The Stargazer and the Well

Can you see the light of the stars from the bottom of a well? Did an astrologer once fall into a well because he was staring up at the stars? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss a couple of well-and-cosmos-related tales from antiquity.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In
today's episode, we're going to discuss a very old association
between astronomy and wells and uh. This ties into various

(00:28):
ancient anecdotes and also archaeological sites. Uh, basically getting it
down to this idea that if you have a well,
if you have a deep pit or even a long tube,
that this could allow an individual to see starlight during
the day. How had you ever heard of this, Joe, No,

(00:50):
I don't think not before you brought this up. Yeah,
this is and and this is one that there was
more to it than the more I kept looking into it. Um,
But instantly it's kind of a captivating idea if you
know nothing about it, because there's something about the two
extremes in play here, the bottom of an earthly pit
and the light of distant stars. You know, it reminds
me of that that that far more recent quote by

(01:13):
author Oscar Wilde in his play A Lady Windermere's Fan,
which even if you're not familiar with that source, you
may have heard this, this particular quote quote, we are
all in the gutter, but some of us are looking
at the stars. Well that's a great sentiment, I guess
I take it to mean that maybe one's character is
defined not by the not by where your body is,

(01:36):
but by where your thoughts are aimed. Yeah. Now, one
guess starting place for this is that a lot of
the especially more recent writings you see and illusions referring
to this well astronomy situation will frequently point out that, okay,
well you had, you had Aristotle mentioning and passing, and
of course plenty of the elder mentions it. Um. So

(01:59):
let's start with the the Aristotle quote. He does mention
it kind of as an aside, and it is in
chapter five of the fourth century BC text Generation of Animals. Okay,
so this is going to be setting up the relationship
between looking out of a well or a tube and
seeing the stars in the daytime. Right, So this is
what Aristotle says. Quote. The cause of some animals being

(02:23):
keen sided and others not so is not simple but double.
For the word keene has pretty much a double sense.
And this is the case in like manner with hearing
and smelling. In one sense, keen site means the power
of seeing at a distance, and another it means the
power of distinguishing as accurately as possible the objects scene.

(02:44):
These two faculties are not necessarily combined in the same individual.
For the same person, if he shades his eyes with
his hand or look through a tube, does not distinguish
the differences of color either more or less in any way,
but he will see further. In fact, men in pits
or wells sometimes see the stars. But one of the

(03:07):
curious things here, though, and this is ultimately the like
the hard fact that we will keep coming back to
and thinking about this, is that during the day we
cannot see the stars, uh not not, you know, not
with the naked eye. And I think i've read that
like the brightest star, not counting the sun. Of course,
the brightest star in the night sky would have to

(03:29):
be something like five times as bright for the human
eye to see it during the day. So this is
one of those things that's right from the get go here.
It's not going to match up with any experience out there. Though,
if you have had the experience of standing in a
pit and looking up and seeing the night sky. Uh,
during the daytime, certainly, right in and tell us more
about this. But um, but for the most part, yeah,

(03:52):
it goes against everything we expect to be true from
our modern perspective. And yet we see multiple references to
this being a reality. And granted a lot of these
are second hand, uh. In the nature of a lot
of these ancient texts, for instance, plenty of the elder,
who's kind of a champion of the second or third
hand account of the natural world, he chimes in on

(04:12):
this little bit in natural history quote, the son's radiance
makes the fixed stars invisible in daytime, although they are
shining as much as in the night, which becomes manifest
at a solar eclipse, and also when the star is
reflected in a very deep well. Oh well, he's doing
really good up until that very last part. Yeah, And

(04:33):
that's that's something you said. I mean, because first of all,
a lot of this, a lot of the times we're
talking not talking about like, you know, just pure folklore here,
we're talking about very learned individuals of their age, individuals
who who you know, often knew something or a lot
concerning as astronomy during their time, and they're chiming in

(04:53):
on this as if it is true or said to
be true. Well, I mean, he is absolutely correct that
the stars are still shining dear in the daytime, just
like they are at night. It's the problem. The problem
is simply that their light is drowned out by the
glare of the sun. So it's not as if, I
mean you might assume if you were just going by
intuition that the stars turn off their lights during the

(05:14):
day or something, or you know, that they somehow disappear. No,
that they're still there. They're always there. We just can't
see them because there's too much light from this other
light source. Yeah. So so almost everything, yeah about that
statement is corrected. But at the end, uh he loves now.
One of the sources I was looking at for this
is a nine three paper by Eiden uh Psi Ali,

(05:38):
and this was republished in two thousand seven by the
Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilization. So Psi Ali major
Turkish science historian. So so important that he's actually on
a bank note. You can if you look him up
on like Wikipedia, you can see uh see his face
on currency. But but this is a very nice little

(05:58):
overview of this concept and touches on you know the
fact that it not only pops up in the history
of astronomy, but it also pops up in folklore and
literature of various different cultures. And the idea is basically
what we've been discussing, that one may stand at the
bottom of a well or you know, something similar, like
a great pit or some sort of natural formation of caves,

(06:19):
and if you look up you can glimpse the stars
during the day. And Psiali writes that sometimes this is
of just a vague tidbit without any specifics, like it's
just alluded to, Oh, one can do this, and this
has been done. But other times it's connected to specific
individuals and times. So the author mentions several more examples here,

