Parents' Notes for Unit 4: The Babylonians, the Egyptians, and Naked Eye Astronomy

Preparation

Below are notes on the main points of each assignment.

• History Web Lecture: The experience of ancient civilizations with natural phenomena prompted them to look for causes. Most early explanations involved stories of gods who created and controlled different aspects of nature. One of the problems with this view of nature is that it makes science difficult: if a god can whimsically bring up a storm, why bother with trying to understand or determine any cause-and-effect relationship between cloud formations and rain the next day? The Creation and Flood stories in Genesis gave us a different view of the universe, one in which nature is ordered, and its behavior guaranteed by God's promise.

  The formulations astrology, or the practice of predicting individual situations from stellar and planetary positions, grew out of the ability to predict the seasons from the same kinds of information. If the position of Sirius in a certain part of the sky is always followed by the flooding of the Nile, it isn't far to jump to the conclusion (however erroneous), that the movement of Sirius into that part of the sky causes the flooding of the Nile. Once that principle is established, it seems more reasonable to expect that perhaps the stars also influence other events on earth. We have other explanations now for why the position of a given star and a particular seasonal event occurs, but we also depend on the observation that "X always follows Y" to develop an argument that perhaps X is caused by Y. Without a concept of cause and effect, science is impossible. Establishing the direct connection between cause and effect is one of the chief goals of scientific investigation.

• Science Web Lecture: If it is possible, take your student to a planetarium show, or (even if you are not doing the lab option), outside to find some constellations and to check the location of the moon at the same time of night for several consecutive nights. Without practical application, it is hard to visual the actual motion of the sun, moon, and stars in space.

• Mastery Exercise: Most of the exercises involve visualizing one's position on earth, and the earth in space. It really helps if the students work this out with a lamp for the sun, another person for the moon, and themselves as the earth-based observer.

• Discussion: The discussion will focus on the development of mathematics as a tool of expressing precise quantities, and on astronomy as a recognition of periodic phenomena, which then can be predicted.

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