Why do circles have 360 degrees

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
41

Oh, the girl with the 9-candle menorah again.
By the way, the synagogue about 200 yards from my front door has a 7-candled one, like all of 'em did. Also 7-tiered menorahs are decorating the kosher deli about 100 yards from my front door. Tell me some day what the 2 added ones are for, should you happen to know a thing about it.

I’ve shown hands-down that Velikovsky’s research has everything in the world to do with Cecil Adams’ column as to the origins of the 360-degree circle. Plus some pizazz in the face of closed-minded ad autoritatem bigotry, by stylishly handling stale sarcasms fumaroled my way by contributors somewhat intellectually rigid.

The origin of using 360 degrees in a circle is a reflection of the number of days that literally once comprised a full sidereal year. There can be no other answer harmonizing with known physical and testimonial evidence.

Otherwise the answer must be a “mystical” one. What authenticated historical testimony is there for it? Were there 360 Spalazas in the first Boozum of Kazoozah? Why that number chosen?

I suggest that it’s closed-minded ad autoritatem bigotry to presumptuously declare Velikovsky’s decades of research and ingenious insight aren’t relevant to the question.

Unless boards of PBS types get to legislate what is acceptable to think and what isn’t.
To my knowledge no one has effectively legislated that dlv must first read anything before stiffly scorning it.

Relax your striating hackles, dlv. My taxi should be here any hour. And I will have struck just the teensy weensiest blow for America’s endangered attention span. You may all then return to your Instant Infothink ™.

42

Please tell us, O 7 of 9 of Velikovskian Borg, where did Velikovsky stick the candle in on the 8th day of Chanukah?

From http://www.jewishsuperstore.com/hanukah.htm

Please take all Velikovskyite flames to a more appropriate venue.

43

[[I’m no “Velikovskyite.” I’m just here to amuse myself until the taxi shows up. It’s handy to have a subject where just about everybody else in the world probably IS wrong.]]

Oh yeah? But more importantly, when was the last time you went out on a date?
Jill

44

I don’t know why I bother, but…

There are two types of menorahs in Jewish tradition. The seven-branched candelabra stood in the Temple, made of gold. The construction is mentioned in the biblical book of Exodus (and elsewhere in the Bible), so the tradition of the seven-branched menorah dates back to before 1000 BC. The Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans, and in fact there is a carving in Rome (the Arch of Titus) that depicts Roman soldiers carrying off the Temple menorah as loot.

After that, the Jewish synagogues used the seven-branched menorah as decoration, and in memory of the Temple. (Orthodox and Conservative synagogues do not light all seven branches, they leave one unlit, as a reminder that there was once an Original in the Temple in Jerusalem.)

OK, now draw a heavy black line.

In about 165 BC, the Israelites successfully rebelled against the Greek-Syrian rulers (the folks who took over after the collapse of the empire of Alexander the Great). To commemorate the victory, the holiday of Chanukah (“Dedication”) was instituted, with a nine-branch menorah used for the eight-day ceremony.

Thus, there are two types of menorahs – a seven branched one (general decoration in commemoration of the Temple) and a nine-branced one (specific to the holiday of Chanukah.)

45

Quite the contrary! Daily, monthly and annual growth patterns are all discernable in coral reefs. By examining current and fossil reefs, it is a simple matter to correlate the daily patterns with the annual patterns and discover that there was never a time the year equalled 360 days.
Thus the quoted allegation does not harmonize with the known physical evidence.

46

Did Velikovsky also assert that the Jewish week used to be 9 days long?

47

I see that Tom Dark doesn’t know the difference between hydrocarbons and carbohydrates, either.

And no educated person believes the old gag about Columbus. (Whose limited voyages wouldn’t have added one iota of evidence to the issue anyway.) The fact that the Earth is round has been well known to western civilization since times B.C. It’s in Aristotle and Ptolomy, it’s vital to the plot of the Divine Comedy…

As to the discover of Neptune, for God’s sake, try thinking. If it were so easy to find a trans-Uranian planet that a random sweep of the sky could do it, why would it take generations to find it? In point of fact, the location given by Le Verrier was only one degree off. (And part of the problem is that the general equations for Newton’s law of gravity have never been algebraically solved for systems containing more than two bodies. Thus the false search for trans-Neptunian planets that occupied astronomers for over a century, producing Pluto only by accident, when the real answer lay simply in more correct figures for the planetar masses.)

