Agora Reaction Paper

History of Science

Name:                                Ho Ka Chee

Matriculation number:        G1510122

Akita International University

Date: 14th October 2015.

Title:                                “AGORA” Reaction Paper

In the film “Agora”, we witnessed Hypatia, a philosopher and astronomer of the late 4th-century in Roman Egypt, struggles to understand the flow and system of our universe and the flaws in Ptolemic system. However, as most of her works were destroyed after her death, there was no historical evidence to back various claims of her discoveries and works. As such, the focuses on this reaction paper will be on Hypatia’s specific conception of a type of planetary motion, the set of claims related to her concept and who ordinarily claimed to be the discoverer of this view.

In the beginning of the video, we observed Hypatia’s struggles with determining if the Earth or the Sun was the centre of the Universe. This was largely due to the influences of Ptolemy’s teaching, an astronomer during the second century of Alexandria who worked out a mathematical model of the Universe with the Earth as the centre. It was believed that the sun, the moon and the five known “wanderers” revolved around the Earth. As the film progresses, we began to notice how Hypatia gradually realise the flaws of Ptolemy model. This is because, the observation of the distance between the Earth and the Mars was different while under Ptolemy’s model it would have been the same due to uniform circular motion. This led to Hypatia spending the later years of her life pondering and collecting astronomical data to come up with a new set of conception to the mystery of planetary motion. Near the end of the film, it was shown that Hypatia had an epiphany and thought of the notion of elliptical orbits as the answer to the mystery she had been trying to uncover. However, it was not shown in the film whether Hypatia was able to finalise and spread her concept of elliptical orbits.

In “Agora”, Hypatia does not agree with the ideal epicycles ( epicycles refer to having smaller circle whose centre moves around the circumference of a larger circle). This refers to the ideal of Ptolemy, being that other planets moves in smaller circle while orbiting around the Earth which is thought to be the centre of the universe. As such, Hypatia took on the heliocentric model (which refers to the concept of having the sun as the centre of the universe) which is a different concept to planetary motion as opposed to Ptolemy’s concept of the Earth being the centre and other planets orbits in the form of epicycles. It was shown that Hypatia gave an insightful thought on opposing her ideal of heliocentric model as she pondered why do people not feel the motion if it is true that the Earth was moving around the Sun. Hypatia went on to substantiate her thoughts of heliocentric model when she performed an experiment in which she asked a slave to drop a sack of weight while sailing with Orestes (a prefect of Alexandria). It was then, Hypatia understood why moving bodies on something that is moving ( in this case a smooth sailing ship) moves in the same way despite the overall movement of the ship.  

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