(06:40):
and I'm gonna gonna touch on them here. So first
of all, it points out that Greek astronomer Cleomides says
that the sun appears larger when seen from the bottom
of a deep cistern because of the darkness and the
moisture of the air, though it does not make mention
of actual what we'll discuss in a bit, actual observed
nation wells, some sort of a well or deep shaft

(07:03):
in the earth that is used that is either built
or repurposed or used for um looking at the stars.
Another individual he points to is the the writings of
Islamic philosopher Abu Barrakat al Baghdatti, who lived ten eighty
through eleven sixty four or eleven sixty five CE. And

(07:25):
this individual actually wrote a text titled on the reason
why the stars are visible at night and hidden in daytime,
And in this he contends that it comes down to
illumination of part of the atmosphere immediately above the observer. Uh.
And he does not mention observation wells specifically either, And
then you have Leonardo da Vinci also contending that the

(07:46):
atmosphere is dense and full of moisture particles that during
the daylight reflect radiance to obscure the stars. So um, again,
there's another example. Da Vinci is not talking about observation wells.
But Psiali contend that all three of these lines of
thinking quote would seem to be in agreement with or
even inspired by the claim that from the bottom of

(08:06):
a well or in a tall tower, which is to say,
at the bottom of a tall tower, which would prevent
the illumination of a portion of the atmosphere immediately above
the observer star has become visible in daytime. Okay, so
I think I'm catching onto the intuitive current that's driving this.
Might it be something like this. I can see the
stars in the nighttime when things are dark. Therefore, darkness

(08:31):
is what allows me to see the stars. So if
I get down at the bottom of a well or
the bottom of a tower where I can look out
through the top, the dark environment that I have enclosed
myself in will somehow like create the conditions of night
where I can normally see the stars. Is it something
like that? It seems to be again, this is something
where again this is it's this is not true, This

(08:55):
is not this is not seemed to be exactly what
happens when one is standing in a pit, looking up,
standing in a well, etcetera. So we can't well, you know,
we can't break down the exact process of this because
this is not a reality. But yeah, this seems to
be what the basic argument seems to be. Like, if
you can as closely as possible approximate nighttime during the

(09:16):
day for your local self and then look up at
the sky, maybe then you would see the stars. Except
that doesn't actually happen right, But again important knowledgeable individuals
were writing about this and repeating its signal boosting and
if you will you have you know ultimately had the
likes of say Roger Bacon, mentioning it seemed to be

(09:37):
familiar with the concept, and multiple Islamic authors, according to Psiali,
reference it and um and that some of these points
is the specific observation wells not just in the generality
of this being a thing. So a few examples of this.
Um Maraga Observatory founded in twelve fifty seven was said

(09:58):
to be in observation well, but I thinks this may
be a mistake in reference, uh, not to the observatory,
but two caves beneath the observatory that quote do not
so far as is known, form any vertical well. Another
one he mentions is the Jaja bay um Marassa of Kishier, Anatolia,
founded in twelve seventy two. This was used in as

(10:21):
an observatory and was said to have an observation well
formed via a circular hole cut in the roof of
the dome of the Madrassa building, and that this was
for daytime star observation. Now on discount Psiali writes that
there is evidence of their having been a well here.
But but first of all, it was probably not dry. Uh.

(10:44):
And this could mean that if it was used for
as an astronomical aid, it was so that one could
look at the reflection of the sky in the water.
And there are references apparently to this practice. Oh okay,
so this connects to I think the way that play
Knee in particular phrased it as opposed to Aristotle, because
Plenty said that you could see the stars reflected in

(11:07):
a very deep well. And so I'd wonder there that
there might be different optical effects at play if you're
not standing in the bottom of a well looking up
trying to see the stars in daytime, but looking down
at the water in a dark well to see if
it's quote unquote reflecting the nighttime stars even during the daytime. Right, yes,

(11:28):
I think there could. It seems to be the case
where you're dealing with with a different um reported phenomena
becoming confused with each other, you know, like, can you
can you look up from from the bottom of well
and see the sky? Yes? Can you see stars? Uh? Well, yes,
potentially if it is nighttime. Uh, But then that can

(11:49):
be you know, crossed into something else. Likewise, you could
have a situation where where the reflection in the well
in the well water could be used to see the
stars at night, but that doesn't mean you can see
them in the date time. Now. A third example that
ssially brings up is the is Ten Bowl Observatory, founded
in fifteen seventy nine, and it did have that This

(12:09):
particular site apparently did have an observation well or tower,
and there is confirmation of this in both Turkish and
European sources. However, the observatory was demolished not long after
its founding, so uh Siali says it might never have
been used or we you know, we just there are
no records of it being used. I saw some different
dates on this. Perhaps it might have been founded in

(12:29):
fifteen seventy seven, but it seems like it was destroyed
in something like fifteen eighty, just a very short period later,
and the destruction was possibly due to religious opposition to astronomy.
So Sili mentioned that there's a sixteen thirty mention of
observers and students glimpsing the stars in the daytime from
the bottom of a very deep Well in Coimbra, Portugal,

(12:52):
and they're also accounts from Spain apparently. And then we
have an individual by the name of Hard vigl Uh,
mathematician to Duke Wilhelm the fourth of Bavaria. He had
a house built in sixteen sixty seven in Jenna, and
it was said to have a quote, slanting tube built
into the wall in order to allow the daytime observation

(13:14):
of the stars. You shared with me a painting of
all ear Hard here. And this guy is such a
mood he's I don't even know how to describe this
he he. I mean, he looks like a very sensitive
boy posing for a photo with his dog, you know,
like pointing to the dog. Except it's just like a