The plain fact is that Velikovsky was a fanatic whose idée fixe was to twist history by any means necessary to force Moses to come before (and inspire) Akhenaton. He couldn’t read any of the necessary languages, had a knowledge of science insufficient to graduate from a decent high school, and seems to have made no attempt whatsoever to work out the math implicit in any of his loony theories. The fact that, out of a thousand errors, he made two or three lucky guesses means nothing – stopped clocks and blind archers, don’cha know?

He did have an ability to bluff people with specious reasoning. Scientists are frequently impressed with his bogus history, and historians with his bogus physics, and the sort of people who watch “Touched by an Angel” are impressed with his bogus treatment of religion. But those of us with any real knowledge know he’s blowing it out his arse.

Hint: don’t attempt to buttress your arguments with “facts” from Velikivsky himself or from your fellow cultists. If you want to contribute, learn the appropriate languages and read the authentic documents, or become a physicist and work out a new theory of gravity – but remember that, whatever your new theory is, it has to work today,, too.

John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams

48

Addressing Tom Dark’s comments…
I have never seen the 360 day Egyptian year mentioned WITHOUT the accompamying “little month” of 5 days.

As to one temple built facing the wrong direction, I wouldn’t assume an exception a rule makes - why wouldn’t we see several built with this orientation before the supposede event.

In fact mastabas had “strict” rules for orientation and which direction they shuld face. Determining true north with shadows is pretty easy “Ancients 101” stuff, yet many of these are not oriented correctly. While mystical, the ancient world was eminently practical as well - haste, economy and laziness often played a role in sloppy construction (witness several pyramids that didn’t quite make it to opening day due to poor construction).

But all of this is missing a major point. If a society has a (religious, lunar, administrative - you fill in the blank) year that is 360 days, is it really functioning as an agricultural year if it processes throught the actual solar year. Probably not. A farmer won’t plant in the flood or the snow no matter what the priests tell him the date is. This is why the religious calendars quickly accomodated the concept of procession in relation to the actual solar year within a few generations of being created.

Conclusion - the Velikovskians assume the 360 day ceremonial year is the actual agricultural/solar year. Others assume the ceremonial year to process through the agricultural/solar year. At thispoint we then have to look outside for other evidence. The best being larger cycles such as the Sothic, which interestingly enough pre-dates Moses and Ankhnaten. To repeat, the Sothic takes 1460 years to process completely because it is a 365 vs. a 365.25 day calendar. A 360 vs. a 365/365.25 day prcession would yield a cycle of only 73 years. I have encountered no evidence from the ancients of any such 73 year cycle.

I do appreciate the relative civility of dicourse here.

To address the general mindset of Velikovskians…I tend myself to be very open to some radical interpretations of ancient history, but apply Occam’s razor to most, if not all.

49

Also - I’m glad we cleared up the difference between a “menorah” and a “hannukham”…the 7 or 9 branched versions of the temple light stand. Even Robert Graves was ready to rewrite history based on his own “discovery” of the this “discrepancy” in Roman monumentaal freizes.

I always advise well meaning Christians to consult with their local Jew before making radical new interpretations of the Old or New Testaments. Even the scantiest pre- barmitvah education seems to be worth it’s weight in gold for ferreting out some simple misconceptions we goy have about the ancient Israelites. Most helpful is the spirit of open and even handed discussion that realizes the Old Testament has no vowels and maybe for that reason alone one should allow some room for interpretation.

50

I bet these “Xians” are as ignorant about their religion as they are about Judaism. Tom sounds like can’t list the constituents of the “Holy Trinity” either.

(40 9-week weeks - what have they been smoking?)

51

I meant 40 9-day weeks = 360 days. Sorry.

52

You ARE saying that phenomena can’t exist unless a proper theory is first made for it to fit into.

Hee hee hee! Not even in the same galaxy as what I said! I’d be fascinated to see an explanation of what steps you followed to reach that conclusion.

Of course it’s ludicrous to claim that a phenomenon cannot exist before a theory. It’s almost as ludicrous to ignore a theory that is as provably correct as Newtonian mechanics.

Velikovsky’s scenario of planetary motion is incompatible with Newtonian mechanics. There are three possibilities:

  1. Newtonian mechanics is and always has been wrong, and Velikovskian mechanics is and always has been correct. This is impossible because Newtonian mechanics has been used successfully to make millions of predictions and calculations that came out differently then they would had Velikovskian mechanics been used.

