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Ancient mesopotamian science
Here we examine the development of astronomy, math, and science in ancient Mesopotamian science.
Akkadian era – 3000 – 2000 BCE.
Sumerian city-state kings fought over land from 3000 to 2000 B.C.
Sargon of Akkad was powerful leader, creator of worldʼs first empire – took over northern and southern Mesopotamia around 2350 B.C. – empire—many different peoples, lands controlled by one ruler (emperor) The Akkadian Empire
Sargonʼs empire was called the Akkadian Empire. This included the Fertile Crescent—lands from Mediterranean Sea to Persian Gulf
Known for rich soil, water, and good farming
Sargonʼs conquests spread Akkadian ideas, culture, writing system. Empires encourage trade and may bring peace to their peoples. Peoples of several cultures share ideas, technology, customs.
Babylonian mathematics
As early as 2000 BCE, Babylonians used pre-calculated tables to assist with arithmetic such as:
This became useful for their early astronomy.
Babylonians developed advanced forms of geometry, some of which was used in astronomy.
Info above comes from Houghton Mifflin Historical-Social Science: World History: Ancient Civilizations: Eduplace Social studies review: LS_6_04_01. This historical overview is brief, and by necessity, highly simplified.
Metallurgy
Chemistry connections
http://www.anvilfire.com/21centbs/stories/rsmith/mesopotamia_1.htm
“[People in ancient mesopotamia] made substantial advances in crafting higher quality bronze tools and weapons. It took trade to relatively distant places – because tin ore caches are sparse – to create tin-alloy bronze. This was the standard to aim for in the ancient world – and also prevented metal-smiths from developing limps and dying of gradual arsenic poisoning. (not joking)”
Babylonian era
First Babylonian dynasty – Amorite Dynasty, 1894–1595 BCE
Early Iron Age – Native Rule, Second Dynasty of Isin, 1155–1026 BCE
Assyrian rule, 911–619 BCE
Let’s look at this same area. in its larger geographical context:
This empire was very similar to the Akkadians. 1792-1749 BCE.
King Hammurabi of Babylon is a major figure.
• Akkadian Empire lasted about 200 years
• Amorites invaded Sumer about 2000 B.C., chose Babylon as capital
• Hammurabi—powerful Amorite king who ruled from 1792 to 1750 B.C.
– extended empire across Mesopotamia, Fertile Crescent
– appointed governors, tax collectors, judges to control lands
– watched over agriculture, trade, construction
Babylonians recognize that astronomical phenomena are periodic (e.g. the annual cycle of the Earth-Sun system)
The motion of the moon, and tides, are more examples of periodic phenomenon
Although they did not know the physical reasons why such patterns existed, they discovered the mathematical periodicity of both lunar and solar eclipses.
Centuries of Babylonian observations of celestial phenomena are recorded in the series of cuneiform tablets known as the Enûma Anu Enlil
Astronomical studies of the planet Venus
Writing of the “Mul Apin” clay tablets, catalogs of stars and constellations, heliacal rising dates of stars, constellations and planets
Babylonian cosmology
They developed a view of the universe in which our Earth was essentially flat, with several layers of heavens above, and several layers of underworlds below.
This diagram roughly shows their view of the universe – but note that this image is not meant to be geocentric. They didn’t imply that our world is the center of the universe; this was just what the universe was imagined to be like, locally.
The idea that our Earth is literally the center of the entire universe (geocentrism) didn’t develop until the later Greek era, circa the time of Aristotle.
“A six-level universe consisting of three heavens and three earths:
two heavens above the sky, the heaven of the stars, the earth, the underground of the Apsu, and the underworld of the dead.
The Earth was created by the god Marduk as a raft floating on fresh water (Apsu), surrounded by a vastly larger body of salt water (Tiamat).
