The Mayans deserve full credit for discovering the earth revolves around the sun

instead of Galileo.

I know this is an odd topic but I was just in Mexico at Chichen-Itza and I got to thinking that the Mayans really were the first to discover the earth was not the center of the universe and revolved around the sun. I just think the Mayans deserve more credit for discovering this than Galileo.

Mayans (2600 BC – 1500 AD)
The Mayans were a long-lived civilization, which inhabited regions in Central America and southern Mexico. With the study of the stars being heavily linked with their religion, Mayans placed a large emphasis on astronomy. The result of their observations and calculations are compiled in the Dresdan Codex: the Mayan's greatest astronomical accomplishment. This document details the observations of and predictions for solar eclipses, moon phases, positioning of planets including conjunctions, and equinoxes and solstices.

The Dresdan Codex was 78 pages long, taking up 3.5 metres of paper, and covered observations and predictions over a staggering 3 million year cycle.
While not all of the predictions are accurate, it is still an impressive accomplishment. This is all the more impressive when you consider that this was done without geometry and trigonometry, and with the belief that the sky was supported by four jaguars, each holding up each corner of the sky.

http://www.astronomywa.net.au/education/historical.html

Sorry Galileo but you were second. Of course it didn't help that the Spanish decided to burn most of the Mayan books.

All I am saying is that the Mayans got the answer first but all we ever hear is that Galileo was the first to discover this. I just don't think it's fair to the Mayans.

Any evidence at all that Mayans were aware of heliocentrism would be adequate. 1800 B.C. seems a real stretch, since that's the earliest record of Mayan civilization whatsoever. We're talking mound building.

But I'd be interested in even classical Mayan evidence.

I looked it up on Google and several articles say the same thing.

Anything more tangible?

Mayans (2600 BC – 1500 AD)
The Mayans were a long-lived civilization, which inhabited regions in Central America and southern Mexico. With the study of the stars being heavily linked with their religion, Mayans placed a large emphasis on astronomy. The result of their observations and calculations are compiled in the Dresdan Codex: the Mayan's greatest astronomical accomplishment. This document details the observations of and predictions for solar eclipses, moon phases, positioning of planets including conjunctions, and equinoxes and solstices.

The Dresdan Codex was 78 pages long, taking up 3.5 metres of paper, and covered observations and predictions over a staggering 3 million year cycle.
While not all of the predictions are accurate, it is still an impressive accomplishment. This is all the more impressive when you consider that this was done without geometry and trigonometry, and with the belief that the sky was supported by four jaguars, each holding up each corner of the sky.

http://www.astronomywa.net.au/education/historical.html

but I see no reference to heliocentrism.

"My people were inventing astronomy and mathematics while yours were painting themselves blue and worshiping trees."

He could pull it off -- he was a big guy.

:rofl:

The tour guide said a lot of interesting things.

I think she was mostly full of shit.

I casually asked the tour guide is she would show me where they hid the bodies and she said "sure right this..." before catching herself and showing me the door.

There are literally hundreds of books & studies about the incredible knowledge that the Mayans had. Their scientists were friggin' brilliant.

Much of it is just a bunch of made up junk.

I'd say the Mayans didn't have scientists, as the scientific method wouldn't be invented for many centuries after their collapse.

They did have astronomers. Who kept pretty good records.

But I still haven't seen any evidence that they were aware of the sun being at the center of the solar system.

It's not as obvious a fact as many laypersons would like to think it is.

or Magellan, or whoever it was first circumnavigated the globe. If you watched a large, masted vessel sinking over the horizon, you wouldn't have to have been a genius to suspect as much, would you?

Although we're not certain EXACTLY what the unit of measurement
he used would translate to, it's generally accepted that he was
probably only about 5% off the correct figure.

http://inkido.indiana.edu/a100/earthmoon7.html

Its the idea that the sun is the center of the solar system.

Unless you listen to Mel Gibson.

Redstone

But seriously folks...

:thumbsup:

it frankly makes us nervous.

Because that's when my calendar ended. But then I looked at my new calendar and it doesn't end until January 31st, 2008.

Whew! We dodged a close one!

however, I unashamedly ADMIT to being intrigued

A new dimension added, and time starts going backwards.... Oh SHIT! We'll have to go through eight years of Bush again!:cry: :banghead: :hide: :mad: :wtf: :shrug: :yoiks:

Can't wait to sell my house too!

:spray:

This happens once roughly 26,000 years.

Since we crossed the "galatic equator" in 1998. I guess the Mayans were close, though.

:rofl:

why they decided to end everything then...although I understand their particular logic on "lifetime" ends...it is a puzzle as to why no one decided to keep going.

I figure one day, in the far far future if we survive, some archaeologist will dig up a chat log from the early Thirtysomething AOL chat room and wonder what in the hell it all meant.