  2. Newtonian mechanics is correct now, and Velikovskian mechanics was correct some long time ago, and the univers changed at some point. I will (as an intellectual excercise) allow this possibility, but I won’t believe it until I see some evidence and discussion other than I’ve seen so far.

  3. Newtonian mechanics is and has always been correct, and Velikovskian mechanics is and has always been wrong. My money’s on this one.

The plain fact is that Newtonian mechanics is correct today and has been so for hundreds, probably thousands, of years. This is demonstrable. Can you demonstrate evidence that the entire universe changed?

jrf

53

What were those “millions of predictions” correctly figured by Newtonian mechanics, again? Are we sure the word shouldn’t be “countless”? Come on, name me 900,000. And don’t include any that were already old-hat in tables set up by astronomers who lived lawlessly before Isaac “Smoove N” Newton. Such as the Babylonians.

Well, let’s see. Every man-made satellite orbiting the earth, or that has ever orbited the earth, or that has ever traveled through the solar system, or that has traveled more than 50 miles above the earth, traveled or travels along a path calculated by Newtonian mechanics (in some cases slightly corrected by relativistic mechanics). How many such satellites failed to ge where intended because of a flaw in the basis of the calculations (that is, not because of a calculation error or mechanical failure or design error)? That’s one H**L of a lot of satellites, and I don’t think the Babylonians did the calculations.

Every prediction of the position of a body in the universe, made in the last 300-odd years, was based on Newtonian mechanics. Some were off because of incomplete or faulty data. The vast majority have been dead-on.
If Velikovskian mechanics applied today, the problems with tht lsst two Mars missions would have been much worse; they wouldn’t have gotten even near to Mars.

jrf

54

There are no Velikovskian Mechanics. He simply says, “So-and-so happened,” and doesn’t try to work out the math at all.

John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams

55

The flaws in Newtonians mechanics exist only inpracticum because they are for bodies in a vacuum. The math required to add in the relitavistic effects and other complicating messiness like thermodynamics and elecrodynamic forces require computing power that we… now…have.

People who expect science to be dogmatic and shoot it down when it isn’t - when it is an evolving hypothesis that takes in all new data through adjustments to the theorems - expect it to in fact be a religion. It is not.

56

There are no Velikovskian Mechanics. He simply says, “So-and-so happened,” and doesn’t try to work out the math at all

True, but I’m assuming that the statements he makes imply that the math could be worked out into a system of what I’ve chosen to call Velikovskian mechanics. I don’t have any reason to believe that an internally consisten mathematical model can be created to fit the Velikovskian scenarios. If it could, it would be very different from Newtonian mechanics.

jrf

57

Hi everyone, I’m a new entry to your discussion and have never done this before so please excuse me if I may violate any proceedures. I read the letters and just had to weigh in with my two bits.
I noted that Tom Dark was being beseiged by anti-Velikovsky forces and there seems to be a problem regarding the 360 day year. First let me comment on the year.
The biggest circle known to the ancients was of course, the yearly path of the earth around the sun, which they knew about as fact . . . until Potolemy screwed things up with his geocentric theory. The length and periods of the year were vital for agricultural pursuits. Being a grave matter of whether or not you ate well or starved, it came under the purvue of a priestly class because of its importance.
Common sense would tell us that something as vital as this would be done as accurately as possible. By putting a stick in one’s yard or using a building’s shadow, anyone can be as accurate as plus or minus one day in the measurement of a year. We can hardly expect less than that from those whose lives depended on accuracy. So it stands to reason that the earth’s year, being the most perfect circle known at the time, must have been 360 days, and this was obviously refected in the degrees in a man-made circle (what else would they use)?
Regardless if Velikovsky was right or wrong about venus, something on a cosmic scale (legends of the flood, etc,.) must have happened to the earth to change that orbit into one with 365 days. The priests couldn’t have been out by a whole five days.
In the “Egyptian Book of the Dead,” pg xlix, E.A.W. Budge, Dover, 1967, The Legend of Osiris, I quote: …to Plutarch in particular we owe an important version of the legend as current in his day. It is clear that in some points he errs, but his was excusable in dealing with a series of traditions already some four thousand years old. According to this writer the goddess Rhea (Nut), the wife of Helios (Ra), was beloved by Kronos (Seb). When Helios discovered the intrigue, he cursed his wife and declared that she should not be delivered of her child in any month or in any year. Then the god Hermes, who also loved Rhea, played at tables with Selene and won from her the seventieth part of each day of the year, which, added together , made five whole days. These he joined to the three hundred and sixty days of which the year then consisted." Unquote. (For the text see De Iside et Osiride, ed. Didot 'Scripta Moralia, t. iii., pp. 429-69, xii.ff.)
I’m quoting this because old stories about gods, etc, were often based on fact and were put into stories (myths and legends), by those that handed down the oral and written traditions of their countries. Natural events were often put into mystical tales of gods. So one of the oldest writings, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, from about 6,000 to 7,000 years ago, would tend to support a 360 day year in the far past.

