The Annual Difference: How a Four-Century Debate between Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist Thinkers on a Problem of Classical Exegesis Shaped a Predictive Mathematical Construct
Daniel Patrick Morgan
Abstract:In China, the precession of the equinoxes was conceptualized as an “annual difference” (suicha 歲差) between the tropical and sidereal year. The idea was introduced in the fourth century, it saw universal acceptance from the eighth century on, and it was in the four centuries in between that it was tried, debated, and spread whilst a Mediterranean-origin concept thereof arrived from India. Its four-century journey from fringe idea to universal truth is a well-studied point of interest in the history of astronomy… Show more
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