Hypatia dies again

Update: Faith Justice has a series of interesting posts (part 1, part 2, and part 3) comparing the movie to the history it depicts.

We watched Agora last night. Interesting, though not great. The politics was done well, and scarily modern, when thinking of groups like Hamas as analogous to the parabalani, combining social services to garner support from their local base, with aggressive tactics against current power. Or when pondering the intentional ignorance of Governor Parnell of Alaska. (Alas, Texas’s governor isn’t much better.) Or when observing Christians in Tennessee who want the government to view Islam as a less valid religion than their own.

A wood model of the conic sections in Hypatia’s lab reminded Carolyn of a similar model her father had made her, that she used when she was first teaching math. I was a bit disappointed that the movie showed a bogus explanation of why the Greek astronomers didn’t move to Aristarchus’s heliocentric theory. In fact, they rejected heliocentrism due to astronomical measurement: they knew that if the earth orbited the sun, they should observe a stellar parallax. And they didn’t observe that. Because the stars are so distant that the actual stellar parallax is smaller than they were able to measure at that time. It seems that could as well have been worked into the story as the bogus bit. Still, the movie gives a strong nod to the empiricism of ancient Greek science, and how much was lost when the dark ages arrived. Alejandro Amenábar deserves kudos for that.