Now as regards Velikovsky, Velikovsky’s great sin was that he published (without going through peer review) a book that went against the then-current scientific views of how our world changed. He postulated that the earth changed, not only via slow evolution, but by catastrophy, and (real heresy), within historical times. This irritated the powers-that-be so much, inclulding Harold Shapley, the ‘dean’ of astronomers, even though he had never read Velikovsky’s book “Worlds in Collision,” that he initiated a pogram against Velikovsky (why couldn’t he have had an easier name to type), and threatened the publisher, MacMillan with loss of their textbook sales. MM then gave the best seller (another reason for the scientist’s ire) to Doubleday who then continued to publish as they were not so suceptable to professorial blackmail.
To those of you that vilify EV, he then wrote another book called “Earth in Upheaval” which then gave hard, physical proofs of earth-based catastrophy, such as the alaskan “muck,” and the mammoths in Siberia with temperate zone plants in their stomachs which had been frozen so fast that the stomach acids – which continue to act even after death until the acids lose their potency – had not digested them. And we all know that Siberia is in the Arctic zone, so whence the temperate-zone plants? And how did ten tons of meat be quick-frozen so quickly the acids couldn’t work?
The scientists vindictively caused the editor in Macmillan that accepted the book to be fired and they also caused the dismissal of the director of the Hayden Planetarium, who was going to do a show based on V’s work.
Scientists have never accepted unorthodox or uncomfortable theories that go against their own dearly-held, and often erronous, views. Look at the case of Vera Rubin in the fifties when she found galatic movement superimposition on the hubble flow.
Look at Halton Arp who was forced to leave this country because he found that some quasars had ‘bridges’ to nearby galaxies that showed a smaller red-shift thus putting into question the idea that quasars are only from the beginning of the universe. He lost his viewing privilages at Mount Wilson and Palamar and now works at the Max Planck Institute in Germany.
Even Carl Sagan was censored. He was elected to the National Acadamey of Scientists and on the same day voted out because scientists were suspicious of his credentials as a serious scientist because of his popularizing of science to the masses of the great unwashed, via the Cosmos series, et al, on PBS. And all this dispite his having over 300 publications to his name.
Remember, Galileo wasn’t grabbed by the Inquisition because he satirized Pope Urban, but because he wrote in Italian, the language of the hoi polloi, and not in Latin the language of the scientists at the time. They weren’t too happy that the common mass of people could now understand what before only the elite scientists could lay claim to.
So whether EV was right or not as far as Venus is concerned (he probably wasn’t), his theory that the earth encountered cosmic catastrophe is valid and proven by the Shoemaker/Levi comet hitting Jupiter.
Even Eugene Shoemaker had his problems. He fought for years to make other scientists accept that meteor crater in Arizona was an impact crater against other scientist’s stubborn insistance that it was a volcanic caldera, which they had never taken the time to actually go see. The comet hitting Jupiter finally got it through their thick skulls that catastrophy does still happen.
Look at the man who came up with the theory of continental drift in the '20s. No scientist would listen to him. Changing their paradigms of continental formation would have been too inconvenient. They had too much invested in the then-current theory and refused to listen to such an obvious crank. He was proven right in 1968 when they measured the magnetic variations along the Atlantic Rift which proved his theory. Unfortunately he was dead by then.
Look at what happens if anyone is so ill-advised to go against Relativity? The Inquisition is still alive and well in our scientific fraturnity.
Recently I submitted a manuscript to a well-known university press and it was rejected because I had a chapter on pork-barrel science and the editor was worried that some scientists might have their delicate egos bruised. When I eliminated the chapter, he then told me that I also had to eliminate any reference to Velikovsky. As I had only written factually, I was considerably put out. It was purely and simply, censorship by peer-review.
By the way, the editors of “Pensee Magazine” in 1962, wrote a book about the pros and cons of the Velikovsky controversy called “Velikovsky Revisited” Some of you out there might benefit if you read it and you should also read “Earth in Upheavel,” before commenting further on Velikovsky. As a theory of Earth’s evolution, his work is as valid as Darwin’s, and Science should have broad-enough shoulders to carry many ideas, even if they don’t conform to orthodoxy.
He also wrote a scholary work on 400 years in Middl

58

Tom Dark, did you reregister under another username?

