by eesmith | 2025-12-08 12:43:44+00:00
> I'm not sure why you keep replying to my post

Because I want to encourage you to read your sources in more detail. Good scholarship is important, and yet so very hard. And because I want to know new things, and this exchange has lead to some fruitful readings for me.

> it's the author of the article responsibility

You haven't pointed out what's missing from the article that would be relevant to the reader. Rather, what you have pointed out hasn't been correct, or hasn't been relevant.

> working on the physics of planetary problems

Sure. Absolutely. And how would mentioning more of them improve the article? The tides are not caused by the heat of the moon. The tides are not caused by astrological forces. The tides are not caused by undersea monsters. The moon's orbit is not described by a sphere. Listing tidbits about all the people who worked on tides is far outside the scope of this article.

> the European scholars later found ocean tides is something that need to be calculated, analyzed and predicted due to their colonization effort around the world during the Renaissance time, hence the need to explore and research them further.

Sure. And they built on a long history of earlier research in understanding tides.

Like, Pliny described how the tides are influenced by both the Sun and the Moon - https://archive.org/details/naturalhistoryof01plinuoft/page/... - something I presume that every educated scholar of the Golden Era would have known about. Pliny wrote:

"Much has been said about the nature of waters ; but the most wonderful circumstance is the alternate flowing and ebbing of the tides, which exists, indeed, under various forms, but is caused by the sun and the moon. ... There is a difference in the tides, depending on the moon, of a complicated nature, and, first, as to the period of seven days. For the tides are of moderate height from the new moon to the first quarter ; from this time they increase, and are the highest at the full: they then decrease. On the seventh day they are equal to what they were at the first ... After an interval of eight years, and the hundredth revolution of the moon, the periods and the heights of the tides return into the same order as at first"

Not bad for someone from the Mediterranean .. except, wait! Not only would he have read about tides, he was the procurator of Hispania Tarraconensis, which has an Atlantic coastline, and may have been the procurator of Gallia Belgica, also on the Atlantic.

Or we can read about China from Needham, at https://archive.org/details/cftri.9621sciencecivilisat0000jo...

"The next advances were made in the Thang. Tou Shu-Mêng, about +770, who wrote the Hai Thao Chih (or Hai Chiao Chih) (On the Tides), seems to have been one of the first to deal with the lunar theory of the tides with any scientific detail. When the moon is passing through hsi-mu and ta-liang, he said, the water rises higher. ... In +850 came a short tractate which was to be famous, Lu Chao’s Hat Chhao Fu (Essay on the Tides). From this we know that regular tide tables (thao chih) were already in use, and that the association of neaps with the moon’s quarters was fully accepted."

Tides calculated, analyzed, and predicted long before Europe's greedy immoral ventures.

Needham suggests the necessity was even greater in China because "The coasts of China, however, have tides of considerable range, for example, about twelve feet in spring off the mouth of the Yangtze. Moreover, China possessed one of the only two great tidal bores or eagres in the world, that on the Chhien-Thang River near Hangchow".

If you really believe your necessity hypothesis, then you should stress Chinese tidal studies, not Muslim/Arabic ones.

Still, it's all interconnected. Europeans needed a better way to handle bookkeeping. Fibbonacci's Liber Abaci introduced the Indo–Arabic numeral system to Europe. The resulting improved of banking and accounting abilities would later help fund Europe's exploitative efforts.

China developed gunpowder. European researchers improved on it both for internal wars and their wars of subjugation.

The Needham Question - yes, the very same Needham - asks and tries to answer the question of why modern science did not develop in Chinese or Indian civilization (or during the Muslim Golden Age), but only in later Europe.