(13:34):
big table of mathematical figures. Yeah. Yeah. My first thought
was like, here is a man who loves his maths. Uh.
If you look him up on Wikipedia, you'll see this
particular painting. There are other images of him that are
not that don't strike the same tone. But I do
really like this painting. It looks like he's like doing

(13:55):
his equations and he's going, who's a good boy? Yeah. Now.
Siali also mentions that the Paris observatory he found in
sixteen sixty seven through sixteen seventy five featured a vertical
hole which, via the caves below, formed a fifty five
meter deep well. Quote, it was said the Cassini, shortly

(14:16):
after the foundation of the observatory, considered the possibility of
its use for daytime observation of the stars, as one
of the brightest stars of the constellation Perseus, he said,
would come within the field of view of the well,
and approximately forty years now. This is interesting to keep
in mind talking about the field of view of the well,
because I think this can be this can be telling

(14:37):
and given some of the analysis out there, Cassini apparently
used the well himself and had another well built. But
around this time, Sili says, astronomical advancements may have made
venturing down to a well just increasingly obsolete. Um. However,
silely mentioned that there were rumors that a janitor at

(14:58):
the observatory had a side hustle of taking people down
into the into the pit to goainst the stars. What
what is this the seventeenth century? Yeah, um, well, I'm
not sure exactly when this uh when the janitors This
may may have come later okay, but it sounds very
at groundpo doesn't uh huh. One more example that Sali

(15:22):
mentions is the Chrestminster Observatory in Austria, found seventy eight
that has a fifty nine meter deep well said to
have been used as an observation well as well well,
given all of these examples and anecdotes from history of
people saying they could do this or building facilities in
which to do this, I'm starting to have my doubts.

(15:44):
I'm like, wait a minute, can you actually I don't know.
I mean, like, would all these people be building starlight
tubes and observation wells and towers and stuff and talking
about this all the time if there weren't something to
this story. I'm I'm having I'm doubting myself. Yeah, I
had the same experience with it, and and Ssiali is
basically discussing the same thing. He's like, it would just

(16:08):
be strange if this idea persisted for so long and
people did all these things, if there wasn't something to it,
if there wasn't some factual basis to the whole enterprise,
Because you know, dudes are incorporating this into their house plans,
you know, buddy, he does point out, Yeah, there was
there were. There were certainly skeptics as well, including Alexander

(16:30):
von Humboldt, who we've we've discussed on the show before,
old friend of the show, the subject of a really
great biography by Andrea Wolf called The Invention of Nature
I highly recommend, very interesting. I'd say Von Humboldt was
very important for promoting a kind of a total view

(16:51):
of science that kind of the connected all of the
natural world together into a a vast system of interlocking
cause as and effects, and viewed nature not just as
discreet entities of here's this animal and here's this plant,
but as an ecology, as a system of interactions in
which everything affected every other thing. Yeah, and so he

(17:15):
comes along, and you know, he's evidently he's read about
this and he's familiar with the concept. But then he's
he says, well, I okay, I spoke with with Chimney Sweeps,
I spoke with miners, I've spoke with other people who
had ventured down into um into conditions just like this,
And apparently he sought those conditions out himself, and he
did not experience this. He was not able to see

(17:37):
the stars no, when he spoke to had direct experience
of having seen the stars this way. Uh, And he's
just one of There are a few other historical critics
of the notion as well that psi Ali mentions. Um,
but but I think Alexander van Homboldt probably this is
the one of the more robust ones coming along, where
he's just saying, yeah, nobody I spoke to has actually

(17:57):
experienced this, and uh and and ultimately Psyli, even though
he's like again he's thinking, there's you know, people have
been doing this and circulating this idea. There there's is
there absolutely nothing to it. He does stress that quote,
although such wells were connected with observatories, there is no
evidence that such observatories were systematically made and utilized by astronomer.

(18:19):
So the whole practice could have been you know, largely theoretical.
Uh even you know, an ultimate basis for it could
ultimately be more imagination than anything. But he thinks that
the whole enterprise might have been connected more to focusing
on particular areas of the of the sky. So again,
come think think about like what this would mean to

(18:40):
stand at the bottom of a well and look up
through the circular um. Aperture of the well and behold
the sky, behold the sky at night to see the stars,
you would it would in a sense, you know, it
would limit what you could see. It would take that
just overwhelming stars ape and limited to just a single

(19:02):
circle of observation. Yeah. Maybe if you were trying to
focus on particular stars as they passed through during the
night or something. I don't know. And then likewise, I
guess if you had a similar setup and you were
looking at stars were flected in the water, you could
and it was very still water and the reflection was
just right, you could have something similar going on. Um.

(19:24):
But in terms of yeah, basically, anybody who comes up
against this idea of it being somehow a way to
to see the stars during the daylight, uh, every nobody
agrees that this is possible. Uh. For instance, this is
this is brought up in the book Bad Astronomy by
Phil Plate, for example. UM. And he also points out

(19:45):
that Charles Dickens wrote of it as well, and he
says that he's never heard a decent explanation as to
why this would work. Well. One nice takedown of the
whole idea came from the Reverend William Frederick arch Doll
Ellison in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association, in writing, quote,

(20:07):
A very little scientific reasoning, even without experiment, will be
sufficient to dispose of it. For what is it which
hides the star in the daytime? It is merely the
glare of our atmosphere illuminated by the Sun's rays. As
the atmosphere extends to a height of fifty miles or
more above the Earth's surface, A shaft or chimney one
hundred to two hundred feet high could do but little

