1981:   JHA review misunderstands purpose — even the unambiguous TITLE — of the book being reviewed.
DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡5 §A2 [p.30].

1981:   Misunderstanding significance of statistical results achieved when data do not permit desired precision but do establish a lack of demonstrated inconsistency of theory.
DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡5 §D5 [p.33].

1981:   MacArthur-genius-to-be N.Swerdlow's ineducability regarding the potential accuracy of ancient solstices debuts, as he supposes equinoxes to be more accurate. (All outdoor ancient astronomers' calendars and year-lengths were rightly based upon solstices: Meton, Kallippos, Hipparchos, BM55555.)
(S.Solstice accuracy within a few hours was achieved by Kallippos & Hipparchos: Bulletin Amer Astr Soc 17:583.)
DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡5 n.20 [p.45].

1982:  Erroneous underlying math in analysis of real lunar motion vs Almajest  motion. DR's correction agreed to by author who on that basis fundamentally recomputed original article at JHA 15:134-135; 1984 June, with result happily much more in accord with reasonable chronology.

1984:   Academic pol David Hughes, shortly before (in his own journal) mangling a study of Halley-Comet apparitions by confusedly-mixing epoch 1950.0 and epoch-of-date orbits (DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡8 §§B-E [pp.78-84]), graced the JHA with his discovery of the glad news that (contrary to hitherto-accepted history) England had spotted the 1758 Halley return ahead of France. But of course this collapsed when DR revealed that the claim was based upon Hughes' confusedly-mixing Gregorian & Julian calendars.
DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡8 §G [pp.85-87].

1987:   The current Assoc. Editor of the JHA published a massive two-part 64pp alibi-fest (both sections run as Pb papers) attempting to obscure the success of Ptolemy skeptics R.Newton & DR. Among other demonstrations, the paper showed how to acquire admiration for one's writing style, by publishing without quotation-marks a couple of passages from J.Dreyer's 1890 book.

1987:   The paper tries to alibi Ptolemy's lack of low stars by pointing to Tycho missing some dim low summer stars, unaware of the fact that in summer it doesn't get completely dark in Denmark.
DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡4 §F2 [pp.43-44].

1987:   An even more imaginative alibi suggests that there might have been a 6°-high pile of rocks south of the alleged observatory of Ptolemy (who astronomers have known for centuries wasn't an observer). The Magnitude-Split test shows that the rocks were entirely in the JHA's head.
DIO 8 [1998] p.2.

1987:   The paper tries showing how dumb Ptolemy-skeptics are about ancient observational accuracy by adducing the authors' own 1981 observations of the eclipsed Moon vs the star λSgr and Hipparchos' two discordant observations of Spica, all of which displayed errors of ordmag 1°. But DR showed that all were not errors of observation but of wrong-signed parallax-correction.
DIO 1.3 [1991] n.288 [p.173]; DIO 16 [2009] (Journal for Hysterical Astronomy) ‡1 [pp.2-10].

1987:   While trying to evade DR's unevadable absent-error waves proof that Ptolemy stole the Ancient Star Catalog, the JHA sloughed over a huge 63° phase-difference that gutted its argument, just saying that the phase is “not exactly right”.
DIO 2.3 [1992] ‡8 §C13 [p.107].

1987:   Same paper's unplumbed opacity-formula turns out to demand that Tycho observed 8th magnitude stars.
DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡4 §H7 [pp.47-49].

1987:   Weirder yet, the paper claims that star ζCMa would be visible from Bergen, though at 10th magnitude by the paper's own formula.
DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡4 n.65 [p.48]; DIO 2.3 [1992] ‡8 n.25 [p.104].

1989:   Fabricated positions of Venus are called “required” positions. No one is required to fake data.
DIO 11.3 [2002] ‡6 n.20 [p.74].

