Bernard R. Goldstein's research while affiliated with University of Pittsburgh and other places
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Publications (152)
In this article, we report the discovery of a new type of astronomical almanac by Joseph Ibn Waqār (Córdoba, fourteenth century) that begins at second station for each of the planets and may have been intended to serve as a template for planetary positions beginning at any dated second station. For background, we discuss the Ptolemaic tradition of...
In addition to becoming the fundamental framework of electromagnetism, Maxwell's theory of electrodynamics has long been a source of inspiration for physicists. Here it is claimed that the key to Maxwell's success in this domain is his creative adaptation of a new methodology, including his appeal to the concept of energy.
Quantum mechanics approaches its centenary with an impressive record. It became the backbone of most research in physics, led to applications such as the transistor and laser, and prompted an upheaval in the philosophy of science. Its scope and its precision have been constantly growing, and it is now promising more powerful computers and safer cry...
The Tabulae eclypsium by Giovanni Bianchini (d. after 1469) was part of a larger work, the Flores Almagesti, on mathematical astronomy. In his work on eclipses, which hitherto has not been studied in depth, Bianchini compiled new tables, strictly adhering to Ptolemy’s procedures, and explained their use by means of worked examples to facilitate the...
This is a contribution towards a history and philosophy of modeling in its early stages in electromagnetism. In 1873, James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) hinted at the methodology of modeling at the end of his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. We focus on Maxwell's impact on physicists who immediately followed him, specifically Oliver Lodge (1851-...
Isaac ben Solomon Ibn al-Ḥadib (or al-Aḥdab) emigrated from Castile to Sicily no later than 1396. In astronomy, his most important work, written in Hebrew, is The paved way ( Oraḥ selula), a set of tables for the motions of the Sun and the Moon. Here, we focus attention on his unusual tables for finding the difference in time and the difference in...
Astronomers have always considered the motion of the Moon as highly complicated, and this motion is decisive in determining the circumstances of such critical celestial phenomena as eclipses. Table-makers devoted much ingenuity in trying to find ways to present it in tabular form. In the late Middle Ages, double argument tables provided a smart and...
In this paper, we analyse and compare two sets of tables in the framework of Alfonsine astronomy composed by John of Lignères and his disciple, John of Saxony, respectively, both belonging to the first generation of scholars using the Alfonsine tables in Paris in the early fourteenth century. John of Lignères’s almanac is limited to the five planet...
The Oxford Tables of 1348, also called Tabule anglicane, were computed for the meridian of Oxford in the framework of Alfonsine astronomy. They had a remarkable success, for they are extant in a good number of Latin manuscripts, and they were adapted repeatedly. This paper focuses on these adaptations: the Tabule Parisiensis, with radices for the y...
In astronomy Abraham Zacut (1452–1514) is best known for the Latin version of his tables, the Almanach Perpetuum, first published in 1496, based on the original Hebrew version that he composed in 1478. These tables for Salamanca, Spain, were analyzed by the authors of this paper in 2000. We now present Zacut’s tables preserved in Latin and Hebrew m...
Isaac Israeli (early fourteenth century) is best known for Yesod ʿolam (Berlin, 1846–1848), a treatise on astronomy and chronology. Here our focus is on his astronomical tables, mainly those in his unpublished Šaʿar ha-šamayim, which have not been studied previously. We present an analysis of some of these tables, preserved in various manuscripts,...
In this paper, we analyze the astronomical tables for 1340 by Immanuel ben Jacob Bonfils (Tarascon, France) who flourished 1340–1365, based on four Hebrew manuscripts. We discuss the relation of these tables principally with those of al-Battānī (d. 929), Abraham Bar Ḥiyya (d. c. 1136), and Levi ben Gerson (d. 1344), as well as with Bonfils’s better...
Immanuel ben Jacob Bonfils (fl. 1350) of Tarascon in southern France composed a set of planetary tables in Hebrew for 1340 and a treatise in Hebrew called ʿEreḵ ha-ḥilluf, an expression that refers to the equation of time. The contents of these tables have been treated elsewhere; this brief communication focuses on some textual peculiarities in the...
Shortly after being recast in Paris in the 1320s, the Alfonsine Tables reached England. There, the otherwise unknown Oxford scholar William Batecombe compiled a set of tables based on them, some of which display a clever and compact presentation. The author composed double argument tables for the five planets and the Moon whose entries depend on tw...
In this paper, we analyze the astronomical tables in al-Zīj al-Muqtabis by Ibn al-Kammād (early twelfth century, Córdoba), based on the Latin and Hebrew versions of the lost Arabic original, each of which is extant in a unique manuscript. We present excerpts of many tables and pay careful attention to their structure and underlying parameters. The...