(20:30):
to take away that glare. And anyone who has ever
actually looked up from the bottom of such a shaft
as I have from the bottom of a colliery. Uh
this is a British term. By the way, um a
coal mine and the buildings and equipment associated with it
nine feet below the surface, must have been struck not
by the darkness of the little disc of sky visible,

(20:52):
but by its dazzling brilliance. And this is something that
people come back to. It's like, if you actually seek
out this experience of gazing up through a shaft at
the at the sky, at the daytime sky, it's the
sky is not going to be dark, it's gonna be
super bright. It's gonna be overwhelmingly bright. Now, I totally

(21:13):
agree with that, that that seems right to me. I
do have a counterposing idea. I wonder if you were
able to build a tower like some of these supposed
observation towers that extended up beyond the top of the atmosphere,
then that might actually work. Oh, I did not see
anyone discussing this idea, This idea that through some sort

(21:35):
of futuristic mega project, we might be able to make
the daytime a well observatory possible. Yeah, like you build
a space elevator and it's just it's a tube going
up beyond the atmosphere. Even then, I'm not positive that
would work. I think it probably would. I guess it
might depend on where the sun is at the moment
relative to like is any of the sunlight shooting down

(21:58):
in there. It's Many commentators also speak to this whole
notion being predicated on a misunderstanding of what a telescope does,
certainly in the later cases in later circulation of the idea,
and that you know, ultimately it's focusing more on the
tube but rather than the lenses, which are vital to
the workings of a telescope, right, not understanding that the

(22:19):
purpose of the telescope is to gather light from a
from a wider surface and then project that down into
your eye to increase the resolution. One such commentator was
Patricio Grady, who wrote on the subject in two thousand
two in a paper title Dailies of My Leaders the
Beginnings of Western Philosophy and Science. She contends that such
wells were used at night as a means of isolating

(22:43):
portions of the night sky for consideration and study. Quote,
descending into a well and peering up the extent of
the well would isolate areas to be observed, and the
rim of the well being similar to that to the
tube about which Aristotle wrote, would be a sort of
quote unquot telescope, but lacking magnification. M M yeah, okay, yeah,

(23:05):
so um, you know it's it's there was so much
more to this than than I expected. But it seems
like we can think of observation wells as being a
mix of second hand accounts signal boosted by important writers
and thinkers during their times, backed up by hypothetical models,
as well as the seeming at least limited use of
such wells as a means of isolating portions of the

(23:26):
night sky for study um at night. Yeah, that that
all seems reasonable to me. I'm still hung up on
the idea that there could also be some kind of
garbling of a report of an optical effects that somebody
got from looking down at the sunlight reflected in water
in a dark well, and that maybe ripples in the

(23:46):
water or something. I've never tried it, so I don't
know what that would be like, but I could imagine
that could look like many points of light instead of one. Yeah,
that's a good point, now, Rob. It's funny you mentioned
this book by Patricia Grady about Thals of Melitas, because

(24:09):
the other half of this coin, the idea of a
stargazer in a well, connects very directly to a famous
anecdote about this. Uh. This philosopher, so Theles of Melitas,
was a pre Socratic Greek philosopher who lived from the
late seventh century to the mid sixth century BC. He

(24:31):
was one of the famous Seven Stages of Greece uh
and as he was revered by other ancient philosophers and
writers as in many ways kind of the primary patriarch
of wisdom. He was thought to be, in a sense,
the first philosopher, and in more recent centuries he's been
seen by some as quote the father of science, though
I think both of those designations are a good bit overstated.

(24:55):
Though Thailes was a very interesting figure. Going to the
idea of him being the quote father or of science,
I would say in an informal way, there were empirical
observations and experiments and deterministic theories of nature, of course,
all going on before Thailey's, no doubt, but he was
famous in ancient Greece for appealing to natural material causes

(25:17):
rather than ad hoc mythological explanations when trying to understand
nature in the world. So, like many ancient Greek philosophers,
from Pythagoras to Socrates, we actually have no surviving copies
of any text by Thailes himself, so if he wrote
anything down himself, we no longer have it. The only
sources we have for his life and his work are

(25:39):
what other people wrote about him, which of course makes
it complicated to know with much certainty what he actually
said and believed. So everything that follows that we're gonna
say about Thailey's comes with the major caveat that it
is based on secondary sources, often writing much later than
Dailey's own lifetime, because it's all we have. Dailies was

(26:00):
known for wisdom in UH, not just what we would
later call science, but in many domains, including in in mathematics.
He was famous for for bringing uh Egyptian geometry to
Greek thought, and for philosophy and politics. He he was
given credit for the maxim know thyself, which I have

(26:20):
to say I find one of the most powerful aphorisms
of all time. You know, know thyself is two words long,
and it really hits you. It's like a wrecking ball,
like it manages to be simultaneously empowering and humbling. And
there's a whole rich tradition of other philosophers simply trying
to explain what they think is meant exactly by the

(26:41):
statement know thyself? Is it? Is it an admonition to
know your place and be humble in the face of
the gods? Is it a a Is it a warning
to know your own limitations? Is it an exhortation to
two deeper philosophical understanding, to understand what you are? In
a way, maybe it's all of these things. Yeah, that's

(27:01):
it's a great naval gazer, that one. The more the
more you think about it, the slipper area it becomes. Now.
At this time, there was not much of a division
between what we would today call science and what the
ancient Greeks would call philosophy. It was it was sort
of all the same thing. It was the the pursuit
of knowledge. But I guess the more scientific version of

