[Avodah] Shitas R' Tam

[Micha Berger]

On Sun, Dec 24, 2006 at 05:27:09PM +0200, Ptolmey dictated to RDBannett:
: Of  course it is possible and quite logical.  Your error is
: that you labor under the misconception so common today that
: the earth is a ball rotating around itself and also around
: the sun.  If you go back to our ancient and well proven
: tradition of a flat earth with the sun going around it, the
: light disappears all over at the same time.
...
: Claudius Ptolemaeus

But in the Ptolmeic universe, the earth is a sphere and everything orbits
around it. Then they added epicycles, orbits within the orbits, getting
ever closer to the true path of the planets in the sky though what would
later be called Fourier analysis.

Having a single sunset across the whole earth requires flatness, not
Ptolmey.

But in any case, I argued a while back ('99, ie the first vol 2) that Chazal's
astronomy evolved with the conservative side of contemporary theory. And thus
R' Yehoshua's notion (1st cent CE) of the sun going behind a flat sky was far
from their last word on the subject.

By Rebbe's day (100 and change years later) Ptolmey's cocentric spheres won the Jewish
thoughtspace; in between, it became the leading theory among the Hellenes as well.
The only difference was that they believed the stars were embedded in the sphere and
thus moved it, and we had a machloqes about whether they moved around on the sphere.
With one exception: I think it looks like R' Chiya thought the sun orbited a flat
earth. That would explain his comment about it warming the pools at night from below.

See <http://www.aishdas.org/avodah/vol02/v02n183.shtml#11>.

Tir'u baTov!
-mi

-- 
Micha Berger             It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to
micha at aishdas.org        suffering, but only to one's own suffering.
http://www.aishdas.org                 -Robert Lynd, writer (1879-1949)
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