1989:   Allegation in MacArthur-Award paper that since (near maximum) Venus' elongation changes only 1°/12 in 6d, “in no way could Ptolemy estimate the time” of greatest elongation, an astoundingly irrelevant (and laughably misunderstood) point upon which JHA Board-member Swerdlow persists in ignorance. Here, his delusion is used to try alibiing the hilarity that Ptolemy self-contradictorily gives (at Almajest 10.1&2) two vastly different dates AND values for the same 137AD greatest elongation of Venus: 37d apart, the most ineptly bungled fake in the entire history of astronomy.
DIO 11.3 [2002] ‡6 n.20 [p.74].

1989:   The misunderstanding essential to the JHA claim that minuscule motion in 6d proves that Ptolemy couldn't fix elongation is depressingly parallel to the author's prior ironically-arrogant ignorance of the method of equal altitudes: DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡5 n.20 [p.45]. In both cases, one simply measures two equal values of elongation at sufficient distance from maximum for accuracy (but not so great as to cause trouble from non-quadraticity) and takes the two times' mean as the time of maximum. (They teach this stuff in high school.)

1989:   The foregoing pair of incomprehensions combine to lead to: “the selection of a particular date for true greatest elongation would be arbitrary in any case.” I.e., the JHA, which makes up behind-the-back fantastic smears at will, isn't bothered if a scientist just makes up data the same way.
DIO 11.3 [2002] ‡6 n.20 [p.74].

1991:   JHA discovers the Winter Equinox.
DIO 1.3 [1991] ‡10 (“Black Affidavit”) [p.177].

1991:   New-arithmetic 128° − 65° = 65°.
DIO 1.2 [1991] §§G7&G9 [pp.121-122].

1991:   Equating 67d2/3 with 67°2/3 (which is consistent with Velikovsky's 360d year: Worlds in Collision p.330).
DIO 1.2 [1991] §G9 [p.122].

1991:   JHA declares orbits unfittable that aren't. obviously can be described by the usual elements.
At Curtis Wilson's behest, the JHA printed a sorta retraction, but twice insisted on keeping from its readers the fact that DR was 1st to solve these orbits. Standard JHA ethics and equity.
DIO 6 [1996] ‡3 §H2 [p.42].

1992:   JHA alleged “further research” into another scholar's curve fitted to the Ptolemy solar theory's errors — without noticing that it is undone (primarily) by an innocent sign-error (that created 180° phase error) — this, while refusing to cite correct fit elsewhere in the very DR paper under massive attack, or the correct fit in the paper immediately following in the same JHA issue. (Correct fit also in Britton 1992.)
DIO 1.2 [1991] nn.144&145 [p.129].

1992:   Current JHA board-member recommended that consideration of a famous historical controversy be henceforth expunged from the Journal for the HISTORY of Astronomy for being too historical. Definitely a non-pareil all-time First — and proposed by the history of astronomy establishment's idea of a MacArthur genius.
DIO 2.3 [1992] ‡8 §C29-30 [pp.112-113].

1992:   Same paper unaware that cosβ weights are needed for measuring size of celestial longitude differentials.
DIO 2.3 [1992] ‡8 n.31 [p.106].

1992:   Same JHA paper also claims that 0°.2 great-circle waves in the Ancient Star Catalog would be undetectable.
DIO 2.3 [1992] ‡8 n.31 [p.106].

1992:   Same paper eyeballs fit to Peters longitude-error curve (instead of using least-squares), with seriously false result.
DIO 2.3 [1992] ‡8 n.31 [p.106].

1992:   In so doing, the author forgets to remove the large 11'-amplitude error-wave due to Ptolemy's known false obliquity, which muddles the phase and amplitude of the error-wave that actually needs explaining.
DIO 2.3 [1992] ‡8 §C14 [p.107-108].

1992:   Hoskin's rendition of Hegel's notorious 1801 planet-distance scheme fails to translate 4/3 power, thus omitting the heart of the theory.
DIO 1.2 [1991] n.60 [p.110].