That's just when the calendar ran out. They predict events taking place many years after 2012 with the new calendar.

Of course, the whole civilization collapsed a thousand years ago, and I guess they didn't see that coming either.

within the first few centuries AD, I think. I think it would ante-date the Arabic conceptualisation of it. All, this, while our ancestors - doubtless, including those of the occasional academics who like to impute an inferior intelligence to Africans - were running around daubed with woad, spear at the ready.

It certainly predates the Arabic zero (Indian actually), but the concept goes back to 2nd millenium BC babylonians.

That's the research I read in college.

that WASPS aren't the intellectual giants some of their dimmer academics like to claim them to be.

I don't think it was WASPs running around covered in woad. It was the Celts, and there weren't any Ps at that time. Or Cs for that matter. ;)

predominantly descended from the Norsemen than the Anglo-Saxons.

There was never any question of such early medieval ancestors being P, though definitely C. But, my use of the term WASP was merely in reference to the historically dominant social class in what we call the Anglo-Saxon world, not a scholarly ecclesial attribution to this race or that. So.... your winking smiley right back atcha, geardaddy!

I was just being nitpicky. ;)

and proposed theories that Earth was just another planet flying around the sun. Much of that knowledge was destroyed when the Alexandria library was destroyed. Apparently they figured it out by measuring the shadow of a column in two different cities at the same time, in one city the shadow disappeared at a certain time of day, at the same time in a city to the north, the shadow didn't disappear. From this they figured the earth was round and how big it was to a high degree of precision. I may be paraphrasing it wrong, but it was in Carl Sagan's Cosmos tv show.

And there is evidence that they had at least the idea of helocentrism.

Aristarchus was the earliest Greek Philosopher to have suggested it, almost 2000 years before Copernicus.

scientists and monks who did scientific research believed that the earth was round. The idea nobody had a clue until 1492 is garbage.

While some African cultures devloped a math based on 5's four fingers and a thumb and later the Sub-Continent of India developed the base 10 system(yes it was the Indians, and not the arabs) because they noticed that there were five more appendages on the other hand. Why is this important? The larger the base that you use the fewer the number of characters needed to express large'numbers, hence complicated calculations of 'large' events are easier. So the eastern hemisphere is the smartest! Nope.

Some raggedy assed, half naked little brown indigenous pipples in Central America looked down at their feet and discovered ten more little digits...they calculated using a base 20 system. Among other things they had the earth dated as old as 40 million years, at a time the Indo-Europeans couldn't even reckon numbers that large. So the moral is, that it not only is safer looking down, you avoid holes and poisonous things, you just might wind up discovering something that helps explain everything far above and beyond you.

Now before all you that sufffer from instant empathy and wannabeism run off to become annointed as Mayans, you might take notice of the fact that although they gave their children things that spun round on tiny axles, they never associated that toy with a wheel. Ya win some, ya lose some.

wouldn't they have had a base 20 system?

And it was Copernicus that introduced our civilization to that notion anyway.

Even if some of us are descended from non-Western civilization, the clothes worn, religions practiced, languages spoken throughout North and South America are most heavily influenced by Western countries, namely Spain, England, Portugal, and France.

and languages.

lol

You don't really believe this was a vast empty continent, do you?

Tell me in which autonomous countries in North and South America these non-european languages and religions dominate.

I don't believe in a vast empty continent. I do believe that the civilizations that were here were conquered and destroyed by colonization.

lets not take credit for EVERYTHING ;-)

Helocentrism was contridictory to the glorious bible.

By the early 2nd century AD, before Christianity had any influence on astronomy, Ptolemy's geocentric model had become the accepted one in the Roman world. Aristarchus himself wasn't 'oppressed' - he was a few centuries before Ptolemy. It takes pretty good observations to be able to reject a geocentric model in favour of a heliocentric one - and when Copernicus did so, he still had to leave in some epicycles. It was Kepler, with the idea of elliptical orbits sweeping out a constant area in a given time, who seems to have been the first to really get it right.

Your government is on top of the situation, just like everything else... So don't worry about anything, and go shopping.

:yoiks:

Everyone knows Europeans discovered everything.

doesn't sound very compatible with a heliocentric theory. Perhaps they did have a heliocentric model, but your link makes it sound like they didn't. This article seems to confirm that - the Dresden Codex shows they had very accurate tables of astronomical events, but didn't have a heliocentric model:



ESI = "empiric sidereal interval" - ie established by observation, not a theory.

and continues to exist and develop as the product of an endless chain of coinkidinkies. How dumb is that! What the force behind them all is.. well.. they dinnae ken, but it cannae be a creator God.

We're talking about whether the Maya had a heliocentric model or not. If you want to start a new topic about atheism and creator gods, then start a new thread.

