Name: How medieval monks are revealing our universe's secrets | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2021-12-12T18:20:04.000Z
Duration: 3 min 52 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

people have got so many misconceptions about the Middle Ages.

Starting with the idea of being called dark ages where we don't even know where that comes from.

And also this idea that in terms of astronomy, the medieval people thought that the earth was flat.

Comets are these strange objects which are very unpredictable in the way they behave, they can explode.

Uh they can split all, all sorts of strange things can happen.

We need a record of that of what was seen when and usually I only work with observations that are done in the last maybe 50 years and this project uses observations of people that lived 1000 years ago.

It's almost like I can pick up the phone and call one of these months 1000 years ago and and and ask him, hey, my computer tells me that should have been a comet in the sky on this state.

The anglo saxons really try to understand the cosmos if the angles accents.

So a comet is a moment or important, which also was the case for telling and predicting the death of an important king or war famine.

This doesn't mean that we're not interested in understanding how that comic work vulnerable beat is was one of the most influential and important intellectual scholars from the Middle Ages.

He was a monk from Northumbria and he lived between the end of the seventh, beginning of the eighth centuries.

And I guess some of the meats that we have about the Middle Ages as well comes from the difficulty of accessing the language which can be at a latin or all the english or any other Medieval vernacular language and all.

And accessing this material isn't isn't easy.

So we try to work with comments that have Periods of orbits around the sun.

That means that they came back maybe 10 times since since the Middle Ages.

But there are comets that come from much larger distances from a region called Ward Cloud and those come back once every million years.

So if one of those comments was seen by the monks, I will not be able to reproduce that observation, but it will be important to know that that things were seen in the sky because it gives us an idea of how many of these comments were visiting the earth as a function of time.

Medieval monks described comments in quite detail and sometimes they give the month, the date, sometimes even the hour on which the comet was seen it occur.

So we get lots of information that is useful.

What I was very surprised about is how much there is still too look for in these in these texts.

I thought, well this stuff has been written 1000 years ago.

We we probably know everything there is to know about it, but it's not true since I started working on this project.

I've been learning that we're still discovering manuscripts.

So there is still material, uh, that is not known.

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