1995   Confusion of Hipparchos' 600y span of eclipse calcuations (from his era back to 747BC) with a non-existent 600y cycle.
DIO 6 [1996] ‡1 §K [pp.26-27].

2001:   In a last-ditch attempt to salvage Ptolemy's claim of observership of the Ancient Star Catalog, massively attacked DR's 1982 paper (published in a refereed science journal) proving Hipparchos observed the Catalog. The JHA effort was pre-doomed by several simple arguments, all entirely independent of atmosphere analysis): [a] R.Newton's fractional-endings argument (Crime of Claudius Ptolemy 1977 Johns Hopkins University); [b] DR's 1976 absent-error-waves analysis in the same 1982 paper under attack; [c] G.Graßhoff's 1986&1990 statistical study. Highly expert analyses by K.Pickering and D.Duke ended this nonsense quickly.
DIO 12 [2002].

2001:   The JHA paper had applied modern skies' daylight-sky opacity to ancient night-time best-clarity skies. The JHA went so far as to call DR's opacity-constant “ludicrous” and “absurd”. Pickering's independent analyses countered this with ease.
DIO 12 [2002] ‡1. (In 2005, the author rather switched over to Hipparchos' side.)

2001:   The most obvious factor overlooked by the JHA attack (and everyone else) was that if ancient sky-opacity (not long-suspected plagiarism) had accounted for the unique 6° gap between Ptolemy's horizon and his lowest stars, then we would find a similar gap in Hipparchos' Commentary (which the JHA author neglected to consult) — and the two catalogs' invisible antarctic circles would differ by 5° since Hipparchos' Rhodes is 5° north of Ptolemy's Alexandria. Neither of these gaps exist. Hipparchos' antarctic circle is identical to that of the “Ptolemy” catalog at Almajest 7.5-8.1.
DIO 10 [2000] n.177; DIO 12 [2002] ‡1 p.4.

2001:   As part of his argument for dense sky-opacity, the paper's author argued (with the whole history of astronomy establishment that Ptolemy's arcus visionis data were not on the horizon, despite Ptolemy's statement and diagram claiming they were. DIO challenged this in correspondence, pointing out that Ptolemy's opposite data, acronychal risings, cannot even be defined other than on the horizon. These unambiguous data proved the existence of a clear ancient atmosphere, a result with important modern climate implications.
DIO 12 [2002] §F11, Fig.4, & Table 3 [p.19]).

2002:   Nonrealization that ancients found latitude (Almajest Book 1) from solstices, not equinoxes.
DIO 16 [2009] ‡3 §F3 [p.28].

2002:   Consistent mis-computing of Syracuse latitude by 200 stades.
DIO 16 [2009] ‡3 n.3 [p.18].

2002:   Confusing observation with calculation and vice-versa.
DIO 16 [2009] ‡3 §E6 [p.27].

2002:   Indiscriminately proposing simultaneously two contradictory obliquities for klima-calculation.
DIO 16 [2009] ‡3 §E7 [p.27].

2005:   In drawing data from Hipparchos' Commentary, confused his Athens and Rhodos latitudes.

2005:   Placing of stars leads to amusing explosive failure.

2005:   Sign-error for star αAri corrupts date arrived at, and contradicts article's own photo. (Since this is the 1st star of a list, it shows that none of the stars were checked by referees.)

2005:   Confusion of atmospheric extinction's effect on size of arctic and antarctic circles.

2005:   North confused with south.

2005:   Obs-Calc confused with reverse.

2005:   Left confused with right.

2005:   Improper merging of two statistically incompatible samples.

2007:   Proposed explanation of Khufu pyramid-shaft grades, without realizing its lack of statistical significance, or even that the claim was statistical at all.
DIO 16 [2009] ‡3 n.24 [p.26].

2007:   And it turns out that this paper's scheme fits data better if its trig-argument is inverted.

The Historical Background

(Does Any Establishment NOT Fight Dirty?)