(27:24):
ancient Greek philosophy would be the kind that focused on
explanations of the natural world and appealing to natural causes.
A lot of the science that the Leis believed in
has not exactly held up to later scrutiny. For just
one example, he was known for arguing that earthquakes were
caused by the fact that the continents, the land on

(27:47):
which we walk, is actually part of a great a
great disc that floats on water, and sometimes the continents
or the disks on which the continents rest are rocked
by waves in the underlying cosmic ocean. UH For ancient
accounts of this belief of Thles, I want to go
back to actually a Patricio Grady, the source you mentioned
earlier in her book on Thailey's um. She, for example,

(28:09):
quote Seneca, who says the cause of earthquakes is said
to be in water by more than one authority, but
not in the same way Thals of Melita's judges that
the whole earth is buoyed up and floats upon liquid
that lies underneath the disc is supported by this water.
He says, just as some big heavy ship is supported
by the water which it presses down upon and elsewhere.

(28:32):
Syneca actually mocks Thles for his beliefs. He says, the
following theory by Thailes is silly for he's for he
says that this round of lands is sustained by water
and is carried along like a boat. And on the
occasions when the earth is said to quake, it is
fluctuating because of the movement of the water. It is
no wonder, therefore, that there is abundant water for making

(28:54):
the rivers flow, since the entire round is in water.
Reject this antiquated, unsca doll early theory. There is also
no reason that you should believe water enters this globe
through cracks and forms. Builge okay, I will not believe
in the billage. Synegain convinced me. But also to continue
with the ocean theme, Thalley's quite remarkably believed that the

(29:20):
entire basis of matter was water, and it can be
difficult to parse exactly what he means by this, but
I think it's commonly interpreted to mean that all matter
is in some way a form of water. So much
like liquid water can turn into vapor, or it can
freeze into a solid ice cube, then it can take

(29:42):
on other forms as well, and in fact it does
take on all the forms we see in the world.
Every piece of matter is some type of water, or
is in some way derived from water, And of course
this is wrong, but it does wander kind of close
to a profound truth that would be disc covered much later,
which is that, as fundamentally different as all the substances

(30:05):
of the world, blood magma would air. As different as
all these things might seem, they're actually made of exactly
the same fundamental building blocks, not water, but the sub
atomic particles protons, neutrons, electrons, in different quantities and arrangements.
So he was wrong about the water part, but I
do think it's still a rather profound hypothesis that at bottom,

(30:27):
all matter is made of the same stuff. Now, coming
back to the designation that some authors have used for
Thailey's as quote the father of science, I think one
of the big stories leading to that designation, like I
know this was there was a piece at some point
that Isaac Asimov wrote about this. The connecting point here

(30:47):
is that there are reports from the ancient world that
Thailes did occasionally make testable predictions that proved correct, such
as in Matters of Astronomy, where the historian Herodotus claims
that they these correctly predicted a solar eclipse in advance
with profound geopolitical implications for for an ongoing war with

(31:08):
between the Meads and the Lydians. So to uh, to
fill out this story a bit I'm gonna describe and
quote from Herodotus the translation by A. D. Godly, so
a bit of background. Herodotus tells us that at some
point in history, a tribe of nomadic Scythians escaped some
trouble in their own lands, and they escaped into the

(31:30):
territory of the Medians or the Meads, who were ruled
by a king named Psiak Saris. The Scythians asked for
mercy and Psia Saris granted it, and even gave over
some Median young men to the Scythians to sort of
like live with them and learn their language and to
learn archery from them. But there came a day when

(31:54):
the Scythians returned from a hunt with nothing to offer
their new king, and Sia Saris be being short tempered.
He took this their their lack of game as an insult,
and he gave him a really bad chewing out. I
think the direct quote is he treated them contemptuously. So
in revenge for being dressed down, some of the Scythians

(32:15):
took the young Meads their their pupils and killed them
and dressed their bodies and presented them to the king
as if they were animals killed in a hunt. Then
they immediately fled the domain of the Meads and went
to the domain of a king named al Yatis of Sartists.
All right, this is already spiraling out of control. This

(32:35):
is a bad situation. Right, So Sia Saries was tricked,
and indeed he did eat the flesh of his young countryman,
thinking it was wild game. And after he found out,
he wasn't very happy about it, and he went to
al Yatis and said, Hey, these guys made me do cannibalism,
you need to give them over to me. So now
I'm just going to quote from the Herodotus translation after this,

(32:58):
since al Yatis would not give up the Scythians to
Sia Saries at his demand, there was a war between
the Lydians and the Meads for five years, each one
many victories over the other, and once they fought a
battle by night. They were still warring with equal success
when it happened at an encounter which occurred in the
sixth year, that during the battle the day was suddenly

(33:21):
turned tonight. Thallis of Melitas had foretold this loss of
daylight to the Ionians, fixing it within a year, at
which the change did indeed happen. So when the Lydians
and Meads saw the day turn tonight, they stopped fighting,
and both were the more eager to make peace. And

(33:41):
apparently they did make peace by securing a marriage between
the between the children of the two kings. Happy ending
there you go, though, I have to imagine there was
a good bit of like, hey, remember when your dad
did cannibalism, and then my dad helped the people who
made him do it. There's probably still some bad blood,
but you know, you get a nice wedding ceremony in there. Uh,
you know, it's well catered. It's gonna it's gonna could

