In the spring of 585 BC, the moon appeared out of nowhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, obscuring the face of the sun and turning day into night.
At the time, the eclipse was shrouded in terrifying uncertainty. However, a Greek philosopher is said to have predicted the disappearance of the sun. His name was Thales. He lived on the Anatolian coast (now in Turkey, but at the time the birthplace of early Greek civilization), and is said to have gained extraordinary powers by abandoning the gods.
The solar eclipse had an immediate impact on the world. The kingdoms of Media and Lydia had been engaged in a brutal war for years. However, the eclipse was interpreted as a very bad omen, and the troops quickly laid down their weapons. The terms of peace included the marriage of the daughter of King Lydia to the son of King Media.
Thales' impiety had even more lasting effects, and his reputation soared over time. Herodotus spoke of his prophecies. Aristotle called Thales the first person to understand nature. In the classical Greek era, he was praised as the foremost of the Seven Wise Men.
Today, this story depicts the awe of the ancients at the disappearance of the sun and their great surprise that the philosophers knew about it in advance.
This episode also marks a turning point. For many years, solar eclipses have been feared as omens of disaster. The Kings trembled. Then, about 2,600 years ago, Thales led a philosophical assault to replace superstition with rational eclipse prediction.
Today, astronomers can determine to the second when the sun will disappear across North America on April 8th. Weather permitting, it's expected to become the most-watched astronomical event in American history and amaze millions of skywatchers.
“Everywhere you look since modern times, everyone has wanted to predict the sky,” said Assyriologist Matthew Ossendriver of the Free University of Berlin. He said the Babylonian kings were “scared to death by the eclipse.” In response, rulers looked to the skies to predict bad omens, appease the gods, and “strengthen their legitimacy.”
By all accounts, Thales was the one who started the rationalist view. He is often considered the world's first scientist, the originator of a radical new way of thinking.
In her 2002 book on the Greek philosopher, Patricia F. O'Grady described Thales as “intelligent, honest, and courageously speculative.” She said that his great achievement was to understand that the difficult world of human experience was not the product of the whims of God, but of “nature itself” that began civilization's secret search. explained.
Long before Thales, ancient landscapes provided hints for successful solar eclipse prediction. Modern experts say Stonehenge, one of the world's most famous prehistoric sites and whose construction began around 5,000 years ago, could have warned of lunar and solar eclipses. .
The ancient Chinese and Mayans paid attention to the dates of solar eclipses, but few early cultures learned how to predict eclipses.
The first clear evidence of success comes from Babylonia, an empire in ancient Mesopotamia. In Babylonia, court astronomers observed the moon and planets every night, usually in connection with gods, magic, astrology, and numerical mysticism.
Reports of solar eclipses are recorded on Babylonian clay tablets from around 750 BC. From years of records of solar eclipses, the Babylonians were able to discern patterns in celestial cycles and eclipse seasons. Court officials may then try to warn of pious displeasure and avoid punishment such as the king's ouster.
The most extreme measure was to hire a scapegoat. The acting king performed all normal ceremonies and duties, including marriage. The acting king and his queen were then killed as sacrifices to the gods, and the true king was hidden until the danger passed.
Initially, the Babylonians focused on recording and predicting eclipses of the moon rather than the sun. Due to the different sizes of the eclipse's shadow, more of the moon's disappearance can be observed.
Earth's shadow is so large that during a lunar eclipse, sunlight from vast areas of space is blocked, making the moon's disappearance and reappearance visible to everyone on Earth's night side. During a solar eclipse, the difference in size is reversed. Because the Moon's shadow is relatively small, the complete observation of the Sun's complete disappearance is quite limited in geographical area. In April, the total path width across North America will vary between 108 and 122 miles.
Long ago, the same geometry prevailed. So the Babylonians took advantage of the opportunity to focus on the moon. Eventually, they realized that lunar eclipses tend to repeat every 6,585 days, or roughly every 18 years. This led to a breakthrough in predicting the probability of a lunar eclipse, even though we had little knowledge of the cosmic realities behind the disappearance.
“They were able to predict them very well,” said John M. Steele, a historian of ancient science at Brown University and a contributor to the recent book “Eclipses and Apocalypse.”
This is the world in which Thales was born. He grew up in the Greek city of Miletus on the west coast of Anatolia. It was sea power. The city's fleet established wide trade routes and numerous tributary colonies, making Miletus wealthy and a star of early Greek civilization before the rise of Athens.