The gods were divided into two pantheons, one occupying the heavens and the other in the underworld. ”
– History of cosmology, from Astronomy 123: Galaxies and the Expanding Universe
Assyrian empire 850 – 609 BCE
• Assyrian Empire replaced Babylonian Empire
• Located in hilly northern Mesopotamia
– built powerful horse and chariot army to protect lands
– soldiers were the only ones in the area to use iron swords, spear tips
– used battering rams, ladders, tunnels to get past city walls
• Assyrians were cruel to defeated peoples
• Enemies who surrendered were allowed to choose a leader.
Enemies who resisted were taken captive, and killed or enslaved.
• Enemy leaders were killed, cities burned
• Captured peoples were sent into exile
• Assyrian Empire fell in 609 B.C.
– defeated by combined forces of the Medes and Chaldeans
– victors burned the Assyrian capital city of Nineveh
Science
Astronomers of their day discovered a repeating 18-year Saros cycle of lunar eclipses
(data for this GIF is from http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEsaros/SEsaros101.html)
Chaldean Empire/Neo-Babylonian empire 625 – 539 BCE
• Chaldeans ruled much of former Assyrian Empire
– sometimes called New Babylonians because Babylon was capital
• Chaldean empire peaked from 605 to 562 B.C. under Nebuchadnezzar II
– took Mediterranean trading cities, drove Egyptians out of Syria
• Nebuchadnezzar seized Jerusalem when the Hebrews rebelled in 598 B.C.
– destroyed the Jewish people’s Temple in Jerusalem, and held many captive in Babylon for about 50 years. (Many Jews returned to their homeland under Cyrus the Great.)
At the height of their wealth and power, the Chaldeans:
• Nebuchadnezzar built Babylonʼs Ishtar Gate, Tower of Babel ziggurat
• Built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of Seven Wonders of the World
– an artificial mountain covered with trees, plants
The Empire Fades
• Weak rulers followed Nebuchadnezzar II
• Internal conflicts over religion divided Chaldean people
– made it easy for Cyrus The Great, King of Persia to conquer land
Post-Chaldean Babylonians
Jesse Emspak, in the Smithsonian, “Babylonians Were Using Geometry Centuries Earlier Than Thought” 1/28/16
As one of the brightest objects in the night sky, the planet Jupiter has been a source of fascination since the dawn of astronomy.
Now a cuneiform tablet dating to between 350 and 50 B.C. shows that Babylonians not only tracked Jupiter, they were taking the first steps from geometry toward calculus to figure out the distance it moved across the sky.
Obliquity of the Nine Planets http://solarviews.com/eng/solarsys.htm
Mathieu Ossendrijver of Humboldt University in Berlin found the tablet while combing through the collections at the British Museum.
The written record gives instructions for estimating the area under a curve by finding the area of trapezoids drawn underneath.
Using those calculations, the tablet shows how to find the distance Jupiter has traveled in a given interval of time.
The distance travelled by Jupiter after 60 days, 10º45′,
computed as the area of the trapezoid whose top left corner is Jupiter’s velocity over the course of the first day, in distance per day, and its top right corner is Jupiter’s velocity on the 60th day.
In a second calculation, the trapezoid is divided into two smaller ones,
with equal area to find the time in which Jupiter covers half this distance.
Photo credit: Trustees of the British Museum/Mathieu Ossendrijver
http://www.space.com/31765-ancient-babylonians-tracked-jupiter-with-math.html
Until now, this kind of use of trapezoids wasn’t known to exist before the 14th century.
“What they are doing is applying it to astronomy in a totally new way,” Ossendrijver says. “The trapezoid figure is not in real space and doesn’t describe a field or a garden, it describes an object in mathematical space—velocity against time.”
Scholars already knew that Babylonians could find the area of a trapezoid, and that they were quite familiar with the motions of planets and the moon. Previous records show that they used basic arithmetic—addition, subtraction, multiplication and division—to track these celestial bodies.
