I just finished reading “Decoding the Heavens”, the story to date of the Antikythera mechanism, which is a 2100 year old analogue calendar, astrological & eclipse computer.
I recommend that this book be read in conjunction with my last year’s read of “The Archimedes Codex”.This book complements the first through its description of modern hi-tech archaeological techniques and its insight into the ancient math that underlies the mechanism. The codex also highlights the Syracuse connection to the mechanism.
Next read “The Book Nobody Read”, the story of Copernicus’ De Revoltionibus to get a basic understanding of the Ptolemaic universe that the mechanism modeled. These books together should give the reader some insight into the reason that the intellectual move to the Heliocentric Universe became so difficult to make.
The overthrow of the Greek mechanical universe for the Newtonian mechanical universe can then be traced if you spend some time with “Feynman’s Lost Lecture, The Motion of the Planets Around the Sun.” The careful reader of this short lecture will be rewarded with the geometric proof that Kepler’s description of the ellipitial motion of the planets around the sun leads to Newton’s law of gravitational attraction.
So with these diverse threads of books I believe you will find the intellectual trail of our understanding of the sky’s around us. One more recommendation though to set the reader’s foundation in the astronomy of the solar system for this journey.
To better understand the place of Greek astronomical/astrological intellectual tradition in relation to other ancient cultures, I recommend “Stairways to the Stars, Skywatching in Three Great Ancient Cultures”. This book is also a good lay man’s resource 1) to what we actually see in the night sky, 2)to the basic ratio’s behind the motion of the sun, the moon, and the planets and 3) to an understanding of how eclipses happen.
