Colour evolution of Betelgeuse over two millennia, derived from records
academic.oup.com
academic.oup.com
Ah, that's a smart workaround!
I tried reading it, sadly it appears to demand €14.00 for 24h access and is not even making clear whether I would be able to download DRM free text.
False. There is mo such has to. Although europe is making progress in that direction.
> Which it is on https://arxiv.org.
Often false. Arxiv only captures a fraction of disciplines.
From the article
When whole colors didn't even have names several thousand years ago, things can be dubious (e.g. wine-dark sea).
This is part of peer-review -- being able to defend the ideas. When the academic "peer" group is reduced to "only those from certain institutions and pedigrees" it really waters down the quality of peer review. Go back 250 years, and peer review was your buddy you met at a symposium two countries over, because only a handful of folks had general interest (i.e. no Quanta magazine yet).
If the exposition of those ideas are locked behind a paywall from peers with interest, then it really isn't very peer reviewable.
I too do not have institutional access.
I have often wondered about that one - is it due to light intensity at Mediterranean latitudes, or the frequency of storms, or the predominance of bronze at the time? Or was there a greater variety of grapes and wine colors? Or is it to do with the absence of glass, so that colors were appraised as they appeared in metallic drinking vessels?
Linguistic drift can occur due to contact with other cultures, changing environmental conditions, availability of new dyes, or political factors. As an example of the latter, consider an absolute monarch with a color vision deviation from the biological norm. Their opinions about colors could become the 'official' one, and over a long reign this could become institutionalized. Chinese culture, for example, identifies 5 fundamental colors and they're invested with far more symbolic specificity than in western societies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_in_Chinese_culture
And I'm not trying to be dismissive of the paper. I just have some doubts because it needs to pile methodological inferences on top of each other over a wide variation in both space and time. If you throw lots of different circles on a Venn diagram and they all have a pretty consistent overlap, then yes, that probably means something. It's a worthwhile approach.
But the fuzzier the boundaries, the harder that task becomes. I'm happy to buy into the idea that Betelgeuse changed color relatively recently and people noticed: my point was to list some confounding factors that make pinning that down very challenging.
That is, Betelgeuse was described in terms that were dissimilar to "red" stars and similar to "yellowish" stars of similar brightness, and those groupings were relatively consistent across multiple different sources.
This kind of isn’t my field so apologies for two likely dumb questions that came up for me. How do we know that the description isn’t written by someone with some kind of color blindness or some other kind of eye issue that impacts the description of it’s only using one source? How do we know that color descriptions aren’t impacted by human perception evolving over time?
For the second question what I mean is that I seem to recall that humans didn’t even used to have language to describe different shades that just didn’t exist so there’s an aspect of language and I wonder if the lack of access to those shades alters the actual ability for humans of different eras to recognize that color in the first place.
However, the claim the authors of this paper seem to be making is that ancient observers did perceive and distinguish different colors of stars -- as evidenced by the fact that they grouped stars in a way that largely matches modern observations -- but that Betelgeuse is a notable outlier in their observations compared to modern ones. That can't be explained by simply saying that the observers were less perceptive than we are now.
And it's not just one source, but multiple observers from different cultures whose observations corroborate one another.
It sounds like you have doubts - which is fine - but you don't actually have the necessary knowledge to make these into solid counterpoints, peer review arguments, or competing scientific paper. As others point out, this is a common issue on HN and comment sections in general.
Your comments are ad hominem. It doesn't matter whether OP has the "necessary knowledge" (read: pedigree and institutional background) to bring up clear confounders.
The mere naming of them is sufficient to make the link. The names of colors have evolved -- no word for Orange for a long time! Perhaps "Yellow" was used instead.
Further, without public access, there is no great way for the OP to respond directly.
Thus, the onus is on the paper's distribution. But you don't call that out. Why?
I am not expert in these areas, but the main reason my comment was so brief was that I was working on something else at the time and glanced at HN while waiting for computations to render.