Tim Whitmarsh, Cambridge, UK Were the atheoi atheists? Religious scepticism and Greek polytheism It is a truism that there are few exact ancient equivalents to the modern atheist, who denies all and any possible supernatural power. To reach that position, one has to have both a rigid, identifiable line of differentiation between the natural and the supernatural, and a more or less coherent conc...

An enigmatic prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity are gravitational waves. With the observed decay in the orbit of the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar agreeing within a fraction of a percent with the theoretically computed decay from Einstein’s theory the existence of gravitational waves was firmly established. Currently there is a worldwide effort to detect gravitational waves with...

Astronomy is entering a new era of discovery, coincident with the establishment of new facilities for observation and simulation that will routinely generate petabytes of data. While an increasing reliance on automated data analysis is anticipated, a critical role will remain for visualization-based knowledge discovery. We have investigated scientific visualization applications in astronomy thr...

Several different controlled vocabularies have been developed and used by the astronomical community, each designed to serve a specific need and a specific group. The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT) attempts to provide a highly structured controlled vocabulary that will be relevant and useful across the entire discipline, regardless of content or platform. As two major use cases for the UAT i...

muḥyī al-dīn maghribī is among the few astronomers of the middle ages whose astronomical system is entirely based on new measures of planetary parameters and whose measurement of the observational data and calculation processes for determining their amount have been carried out in maragha observatory. he has explained the details of his observations and calculations in a volume called talkhīṣ a...

simulation of gamma and hadron showers in the energy range 100gev- 25tev has been carried out. for a big ideal cherenkov light array, characteristics of lateral distribution of cherenkov photon density have been studied. results from this ideal detector are compared with those simulated for a real tunka- like array to investigate experimental potential of using existence of a hump in lateral di...

Contemporary medical terminology frequently stems from ancient Greek origins. However, there is some controversy relating to the true derivation of the word ‘‘glaucoma’’. The disorder, now defined as glaucoma, was first documented by the Ancient Greeks in 400 BC. ‘‘Glaucosis’’ was first mentioned in Hippocratic writings as a blinding disease occurring most commonly in the elderly. The descripti...

We introduce a new method to construct approximation algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems using semidefinite programming. It consists of expressing each combinatorial object in the original problem as a constellation of vectors in the semidefinite program. When we apply this technique to systems of linear equations mod p with at most two variables in each equation, we can show tha...