By 400 B.C. Babylonian astronomers had worked out a coordinate system using the ecliptic, the region of the sky the sun and planets move through, Ossendrijver says. They even invented the use of degrees as 360 fractions of a circle based on their sexagesimal, or base 60, counting system. What wasn’t clear was whether the Babylonians had a concept of objects in abstract mathematical space.
The trapezoid method involves learning the rate at which Jupiter moves and then plotting the planet’s speed against a set number of days on an x-y graph. The result should be a curve on the graph. Figuring out the area of trapezoids under this curve gives a reasonable approximation of how many degrees the planet has moved in a given period.
Babylonians Were Using Geometry Centuries Earlier Than Thought, Smithsonian Magazine
External references
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_astronomy
Learning Standards
2016 Massachusetts Science and Technology/Engineering Curriculum Framework
Understandings about the Nature of Science: Science knowledge has a history that includes the refinement of, and changes to, theories, ideas, and beliefs over time.
Science Is a Human Endeavor: Scientific knowledge is a result of human endeavor,
imagination, and creativity. Individuals and teams from many nations and cultures have contributed to science and to advances in engineering.
Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Framework
Mesopotamia: Site of several ancient river civilizations circa 3500–1200 BCE
7.10 Describe the important achievements of Mesopotamian civilization.
Next Generation Science Standards
HS-ESS1 Earth’s Place in the Universe
Construct an explanation based on valid and reliable evidence obtained from a variety of sources (including students’ own investigations, theories, simulations, peer review) and the assumption that theories and laws that describe the natural world operate today as they did in the past and will continue to do so in the future. (HS-ESS1-2)
Apply scientific reasoning to link evidence to the claims to assess the extent to which the reasoning and data support the explanation or conclusion. (HS-ESS1-6)
Engaging in Argument from Evidence: Use appropriate and sufficient evidence and scientific reasoning to defend and critique claims and explanations about the natural and designed world(s). Arguments may also come from current scientific or historical episodes in science.
Connections to Nature of Science:
Science Models, Laws, Mechanisms, and Theories Explain Natural Phenomena.
A scientific theory is a substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment, and the science community validates each theory before it is accepted. If new evidence is discovered that the theory does not accommodate, then the theory is generally modified in light of this new evidence. (HS-ESS1-2),(HS-ESS1-6)
The Writing Revolution
The Atlantic, October 2012
By Peg Tyre
in 2009, when Monica DiBella entered New Dorp, a notorious public high school on Staten Island, her academic future was cloudy. Monica had struggled to read in early childhood, and had repeated first grade. During her elementary-school years, she got more than 100 hours of tutoring, but by fourth grade, she’d fallen behind her classmates again. In the years that followed, Monica became comfortable with math and learned to read passably well, but never seemed able to express her thoughts in writing. During her freshman year at New Dorp, a ’70s-style brick behemoth near a grimy beach, her history teacher asked her to write an essay on Alexander the Great. At a loss, she jotted down her opinion of the Macedonian ruler: “I think Alexander the Great was one of the best military leaders.” An essay? “Basically, that wasn’t going to happen,” she says, sweeping her blunt-cut brown hair from her brown eyes. “It was like, well, I got a sentence down. What now?” Monica’s mother, Santa, looked over her daughter’s answer—six simple sentences, one of which didn’t make sense—with a mixture of fear and frustration. Even a coherent, well-turned paragraph seemed beyond her daughter’s ability. An essay? “It just didn’t seem like something Monica could ever do.”
For decades, no one at New Dorp seemed to know how to help low-performing students like Monica, and unfortunately, this troubled population made up most of the school, which caters primarily to students from poor and working-class families. In 2006, 82 percent of freshmen entered the school reading below grade level. Students routinely scored poorly on the English and history Regents exams, a New York State graduation requirement: the essay questions were just too difficult. Many would simply write a sentence or two and shut the test booklet. In the spring of 2007, when administrators calculated graduation rates, they found that four out of 10 students who had started New Dorp as freshmen had dropped out, making it one of the 2,000 or so lowest-performing high schools in the nation. City officials, who had been closing comprehensive high schools all over New York and opening smaller, specialized ones in their stead, signaled that New Dorp was in the crosshairs.