(34:04):
calm a lot of the waters. Yeah. So anyway, the
story again is that Thaileys predicted this solar eclipse that
interrupted the middle of a battle. He predicted it in advance.
Later scientists have worked out that this must be a
reference to the solar eclipse of May five b C,
because that's the only one within the right time frame

(34:26):
that would have been visible at the place in question,
and that does all work out. But if it's true
that Thaile's predicted the eclipse in advance, this is an
absolutely extraordinary claim, and I think a lot of modern
scholars have doubts about this story. So we know lunar
eclipses where the shadow of the Earth passes over the

(34:46):
face of the moon, these have been predicted going way
way back, long before Thailes the court. Astronomers of ancient
China and ancient Babylon were able to figure out these
patterns and draw up tables allowing to predict lunar eclipses,
but solar eclipses where the Moon passes directly between the

(35:06):
Earth and the Sun, blocking out the sunlight. These are
much much harder to predict, especially because they are localized
to specific vantage points on Earth's surface. I mean, there
are solar eclipses all the time, but living wherever you do,
you don't see most of them. They're they're on some
other part of the globe. Yeah, Like if you scout,

(35:27):
try to scout one out for yourself. You may have
encountered this situation where you know, someone's like, hey, there's
a solar eclipse coming up, and you're like, great, when
can we see it? And it's like, well, on this date,
if we're in Arkansas or parts of Texas, there's the
solar eclipse coming, we have to travel to Baffin Island,
that sort of thing. But that that being said, I mean,

(35:49):
if you have the ability to to go witness solar
eclipse under safe circumstances, that absolutely do so, because it's
it's wonderful. Oh absolutely yes, it is worth it as
one of the most magical experiences of my life. Now,
the first solar eclipses that we know for sure we're
predicted in advance came after we had much better astrophysical

(36:10):
theories in hand. Uh, This would be in the early
eighteenth century. The first case where we know for sure
that someone accurately predicted to solar eclipse was on May third,
seventeen fifteen, when English astronomer Edmund Halley of Hallie's comet fame,
built upon the scientific revolution unlocked by Isaac Newton's theory
of universal gravitation. Hall he was a friend of Newton's

(36:32):
and he used Newton's new theories to accurately pinpoint and
eclipse that would be visible in London. And I think
he got it right within a margin of about four minutes.
But Hallie's prediction and all subsequent solar eclipse predictions, they
require a lot of information that was, as far as
we know, not available in ancient Greece. And unfortunately, no

(36:56):
writings of Dailey's exist today. As I said, and Herodotus
does not. Bother too mentioned the method by which the
Lees made this prediction. I don't think other authors who
mentioned this this story share any any further insights either, uh,
and so we and we also don't know what the
level of precision of this prediction would have been, though
the Herodotus does say that it took place that year,

(37:18):
which makes me wonder if it's possible Thailies just said
there will be a solar eclipse sometime this year and
got extremely lucky. But ultimately we don't know, We don't
know what was going on here. If he actually did
make the prediction and it was correct. Did he just
have an amazing stroke of luck, or did he have
some kind of incredibly advanced uh type of knowledge about

(37:40):
astrophysics that nobody else at the time had and he
left no record of it. And as with the observation,
well as what we're dealing with, you know, second hand
accounts and in vague references here, right, So also we
don't even know for sure it's true that he made
this prediction, though it seems to be a widely attested story,
and we do know the eclipse did happen. Now, I

(38:06):
was reading about a few other scientific contributions of the Ley's.
One source I was looking at was by W. K. C.
Guthrie called A History of Greek Philosophy, Volume one, the
Earlier pre Socratics and the Pythagoreans. This was Cambridge University Press,
nineteen sixty two, and Guthrie collects a lot of observations.

(38:27):
He writes that Theile's made uh made gave guidance about
the relative usefulness of different constellations for c navigation, pointing
out that the the minor bear the little bear constellation
was better than the Great Bear for finding the poll
and this story was related by Callimachus. Apparently, the use

(38:49):
of the minor Bear was already in practice by the Phoenicians,
and Thais showed why it was better than the Greek
standard diversa major. He apparently also is said to have
used geometry to measure the dimensions of the pyramids and
uh and to show how you could calculate how far
away a ship at sea was. And in summary, writing

(39:10):
about the Thailey's reputation in ancient Greece, Guthrie says, quote,
once he had achieved in the popular mind the status
of the ideal man of science, there is no doubt
that the stories about him were invented or selected according
to the picture of the philosophic temperament which a particular
writer wished to convey. And so Guthrie goes on to

(39:33):
describe an example of what he calls this quote mutually
canceling propaganda, which is the contrast between the story of
the olive presses and the story of the fall into
a well or into a pit, and these are given
respectively by Aristotle and Plato. I'm going to start with
the story of the olive presses, which we have from Aristotle,

(39:53):
so this is an Aristotle's politics translation by Benjamin Jowitt.
I'm just going to read direct lee. Aristotle says, there
is the anecdote of the LEAs the Miletian and his
financial device, which involves a principle of universal application, but
is attributed to him on account of his reputation for wisdom.