Carpe diem - Seize the day
Carpe noctem - Seize the night
Carpe cerevisi - Seize the beer

59

Larsen: your explanation is one piece of speculation (a circle having 360 degrees because it was supposedly based on a calendar)built upon a second piece of speculation (that calendar supposedly had 360 days because that was once the length of a year). But your speculative conclusions ignore an important empirical fact- as I stated in a previous post, daily and annual growth patterns in coral reefs show that the year was never 360 days long!

If you want speculative reasoning try this- the early Mesopotamian mathematicians originally tried working with circles of 365.25 degrees and just found the computation too damn complicated, and so quickly simplified the system to 360 degrees in a circle. Remember they used a base 60 number system, so the simplified version would have been much more convenient for them.

60

Fellows, Fellows! I am surprised to see this thing still going. This means things.

No, I am not here under another name. I’ve been away, scuba-diving at my secret spot in old Atlantis, which was revealed to me by english-speaking dolphins.

Thank you, Larson. Together, we shall swordfight our way out of this den of unreason and red-faced puffery. I mean Kennedy and dlv, of course. Kennedy for his childishly prevaricated depiction of who and what Dr. Emmanuel Velikovsky was, and dlv for supposing for an instant that I am a Christian. Whattaya, both nuts?

We should start a Velikovsky/anti-Velikovsky thread. Just as soon as Kennedy and the others actually go read any of it. Coincidentally I recently ran across a passage in Sagan’s BROCA’S BRAIN where he pulls literary tricks that seem to intend malicious libel against DR. (Kennedy? See that?) Velikovsky. But I will most appropriately leave all that to Charles Ginenthal.

For those of us who are not PBS couch potatoes, or whose Tourette’s-like emotional makeup gets in the way of a reasonably adult attention span (Kennedy. Poke, poke… and by the way, you HAVE to be an airhead to have swallowed “revised” science history as you’ve farted it out here), not a thing has been resolved about the origins of the choice of 360 degrees for a circle. One contributor here has uttered a speculation that’s already been covered.

The cuneiform base-60 doesn’t answer anything, either. The question is, why the choice of those numbers? Why 360 degrees? Why not 100 degrees? or 400? Or 40?

If it is from the days of the year as those days once literally were, the sea-coral argument could hardly cut it, because the violent force of a planet bumped out of its orbit would probably eradicate it.

As to “millions” of instances of proof that Newton’s mechanics must rule men’s perceptions of celestial motion, there’s no reason that satellites could not be “obeying” some other “laws” which Newton’s match coincidentally match in certain, but not all, areas. This is stuff you talk about in freshman year. Everybody but Kennedy.

And Kennedy has not even read here the statement as to Einstein’s Special Theory being considered highly important for having seemed to solve a nagging discrepancy in Newtonian physics – the perturbation in Mercury’s orbit. But maybe it only seemed to. The point was, Newton’s word wasn’t The Word Of The Lord then, and oughtn’t be treated that way in any case.

Of course, Velikovsky is the Messiah who knows all. That is why I keep a little plastic statue of him on the dashboard of my Dodge Colt. (Sorry, can’t help but poke at these Star-Trek type nurds here) By the way, Newton DID consider that the unexplainable portions of his theory of gravitation were supported by Divine Law. Did you know that, Kennedy? And they still haven’t been explained. There are several points.

RobRoy, that one exception is a bit too conspicuous not to raise questions. And as to where it is referenced that ancient peoples counted 360 days in a sidereal year, you’ve never read about it, and others have.

Just a reminder to the overly literal-minded here (Kennedy. dlv is too far into outer space to qualify) – most likely all of us are only talking about stuff we read. It’s only books. None of you have proof for a single damned thing, even if your books have great big shiny pictures in them.

Otherwise, where did the choice of 360 degrees for a circle come from? So far, Cecil is “right,” by default of all of your arguments. Thus the pyramids are still standing by accident, not accurate engineering. And all the stone of Babylon fell down due to a few degrees fudged here and there.