This is a project-base course in which students put themselves in the position of ancient astronomers and try to develop their own mathematical models in order to predict the position of one of the five planets that can be observed with the naked eye.
The main goal of the course is for students to experiment the scientific method: confronting tough questions, making small but incremental progress and taking advantage of feedback.
The historical field will be the students' playground. The first courses will explain some of the ancients findings on mathematical astronomy such as the neo-babylonians’ zig-zag functions and Ptolemy’s geometrical models. Then students will choose one planet, one location, and one period of time and will produce their own models and confront them to the real motions of the planet using the Stellarium software.
The range of the historical discussion will go from the middle of the third millennium BP to Einstein’s breakthrough in the early twentieth century: the questions of the ancient astronomers may be seen as natural ones, their answers may be seen as cultural ones, but what is really at stake in this course is about the search for understanding what might not be understood and the long term process of mankind trying to figure it out.