orbiting spacecraft some 2,400 years later, bears the name Anaxagoras.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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