I hadn't read your post, but jumped the gun on the basis of what I had wrongly imagined was your point.

scientists have evidence.

Taoist artwork showing the phases of the moon suggests that at least some astronomers appreciated that earth and moon revolved around the sun. While not common knowledge throughout society, there’s really no doubting that astronomers—who were constantly observing the heavens—eventually realized the nature of the solar system. And they passed this knowledge on to their successors at the astronomical institutions. I would expect that as was also the case with ancient Greece where Aristarchus declared by 150 BC that earth revolved around the sun. Probably, some key Chinese astronomers had also reached that conclusion by about 3000 BCE. Also, the Han Chinese and Romans exchanged more than silk during the 2nd century BCE--so there was likely cross-fertilization in the astronomical field as well.

http://www.1421.tv/pages/evidence/content.asp?EvidenceID=456

It's pretty easy to observe the phases of the moon and incorporate them into your artwork without having a heliocentric model of the solar system.

They are evidence that the Moon shines entirely from reflected light of the Sun, but they'd look exactly the same in a geocentric model.

The phases of Venus (first observed, as far as we know, by Galileo) are another matter. They are good evidence of the relative movement of the Sun and Venus, and imply Venus orbits round the Sun. But from the Earth, the Moon and Sun appear to move in an orbit around the Earth, and you can't distinguish what is 'stationary' without very careful measurement of things like the parallax of stars.

Why, if it weren't for White Europeans™, we'd all still be living in caves eating bugs.

And Kepler came up with the idea of elliptical orbits.

Nothing in your OP indicates the Mayans had a heliocentric model. You can have the best data in the world, and it sounds like they did at the time, but that doesn't guarantee that the model you build from it is accurate.

the invaded. When I think of the history of Africa I also weep. They laugh at Timbuktu without understanding the scholarship that took place there.

I'd agree it's overlooked, but I don't see people laughing at it.

Are you suggesting the Mayans did subscribe to heliocentrism and invaders destroyed it?

to be able to think in really, really big numbers. It takes
some training for our minds to comprehend insanely large
numbers, and they were the first to be able to do that.

I mean, if they figured it out independently of Galileo, that should be noted. But its not as if Galileo stole from the Mayans and Galileo's discovery remains more important because it, not the unknown at the time discovery by the Mayans, formed the building blocks for future scientific progress.

exceeds your antipathy for racial intellectual arrogance, the curse of every empire. But it was an interesting point.

that should be noted in the history books. However, it doesn't change the importance of the independent discovery of the same thing by the Europeans, given that its importance is what it led to, not the discovery in and of itself.

science without truth leads to madness, as indeed it is doing at this minute. Scientists trying to clone human beings, others making hybrid animals from body parts... Genetic engineers introducing DNA from humans and animals into food.

Whether or not the Mayans had a heliocentric model (and it appears they didn't) would be history, not science.

of creation. In fact, now physicists at the macroscomic level and the microcosmic level are close to the limits of what you would understand as science, i.e. mechanistic clockwork stuff. If it is to have a future at its extreme limits, it must be in terms of juggling with paradoxes.

Both Newton and Einstein, the originators of the last two cataclymic paradigm shifts in physics stated that they resorted primarily to inductive reasoning, not deductive reasoning the basis of the so-called scientific method (just common-sense testing and a sensible exclusion of any consideration of extraneous information). In fact, Newton even came to despise mathematics, which as "a priori" reasoning, could at least reasonably claim to be a primordial aspect of truth, in favour of writing tomes on theology nobody is interested in.

left us records that stated accurate motions of the heavens laid out in base 60 mathematics.
The twelve astrological 'houses' were laid out and named a thousand or two years prior to the
Mesoamerican civilizations came into being.
Those 'Houses' still carry the same 'names/meanings' that were given them wayback.

I know about the Zodiac, but I doubt it match any such Mayan version.

A) Galileo is not given credit for discovering the earth revolves around the sun. Since he didn't. He's generally given credit for pushing Copernicus's views of the heliocentric model of the solar system and backing up his view with some telescope observations.

B) If the Mayans did discover this fact long before the rest of human civilization it's sort of interesting for understanding their culture but not very interesting scientifically. Many concepts were discovered and rediscovered in ancient civilizations. The most credit for discoveries go to the people that are able to mass communicate those ideas.

Being first to figure it out doesn't matter, it's being the first to tell everybody that gets you the credit.

Did the Mayans accept that the Earth goes around Sol, or did they just find it easier to explain the phases of Venus by making it orbit Sol rather than Earth? I'm finding LOTS of references to Venus, given the planet was more important to the Mayans than Sol, but I've found no good references to any Mayan belief in a heliocentric worldview.

Until you cite some serious scientific citations, this notion of the Mayans being first is rubbish.