Michael Hoskin founded the Journal for the History of Astronomy in 1970. His dedication to the enterprise, and to forging necessary political alliances, ensured the inevitable and the intended: the JHA became the establishment journal in the field of astronomical history. With all the pros&cons thus implied.

The positives are considerable. Hoskin is admirably dutiful in correspondence and all the formalities of running a journal. The JHA is equally dutiful in reviewing all the books (by Approved scholars, anyway) that appear in the field. The journal's appearance is 1st-class, and its mailings are prompt. (Hoskin is far superior to DR in all these important respects.)

The JHA fulfills an important rôle in the field, and DIO is glad such a central clearing-house journal exists, since we have no desire to be such — being more concerned with creating progressive scientific-history inductions than with political, social, or procedural matters.

Of course, as with most establishments, the JHA enterprise has also become known for over-concern with power, a factor that, early on, was evident to the wider community of scholars. This affected selection and refereeing of papers submitted.

Papers upsetting to members of a largely window-dressing board (chosen for academic-political connexions as much as anything) were not treated equitably, even if the authors were world-class experts. But papers by anyone related to, say, the Princetitute, suffered no such treatment. To maintain this important imbalance, Hoskin over-rode his own referees' advice at will, e.g., publishing a prestige-institution figure's paper against their recommendation, and impeding publication of a personal non-favorite even in the face of positive reports.

If Hoskin, Editor-for-Life of history-of-astronomy's most deliberately prestigious journal, was expert in the mathematics of astronomy (which is among the most highly mathematical of the sciences), such interference might have a hope of occasional positive effect. He isn't.

Hoskin carried this spirit to the heights in 1982-1983, exceptionally delaying (for most of a year) publication of a partly heretical DR paper (recommended by both of his own referees and advertised as forthcoming in Isis: 1983 March) and then attempting to censor the heretical section (only) out of it.
[For both parts in full, plus a history of the affair, see: DIO 9.1 [1999] ‡3 [pp.30-42].]
DR then revealed essential mis-computation in the very paper Hoskin had replaced DR's paper with. Hoskin's typically mature and equitable reaction was to banish DR from the JHA, cut correspondence, and threaten a libel action. He soon thereafter learned that the later paper's forthright author agreed with DR, and on that basis, he fundmamentally re-computed his paper: see JHA 1984 June. But the fact that DR's advice proved accurate did not improve the esteamed Editor-for-Life's wisdom half a whit. Which telegraphs just how high accuracy, competence, and truth rank at the JHA.

Hoskin is a textbook case of pol as superscholar-wannabe, who — while making welcome (and well-written) contributions to, e.g., Herschel family biographies — screws up elementary material again and again and again.

Worse, Hoskin and prime JHA side-kook (religious fundamentalist Owen Gingerich) have been desiring a shunning of DR for 27y.
Shunnings are an all-too-common offense against academce, but this case is somewhat special in that neither of these archons has the talent even to gauge the quality of the research being shunned. (Nor to choose a brain-double to do it for them.)

What is a shunning? Some items: Not a single JHA paper has credited DIO with a single scholarly achievement for two decades. (DIO has not responded in kind, going out of its way to praise and reward occasional mental and behavioral glimmerings at the political center, while encouraging open-forum intellectual freedom: DIO 16 [2009] p.2. n.2) JHA's and DIO's publishers haven't communicated in 27y, despite our requests (idem) to end such a tantrum-initiated and circularly fertility-poisoning academic outrage.

Such contrasts (in ethics and scholarship) appear to interest no one at the American Astronmical Society, whose Gingerich-kissing Hysterical Astronomy Division has covered the semi-numerate shunners and their miss-men with honors, blatant fawning, and nationwide promotion, while protecting HAD members for consecutive years (e.g., when HAD's newsletter surveys publications in the field) from awareness of DIO's very existence.
[Though invited as a speaker by the AAS in 1990 (Charlottesville meeting: DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡7 [pp.68-74]), DR has never been officially invited as an HAD speaker, though he is one of the better-known (see back cover of any recent DIO) and more productive scholars in astronomy-related history, as well as the publisher (for 19y) of the astronomical-history journal which is the US leader and easily the most technically competent on the planet. (Check out the quality of DIO's refereeing and judging boards.)