(40:14):
He was reproached for his poverty, which was supposed to
show that philosophy was of no use. According to the story,
he knew by his skill in the stars, while it
was yet winter, that there would be a great harvest
of olives in the coming year. So, having little money,
he gave deposits for the use of all the olive
presses in chias and militas, which he hired at a

(40:38):
low price, because no one bid against him. When the
harvest time came and many were wanted, all at once,
and of a sudden, he let them out at any
rate which he pleased and made a quantity of money.
Thus he showed the world that philosophers can easily be
rich if they like, but that their ambition is of
another sort. And you notice at the beginning that Aristotle

(41:00):
said this, Uh, this financial device, he says, involves a
principle of universal application. So Aristotle is actually saying, you know,
the thing that that Dailies is doing this story is
a well known move. It's called monopoly. Uh. The exploitation
of a monopoly is a standard, well known commercial and
political practice. And he gives examples having to do with

(41:22):
like cornering the iron supply in a local area or something.
Of course, the principle is, if you're the only person
selling something and it's in demand, then you can set
whatever price you want. Uh. So uh, you know, when
a smart person figures out how to create a monopoly,
how to be the only person offering a good or
service that is needed, they will use this to their advantage.

(41:44):
I guess, with the caveat of unless they're a philosopher
who is above worldly concerns, it will only gouge to
make a point. Yeah. I love this. It's like there's like, hey, hey,
Bailey's if you're so smart, why aren't you rich? And
he's like, oh yeah, well I could do that out
if I wanted to. Hear, he proves himself, and then
it goes back to whatever he was doing beforehand. Right, yeah,

(42:05):
So it portrays the Thiles as worldly and full of
potential for practical cunning, but simply lacking interest in financial
gain unless it's to own the haters. Alright. So that's
one vision one invoked vision of Thles. What's another one. Well,
here's where we come back to the the idea of

(42:27):
the stargazer in the well. So Plato tells this totally
different story of Thailes. This takes place in Plato's the
Attis dialogue. And if you ever taken a logic or
a philosophy course that tried to define the word knowledge,
you might have encountered the atitas, because I believe this
is the one where Socrates builds up to a definition

(42:49):
of knowledge as something like true belief, with an account
sometimes paraphrased as justified true belief. So under this definition,
to know something, to actually have knowledge, it means you
have one a belief to which is true. Because if
you believe something but it's false, that's not knowledge. And
three uh, it is something of which you are aware of,

(43:12):
a warrant for believing. So if you believe something and
it turns out to be true, but you had no
good reason for believing it, that's still not knowledge. Like
if if I believe I'm going to win the lottery
this year, and then I happened to win the lottery
this year, that was not knowledge. I had no good
reason to believe that. I just I just got lucky.
But anyway, the story of the stargazer in the well

(43:34):
is actually a digression within this dialogue. So I'm quoting
from the Fowler translation of of Plato here. So this
is Socrates speaking, and and Socrates says, uh. Take the
case of the Ley's he's being to somebody named Theodoras.
Take the case of Thales Theodorus. While he was studying
the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a pit

(43:55):
sometimes translated as a well. And uh, and a neat
witty Thracians irvant girl jeered at him. They say, because
he was so eager to know the things in the
sky that he could not see what was there before
him at his very feet. The same jest applies to
all who passed their lives in philosophy, and you can
actually find these charges in their original form in uh

(44:18):
stuff like rob did you ever read the Clouds by Aristophanes?
The play Mocking Socrates? No, I don't think I did.
Oh yeah, well, so it's a whole play is just vicious,
brutal mockery of of Socrates in the school of philosophers
of Athens, showing them to be absolute buffoons who are
wasting their lives just making up garbage about trivial and

(44:42):
unimportant topics. And so in a way, I wonder if
you know this is kind of responding to that sort
of criticism, because yeah, it's the same kind of thing.
It's like, oh, you know, you think you're so smart,
but you actually just fall into pits all the time,
or you trip and falling, well, because you're trying to
figure out some major and ursa minor. Yeah, nothing you
do is practical and you're in the bottom of well,

(45:06):
how did you get their, old man? You must have tripped.
It's also the classic oh philosophy, major, how what are
you going to do with that? And then so Socrates
goes on to explain his view, I've made some abridgements
to this section, but I just want to read part
of what he says. Socrates says, hence it is my friends,
such a man, both in private when he meets with individuals,

(45:27):
and in public, as I said in the beginning, when
he is obliged to speak in court or elsewhere about
the things at his feet and before his eyes, is
a laughing stock. Note not only to Thracian girls, but
to the multitude in general, For he falls into pits
and all sorts of perplexities through inexperience, and his awkwardness
is terrible, making him seem a fool. For when it

(45:49):
comes to abusing people, he has no personal abuse to
offer against anyone, because he knows no evil of any man,
never having cared for such things. So his perplexity makes
him appear ridiculous. And as to laudatory speeches and the
boastings of others, it becomes manifest that he is laughing
at them, not pretending to laugh, but really laughing. And

(46:11):
so he has thought to be a fool. When he
hears a panegyric, meaning like a sort of a sermon
praising the virtues of a public figure. When he hears
a panegyric of a despot or a king. He fancies
he is listening to the praises of some herdsman, a swineherd,
a shepherd, or a neat herd, for instance, who gets
much milk from his beasts. But he thinks that the

(46:33):
ruler tens and milks a more perverse and treacherous creature
than the herdsman, and that he must grow coarse and
uncivilized no less than they, for he has no leisure
and lives surrounded by a wall, as the herdsman live
in their mountain pens. And when he hears that someone
is amazingly rich because he owns ten thousand acres of
land or more to him, accustomed as he is to

(46:55):
think of the whole earth, this seems very little. And
he goes on and at length talking about, how, you know,
the common man might think himself very important because he
claims to trace his ancestry back to Heracles and Inphitrion.
And meanwhile the philosopher is like, but, but everybody has
thousands of ancestors of all kinds, what does that matter?