Thales was from a prominent family in Miletus, and is said to have traveled to Egypt and perhaps Babylonia, where he studied the stars. Plato told that Thales once fell into a well while studying the night sky. He reports that a maid made fun of a thinker who was so curious about heaven that he ignored what was beneath her feet.
In his History, it was Herodotus who spoke of Thales' prophecy of a solar eclipse that ended the war. He said ancient philosophers predicted the date of the sun's disappearance to be “within a year” of the actual event, but that is far from accurate today.
Nevertheless, modern experts have been questioning the ancient claims since 1864. Many thought it was a hoax. In 1957, science historian Otto Neugebauer called it “highly doubtful.”
In recent years, this argument has gained new support. The latest information is based on knowledge of the types of observational cycles pioneered by Babylon. It is believed that this pattern allows Thales to make solar predictions that can sometimes, if not reliably, be successful.
If Stonehenge might do it sometimes, why doesn't Thales?
Astronomer Mark Littman and former NASA astrophysicist Fred Espenak, who specializes in solar eclipses, write in their book Totality that the date of the war eclipse was relatively easy to predict, but its exact location is unknown. claims that it could not have been predicted. As a result, they write, Thales “could have warned.” possibility About solar eclipse. ”
Leo Duval, a former Swiss physicist who studies ancient artifacts and recently wrote about Thales, agrees. Although Greek philosophers could not be sure about where an eclipse might be seen, such as on the front lines of a war, they may have been able to know its date with great certainty.
In interviews and recent essays, Dr. Duvall argued that generations of historians have confused the informed hunches of philosophers with the accuracy of modern predictions. He said that Thales got it right, exactly as the ancient Greeks proclaimed.
“He was lucky,” Dr. Duvall said, noting that such coincidences are a normal part of the discovery process in scientific research.
Over the years, Greek astronomers learned more about the Babylonian cycles and used this knowledge as a basis for furthering their own research. Things that were marginal in Thales' time have become more reliable, such as predicting solar eclipses.
The Antikythera Mechanism is an amazingly complex mechanical device and a testament to Greek progress. This clock was made in the 2nd century BC, 4 centuries after Thales's, and was discovered off the coast of a Greek island in 1900. Its dozens of gears and dials allow it to predict many cosmic events, including the dates of solar eclipses, but not in the usual narrow range. Wholeness path.
Until the Renaissance, astronomers continued to refine their predictions of solar eclipses based on those pioneered by the Babylonians. Steele, of Brown University, said the 18-year cycle “has a very long history of working.”
Then the revolution happened. In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus made the Sun, rather than the Earth, the center of planetary motion. His breakthroughs in cosmic geometry led to detailed studies of the mechanics of solar eclipses.
That superstar was Isaac Newton. A towering genius who unlocked the universe with the law of gravitation in 1687. His breakthroughs made it possible to predict the precise paths of not only comets and planets, but also the sun, moon, and earth. As a result, the accuracy of solar eclipse forecasts has increased dramatically.
Newton's close friend, Edmund Halley, lent his name to a bright comet and publicly demonstrated its new powers. In 1714, he published a map showing the predicted path of a solar eclipse across England the following year.
Halley asked observers to determine the true extent of the picture. Scholars are calling this the first-ever large-scale study of solar eclipses. In accuracy, his predictions exceeded those of Astronomer Royal, who advised the British monarchy on astronomical matters.
Today's experts can use Newton's laws and a bank of powerful computers to predict the movement of stars millions of years into the future.
However, it is difficult to predict solar eclipses for such a long period in our daily lives. Because the Earth, Moon, and Sun are located relatively close to each other, relatively strong gravitational forces interact with each other, and the strength of that gravitational force changes slightly over time, causing the planet's rotation and position to change slightly. Because it changes.
Despite these complexities, “it is possible to predict the date of a solar eclipse more than 10,000 years in the future,” Dr. Espenak, a former NASA expert, said in an interview.
He created a webpage for the space agency that lists solar eclipses nearly 4,000 years into the future.
So, for those of you who are keen on the April 8 totality day, consider what awaits those living in what we today call Madagascar on August 12, 5814. That's fine. According to Dr. Espenak, the day becomes a defining feature of the day's phenomenon. It turns into night and then back into day—this is a natural scene, not one of a malevolent god.
Perhaps this might be worth some thought. Because if for no other reason, this represents further evidence of Thales' wisdom.