And so the school’s principal, Deirdre DeAngelis, began a detailed investigation into why, ultimately, New Dorp’s students were failing. By 2008, she and her faculty had come to a singular answer: bad writing. Students’ inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects. Consistently, one of the largest differences between failing and successful students was that only the latter could express their thoughts on the page.
If nothing else, DeAngelis and her teachers decided, beginning in the fall of 2009, New Dorp students would learn to write well. “When they told me about the writing program,” Monica says, “well, I was skeptical.” With disarming candor, sharp-edged humor, and a shy smile, Monica occupies the middle ground between child and adult—she can be both naive and knowing. “On the other hand, it wasn’t like I had a choice. I go to high school. I figured I’d give it a try.”
New Dorp’s Writing Revolution, which placed an intense focus, across nearly every academic subject, on teaching the skills that underlie good analytical writing, was a dramatic departure from what most American students—especially low performers—are taught in high school. The program challenged long-held assumptions about the students and bitterly divided the staff. It also yielded extraordinary results. By the time they were sophomores, the students who had begun receiving the writing instruction as freshmen were already scoring higher on exams than any previous New Dorp class. Pass rates for the English Regents, for example, bounced from 67 percent in June 2009 to 89 percent in 2011; for the global-history exam, pass rates rose from 64 to 75 percent. The school reduced its Regents-repeater classes—cram courses designed to help struggling students collect a graduation requirement—from five classes of 35 students to two classes of 20 students.
…[Why were the students previously failing?]
…. New Dorp students were simply not smart enough to write at the high-school level. You just had to listen to the way the students talked, one teacher pointed out—they rarely communicated in full sentences, much less expressed complex thoughts… Scharff, a lecturer at Baruch College, a part of the City University of New York, kept pushing, asking: “What skills that lead to good writing did struggling students lack?” …
Maybe the struggling students just couldn’t read, suggested one teacher.
A few teachers administered informal diagnostic tests the following week and reported back. The students who couldn’t write well seemed capable, at the very least, of decoding simple sentences. A history teacher got more granular. He pointed out that the students’ sentences were short and disjointed. What words, Scharff asked, did kids who wrote solid paragraphs use that the poor writers didn’t? Good essay writers, the history teacher noted, used coordinating conjunctions to link and expand on simple ideas—words like for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so. Another teacher devised a quick quiz that required students to use those conjunctions. To the astonishment of the staff, she reported that a sizable group of students could not use those simple words effectively. The harder they looked, the teachers began to realize, the harder it was to determine whether the students were smart or not—the tools they had to express their thoughts were so limited that such a judgment was nearly impossible.
The exploration continued. One teacher noted that the best-written paragraphs contained complex sentences that relied on dependent clauses like although and despite, which signal a shifting idea within the same sentence. Curious, Fran Simmons devised a little test of her own. She asked her freshman English students to read Of Mice and Men and, using information from the novel, answer the following prompt in a single sentence:
“Although George …”
She was looking for a sentence like: Although George worked very hard, he could not attain the American Dream.
Some of Simmons’s students wrote a solid sentence, but many were stumped. More than a few wrote the following: “Although George and Lenny were friends.”
A lightbulb, says Simmons, went on in her head. These 14- and 15-year-olds didn’t know how to use some basic parts of speech. With such grammatical gaps, it was a wonder they learned as much as they did. “Yes, they could read simple sentences,” but works like the Gettysburg Address were beyond them—not because they were too lazy to look up words they didn’t know, but because “they were missing a crucial understanding of how language works. They didn’t understand that the key information in a sentence doesn’t always come at the beginning of that sentence.”
Some teachers wanted to know how this could happen. “We spent a lot of time wondering how our students had been taught,” said English teacher Stevie D’Arbanville. “How could they get passed along and end up in high school without understanding how to use the word although?”