Given the HAD's quality and integrity, this shunning is not mentioned here because DR feels a sense of deprivation. Hardly. The deprivation is elsewhere (see, e.g., DIO 16 [2009] ‡1 n.7 [p.4]), damaging the whole field's reputation in academe and (rather more important) its ability to learn and progress. Not that anyone at the Amer Astr Soc cares, so long as the scandal stays out of the newspapers, and JHA's Owen Gingerich & clique remains on committees that control funding.]

Gingerich's friends at Sky&Telescope even ran a wildly mis-informed and essentially plagiarized slanderous attack on DIO in 2002 Feb, alleging support by documents it has never been able to produce, and puffing the bumbling, cowardly JHA as the “premier” journal in the field.
[It is premier in the sense noted above, which is at best irrelevant to the controversy the smear-article was discussing. The reader can judge whether JHA is premier in scholarship.]
Such libels and kiss-ups are an essential part of how a shunning works.
Of course, a shunning is always in actuality a running. In this case: the running-away archons are intellectually-outgunned pols who know it would be suicide to engage rationally and calmly with a self-created enemy that turned out to be slightly more formidable than the esteamed Hoskin had the sense or calm to realize when he in 1983 fatally committed himself and thus the field's whole rabbitariate to banish-tactics — tactics which entail fleeing DIO with the same courage that has too long typified the history-of-astronomy herd's horror at a rebel journal's not joining it in kissing moguls' brains.

Despite JHA goons' repeated and ever-rewarded snipes at DR, not a single theory 1st published in DIO has been found in error — during 19y of publication. Since nothing is perfect — not even a world-class-refereed journal — obviously we owe something to luck. (But it is probably not entirely luck that DR's two longago errors occurred prior to DIO, which is blessed with the most scientifically able referees in the field.) The point here is not perfection but relative reliability-averages. Considering the persistent efforts by centrist miss-men (like Hoskin's appropriately devious beneficiary, J.Wall) to portray DR or DIO as kook or Unreliable, it ought to (but likely won't) enlighten one or two esteemed archons that: each would-be DIO-assassin's stab has failed to establish the DIO error he so nakedly hoped-for.

To get some idea of the desperation and integrity of those institutions whose fumblings have been exposed by DIO, check out the vandalistic, sometimes outright dishonest histories of harassment on Wikipedia, at the bios of DR, Carl Sagan, Aristarchos, Tycho, etc — much of it supervised by a hilariously sloppy, mathematically amateurish establishment-plant Wiki Administrator, who — in the absence of valid factual or scholarly reasons for suppressing material upsetting to institutions — routinely uses threats and extortion, e.g., holding articles hostage to enforce rationally indefensible censorships of accurate but establishment-embarrassing information that Wikipedia readers ought to have access to. (Such Heydrichesque tactics suggest that the perps lack not only proper qualifications for Wiki editing — but also have even less of a clue about what DR is made of.)
It ought to enlighten those who trust pseudo-populist Wikipedia that it could have fallen so under the thumb of establishment fixers & goons that it would for years classify a politically unreliable journal as academically Unreliable when: [a] The censors haven't even claimed to have found a scholarly error anywhere in the numerous accurate DIO-citations which its corrupt Administrator (a teacher of rox-for-jox etc, to high-school kids) eliminated 2008/3/10. [b] DIO's boards and contributors (as he has been informed) include world leaders in several fields. [c] DIO's contributions to knowledge are internationally recognized: DIO has co-published with the University of Cambridge; and DIO's merit in its most famous controversies (Egyptology, Ptolemy, Cook, Peary, Byrd, Amundsen) has been recognized by the New York Times on multiple occasions in both the Science section (which has created a link to DIO) and on the front page.

















Original Version Uploaded 2010/6/14.