Abstract
Tidal phenomena along the coasts were known since the prehistoric era, but a long journey of investigations through the centuries was necessary from the Greco-Roman Antiquity to the modern era to unravel in a quasi-definitive way many secrets of the ebb and flow. These investigations occupied the great scholars from Aristotle to Galileo, Newton, Euler, d’Alembert, Laplace, and the list could go on. We will review the historical steps which contributed to an increasing understanding of the tides.
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Notes
- 1.
Born in Crete around 360 B.C., he participated in the expedition of Alexander the Great, being in charge of a fleet of 120 vessels, transporting 10 000 people. He was in charge of establishing a new maritime route between the Indus and the Persian Gulf. His achievements were described by Strabo in Geography (vol. XV).
- 2.
One of the oldest scientific explorers. His accounts and astronomical observations were used later by Eratosthenes and Hipparchus.
- 3.
Astronomer, geographer, philosopher, and mathematician, well known for his measurements of the Earth radius by studying shadows produced by the mid-day Sun at Cyrene and Alexandria.
- 4.
Geographer and historian, he was keen on measurements (meridian length, height of the atmosphere, distance to celestial bodies). He wrote treatises in physics and meteorology.
- 5.
Roman author, naturalist, and philosopher, he wrote Naturalis Historia, an encyclopedia of much of the knowledge of his time, the largest single work to have survived from the Roman empire to the present day, encompassing botany, zoology, astronomy, geology, and mineralogy.
- 6.
Persian astrologer, astronomer, and Islamic philosopher, he wrote a number of practical manuals on astrology that profoundly influenced the Muslim intellectual history.
- 7.
English monk at the Northumbrian monastery of St. Peter at Monkwearmouth. Well known as author and scholar, and for The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. In The Reckoning of Time, he deals with ancient and medieval views of cosmos, including explanations of astronomical phenomena.
- 8.
English scholar, bishop of Lincoln. He showed deep interest in geometry and optics.
- 9.
Also mathematician, physicist, astronomer, born at Zadan in Croatia and educated at Padova. In addition to Commentaries on Euclid’s Elements, he developed an important theory of tides, published in Venice in 1528.
- 10.
Italian humanist and scientist from Ferrara, in his time a reputed astronomer.
- 11.
Our method of proof, based on accelerations and vectors, is not that of Galileo who works with velocities only. But it is a faithful translation of his idea.
- 12.
The intersection of the orbital plane of the Moon with the plane of the ecliptic.
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Deparis, V., Legros, H., Souchay, J. (2013). Investigations of Tides from the Antiquity to Laplace. In: Souchay, J., Mathis, S., Tokieda, T. (eds) Tides in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Lecture Notes in Physics, vol 861. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32961-6_2
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