…The Hochman Program, as it is sometimes called, would not be unfamiliar to nuns who taught in Catholic schools circa 1950. Children do not have to “catch” a single thing. They are explicitly taught how to turn ideas into simple sentences, and how to construct complex sentences from simple ones by supplying the answer to three prompts—but, because, and so. They are instructed on how to use appositive clauses to vary the way their sentences begin. Later on, they are taught how to recognize sentence fragments, how to pull the main idea from a paragraph, and how to form a main idea on their own. It is, at least initially, a rigid, unswerving formula. “I prefer recipe,” Hochman says, “but formula? Yes! Okay!”
…Within months, Hochman became a frequent visitor to Staten Island. Under her supervision, the teachers at New Dorp began revamping their curriculum. By fall 2009, nearly every instructional hour except for math class was dedicated to teaching essay writing along with a particular subject. So in chemistry class in the winter of 2010, Monica DiBella’s lesson on the properties of hydrogen and oxygen was followed by a worksheet that required her to describe the elements with subordinating clauses—for instance, she had to begin one sentence with the word although.
Although … “hydrogen is explosive and oxygen supports combustion,” Monica wrote, “a compound of them puts out fires.”
Unless … “hydrogen and oxygen form a compound, they are explosive and dangerous.”
If … This was a hard one. Finally, she figured out a way to finish the sentence. If … “hydrogen and oxygen form a compound, they lose their original properties of being explosive and supporting combustion.”
As her understanding of the parts of speech grew, Monica’s reading comprehension improved dramatically. “Before, I could read, sure. But it was like a sea of words,” she says. “The more writing instruction I got, the more I understood which words were important.”
Classroom discussion became an opportunity to push Monica and her classmates to listen to each other, think more carefully, and speak more precisely, in ways they could then echo in persuasive writing.
PEG TYRE is the director of strategy at the Edwin Gould Foundation and the author of The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-writing-revolution/309090/
Interactive lecture demonstrations
from Interactive Lecture Demonstrations:
Created by Dorothy Merritts, Robert Walter (Franklin & Marshall College), Bob MacKay (Clark College). Enhanced by Mark Maier with assistance from Rochelle Ruffer, Sue Stockly and Ronald Thornton
What is an Interactive Lecture Demonstration?
Interactive Lecture Demonstrations introduce a carefully scripted activity, creating a “time for telling” in a traditional lecture format. Because the activity causes students to confront their prior understanding of a core concept, students are ready to learn in a follow-up lecture. Interactive Lecture Demonstrations use three steps in which students:
- Predict the outcome of the demonstration. Individually, and then with a partner, students explain to each other which of a set of possible outcomes is most likely to occur.
- Experience the demonstration. Working in small groups, students conduct an experiment, take a survey, or work with data to determine whether their initial beliefs were confirmed (or not).
- Reflect on the outcome. Students think about why they held their initial belief and in what ways the demonstration confirmed or contradicted this belief. After comparing these thoughts with other students, students individually prepare a written product on what was learned.
Why Use Interactive Lecture Demonstrations
Research shows that students acquire significantly greater understanding of course material when traditional lectures are combined with interactive demonstrations. Each step in Interactive Demonstrations – Predict, Experience, Reflect – contributes to student learning.
Prediction links new learning to prior understanding. The experience engages the student with compelling evidence. Reflection helps students identify and consolidate that they have learned.
More on why use interactive demonstrations
How to Use Interactive Lecture Demonstrations in Class
Effective interactive lecture demonstrations require that instructors:
- Identify a core concept that students will learn.
- Chose a demonstration that will illustrate the core concept, ideally with an outcome different from student expectations.
- Prepare written materials so that students can easily follow the prediction, experience and reflection steps.
More on how to use Interactive Demonstrations in class
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Using PhET interactive labs with interactive lecture demonstrations
Using PhET as an (Interactive) Lecture Demonstration
KaiserScience 