(47:19):
And he just goes on and on, listing all these
cases of the concerns of regular people who are squabbling
over like uh, power and money and prestige and hierarchy,
and the philosopher who seems to them to be a
fool because he cares not for those things. Now, I
think it's interesting to sort of compare and contrast Aristotle's
vision of the of Thailes here versus socrates Is vision

(47:44):
of Thilies. Both essentially assume that true philosophers, and I
think the modern reader might might sort of read this
in a more inclusive way, just as the thoughtful person.
Thoughtful people um that that they are above petty worldly concerns.
But the olive press story communicates a kind of deliberate

(48:05):
aloofness which can be subverted and cast aside any time
when some wise cracker comes along and says, you know,
like you said, Robert, Hey, Thailey's if you're so smart,
how come you're not as rich as me? The point
is here, Well, Silas could be if he wanted to,
That's just not his concern. Meanwhile, in the story told
in in the in Plato's dialogue, here Socrates makes it

(48:27):
sound like falling into the ditch and being mocked by
the Thracian girl. It does communicate the same kind of aloofness,
but in a more helpless and involuntary mode, like well, okay, yeah,
he might be so wrapped up in the stars that
he falls into pits all the time and he's always
ending up at the bottom of wells. But that's actually
a sign of a virtuous mind, concerned with the stars

(48:50):
and concerned with the nature of reality, rather than the
nasty pettiness that occupies your mind all of the uh,
the grubby business and Paul politics and and uh and
social gossip and hierarchy that you're so obsessed with. Which
is funny though, because it essentially comes down to these
philosophers putting themselves at the top of a hierarchy and
saying like, you know, my, my, my life of the

(49:12):
mind is so much more virtuous than your existence. Yeah,
I mean it's a little bit of hypocrisy. Yeah. Yeah.
In both cases, the the philosopher is disconnected from this world,
and uh, you know it didn't It basically just comes
down to the nuances of what you're saying about that,
like it's it's it's uh, they're disconnected from this world, yes,

(49:34):
but if they wanted to gain this world like other people,
they could easily, or you know, even if they're falling
down wells, it's like, yeah, he's not concerned with wells
and pits. Oh, you're so obsessed with the well thing.
Come on. But it is interesting how this ties back
in because um, you know, they leaves is said to

(49:55):
be an individual who is very interested in the stars. Uh,
here he is falling into well and um, and indeed
some have looked at this, in particular that that paper
I cited earlier and you also cited this author, Patricia
O'Grady um looks at this and and says, yeah, this
connection between an individual who is who analyzes the stars

(50:19):
and fall and a well that they fall into. Perhaps
this is is also connected to the idea of a
well being an observatory and the LEAs may have And
again we're dealing with second accounts and fictionalized and mythologicalized
versions of reality. But on some level, maybe you have
this individual falling into a well, because that's the kind

(50:41):
of place that uh, that astronomers and philosophers go to
their climbing to the bottom of a well to look
up at the stars and and I don't know, it
kind of falls that that that that kind of just
that basic vision uh kind of falls into these uh,
these these views of philosophy that we've discussing. Well, another
theme that emerges for me is just the tenuous and

(51:04):
artificial nature of the distinctions between practical and impractical knowledge.
That knowledge, that knowledge which seems impractical today may in
several hundred years become incredibly practical. The astronomy and the
geometry of of these ancient Greek philosophers might have seemed
absolutely ridiculous and and of no practical use whatsoever to uh,

(51:26):
to somebody at the time, but then they would sort
of be built upon in generations to form the foundation
of all existing technology, navigational techniques, and you know everything
like that. M yeah, yeah, I'm also suddenly struck by
how how one could conceivably compare uh stylight a you know,

(51:46):
an individual a hermit atop a pillar, to the idea
of of an astronomer crawling down to the bottom of
a pit. Uh. You know, both are kind of like
they're they're removed from from the surface world, from the
from the affairs of man, and in either case it's
about you know, contemplating things beyond the realm of man.
This is funny. I thought of potentially doing something about

(52:09):
the stylite tradition on our on our show before. I
can't remember, has it ever come up in an episode?
It was like, it's a particular type of asceticism where
you would, uh, you know, you would subject yourself to
just living at the top of a pillar. Yeah, yeah,
I feel like it's come up. I don't know if
we did. Yeah, I feel like it's come up at
least once, but I don't remember the context. Maybe when

(52:32):
we were talking about Diogenes and living among the dogs, Oh,
Diogenes the cynic Yeah, living in a jar with some
dogs eating fava beans or not Favlopen's I think. Okay,
I've forgotten about the being consumption. Yes, yeah, okay, I've
actually got a call to listeners. I'm curious if if

(52:54):
you're somebody out there with with a good basis in
astronomy and physics, um, what do you think is the
most plausible scenario by which Thailies could have truly predicted
the five eclipse? If the story is true, if he
actually made the prediction and it was not just a
lucky guest but actually justified true belief that he had

(53:14):
a warrant for believing that what could it have been? Yeah?
Right in, let us know. Likewise, if you have any
thoughts about the the concept of of glimpsing the stars
from the bottom of a well, the bottom of the pit. Alright,
we're gonna go and close out this episode, but yeah,
we'd love to hear from everyone. Core episodes of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind published on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and

(53:35):
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on Monday's Artifact or Monster Fact on Wednesdays, and on Friday,
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(53:55):
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