We present an analysis of three related tables, uniquely extant in Vatican, MS Heb. 384, for finding daily lunar positions in periods of 11,325 days (about 31 years), before and after January 1, 1400. This lunar period seems to have been unknown prior to the fourteenth century, when it appears in both Hebrew and Arabic astronomical texts from Spain...
The quantum theory of Bohr has roots in the theories of Rutherford and J. J.
Thomson on the one hand, and that of Nicholson on the other. We note that Bohr
neither presented the theories of Rutherford and Thomson faithfully, nor did he
refer to the theory of Nicholson in its own terms. The contrasting attitudes
towards these antecedent theories is...
The term “analogy” stands for a variety of methodological practices all related in one way or another to the idea of proportionality. We claim that in his first substantial contribution to electromagnetism James Clerk Maxwell developed a methodology of analogy which was completely new at the time or, to borrow John North’s expression, Maxwell’s met...
The anonymous set of astronomical tables preserved in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 10262, is the first set of displaced tables to be found in a medieval Latin text. These tables are a reworking of the standard Alfonsine tables and yield the same results. However, the mean motions are defined differently, the presentation of the...
Levi ben Gerson (Gersonides: 1288–1344) included discussions of cosmology in his magnum opus on astronomy (Wars of the Lord, Book V, Part 1). In particular, he addressed issues concerning the arrangement of the planets and their orbs in space. In chapter 29 of this work, Levi argues that the lowest of the set of orbs for each planet moves with the...
On the occasion of the issuance in 2009 of an Israeli postage stamp honoring Levi ben Gerson (d. 1344) and the astronomical instrument he invented, we offer a brief survey of descriptions of this instrument, illustrations of it, and names that have been used for it over the centuries in Hebrew, Latin, and the vernacular European languages. Also, th...
Abraham ben Samuel ben Abraham Zacut of Salamanca (1452–1515) is perhaps best known today for his historical work, The Book of Genealogies (ספר יוחסין), but he was also the leading astronomer in the Iberian peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century. His main astronomical work, The Great Composition (החבור הגדול), composed in Hebrew in 1478, con...
:Levi ben Gerson (Gersonides, d. 1344) was an outstanding medieval astronomer whose contributions met the highest standards of the day. Chapter 58 of his Astronomy is devoted to his reasons for doubting some of the observations, as well as the consequences drawn from them, by ancient and medieval astronomers. His discussion reveals a profound under...
Interreligious cooperation on philosophical and scientific matters was part of the legacy of the culture developed under Muslim auspices in Baghdad in the ninth and tenth centuries. This kind of cooperation continued in both Muslim and Christian Spain, although there are instances where Jews and Christians did not wish to call attention to it. Seve...
Symmetry as it is applied today is a modern concept; hence it is implausible to ascribe this concept to classical thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle. How then should one interpret discussions in antiquity on the stability of the Earth? In this paper we analyze the arguments in order to see how they ‘work’. While both Plato and Aristotle invoked t...
1. Introduction, 2. The Mathematical Path, 3. The Aesthetic Path, 4. New Aesthetic Sensibilities in Italian and French Architecture, 5. The Ancient Concept of Symmetry in Scientific Contexts in Early Modern Times and Its Association with Harmony, 6. The Treatment of Symmetry in Natural History (1738-1815), 7. Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) and Immanuel...
The study of medieval astronomical texts has provided many examples of the interaction of scholars writing in Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew in a tradition that largely depended on Ptolemy's Almagest, written in Greek in the 2nd century A.D. Star lists have been shown to exemplify the variety of transmission and adaptation of the Almagest, largely due t...
ABSTRACT Ptolemy's Almagest (dating from the 2nd century A.D.) is a remarkable and original astronomical work, despite the general absence of claims for originality. Among Ptolemy's innovations are his dependence on a small number of explicitly dated observations and the derivation from them of the parameters for his geometrical planetary models by...
Halfway through the paper in which he laid down the foundations for the theory of special relativity, Einstein concludes that “the asymmetry mentioned in the Introduction … disappears.” Making asymmetry disappear has proved to be one of Einstein's many significant moves in his annus mirabilis of 1905. This elimination of asymmetry has led many comm...
Hermann Weyl succeeded in presenting a consistent overarching analysis that accounts for symmetry in (1) material artifacts, (2) natural phenomena, and (3) physical theories. Weyl showed that group theory is the underlying mathematical structure for symmetry in all three domains. But in this study Weyl did not include appeals to symmetry arguments...
Abstract We propose a likely path to Einstein’s postulate of the constancy of the velocity of light as part of his theory of relativity in 1905. Our principal claim is that the issue of adding velocities played a crucial role in pointing the way to positing a second postulate, for Einstein realized that the principle of relativity is not sufficient...
Contents: I. Introduction II. Einstein's usages of the term symmetry in 1905 1. The dissertation (April 1905) Case 1: isotropy Case 2: analogy Case 3: geometrical usage 2. "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies" (June 1905) Case 1: indifference Case 2: two algebraic usages Case 3: physical usage Case 4: algebraic usage Case 5: rejecting asymmetry...
We call attention to the historical fact that the meaning of symmetry in antiquity—as it appears in Vitruvius’s De architectura—is entirely different from the modern concept. This leads us to the question, what is the evidence for the changes in the meaning of the term symmetry, and what were the different meanings attached to it? We show that the...
This study of the concept of orbit is intended to throw light on the nature of revolutionary concepts in science. We observe that Kepler transformed theoretical astronomy that was understood in terms of orbs [Latin:orbes](spherical shells to which the planets were attached) and models (called hypotheses at the time), by introducing a single term, o...
The study of planetary theory in Ptolemaic astronomy has concentrated on the models and tables for planetary longitudes, and considerably less attention has been paid to Ptolemy’s models and tables for planetary latitudes. There are good grounds for this imbalance both in medieval sources and in the modern secondary literature, but it is not our go...
Citations
... In contrast, decoherence theory [79][80][81][82] assumes a singleparticle wavefunction whose evolution is non-unitary due to environmental effects and whose collapse leads to a particular outcome of a measurement. See also Ref. [83]. ...
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... He is known as the author of a set of astronomical tables in Arabic written in Hebrew characters, with radix 720 AH (1320/21 CE), composed in 761 AH (1359-60 CE) and uniquely preserved in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Heb. 230 : Steinschneider 1893, p. 598;Castells 1996;Goldstein 2020Goldstein -2021. A Hebrew version of the canons, composed by the author and dated 1397, also appears in the same manuscript. ...
... The Tabulae alphonsinae began to circulate in Latin from 1320, with canons prepared by Parisian astronomers Jean de Murs, Jean de Lignères, and Johannes de Saxonia. 48 For a typology of the tables and indications on their organization and use, see (Poulle 1981(Poulle , 1984Chabás 2012;Chabás and Goldstein 2012); on the tables in the sixteenth century, see (Poulle and Savoie 1988). and the actual mechanism of celestial motions was not explained. ...
... in what Hon and Goldstein [12] call an odyssey in electromagnetics consisting of four stations: -Station 1 (1856-1858): on Faraday's lines of force [18] -Station 2 (1861-1862): on physical lines of force [19] -Station 3 (1865): A dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field [20] -Station 4 (1873): A treatise on electricity and magnetism [21] Maxwell's original work is a rich source for methodological inspiration [22,21]. Many excellent books [4,12,24] and papers [1,2,27] have been written on Maxwell's construction of an electrodynamic theory, the transcription of Maxwell's equations to vector analysis notation [13,28] and their contemporary presentation with differential forms [8,16,23,30]. ...
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... As we recently pointed out, the Oxford Tables were adapted to other latitudes, such as Paris and Louvain, and they were also translated into Hebrew by Mordecai Finzi (fl. 1440-1475) who adapted them to Mantua (Chabás and Goldstein 2018), thus enhancing the dissemination of double argument tables within the astronomical community. ...
... The details are due to appear in a planned volume to be edited by him on the context and transmission of Yesod 'Olam, mentioned above. 21 See Goldstein and Chabás (2017 ', 'line', 'area', 'circle', its 'circumference', 'arc', 'diameter', 'hypotenuse', 'angle', 'pole', 'sphere', 'orb' […] ...
... 1460) who translated the Parisian Alfonsine Tables into Hebrew, composed astronomical tables, uniquely preserved in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Heb. 343, 92a-103b, that are partly in the tradition of Alfonsine astronomy and partly in the Hebrew tradition of Levi ben Gerson and others (Goldstein and Chabás 2017). Of interest here is his double argument table for the lunar equation (f. ...
... The Oxford Tables also include double argument tables for the longitudes and the latitudes of the planets and show a close relationship with John of Lignères's Tabule magne. They too were computed with Alfonsine parameters (North 1977;Chabás and Goldstein 2016). In the case of the Moon, the two arguments involved are the mean lunar anomaly for the columns at intervals of 6° from 0s 6° to 12s 0°, and the mean elongation for the rows at intervals of 3° from 0s 3° to 12s 0°. ...
... Yūsuf Ibn al-Kammād (Córdoba, fl. 1116): Chabás and Goldstein 2015. Of interest to us is a set of almanacs for retrograde motion, one for each of the five planets, where the argument is the number of days after second station. ...
... Al Table The Another work by John of Murs was found in Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale and it consists in a calendar with the daily positions of the Sun for 1321, with canons and tables. The purpose of the authors in the paper [22] is to reproduce some excerpts of the Kalendarium Solis et Lune: the calendar, the tables for the Sun and the tables for the Moon. ...
