I'm really curious how they accounted for many color names being relatively recent, including basic things like "blue".
ctrlmeta 618 days ago [-]
> Hyginus (Rome) and Sima Qian (China) independently report it two millennia ago as appearing like Saturn (B−V=1.09 ± 0.16 mag) in colour and ‘yellow’ (quantifiable as B−V=0.95 ± 0.35 mag), respectively (together, 5.1σ different from today).
vanderZwan 617 days ago [-]
> appearing like Saturn
Ah, that's a smart workaround!
matkoniecz 619 days ago [-]
I wonder whether production of this paywalled work was funded with tax money.
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.
sandgiant 618 days ago [-]
It most certainly is funded with tax money. This usually means that the work has to be publicly accessible. Which it is on https://arxiv.org. I agree that the fees journals charge to access (even your own) work is absurd, but it's not something most astronomers worry about. astro-ph is where it happens. I don't know about other fields, but the arXiv is really fantastic for astronomy/astrophysics.
freemint 618 days ago [-]
> This usually means that the work has to be publicly accessible.
False. There is mo such has to. Although europe is making progress in that direction.
Often false. Arxiv only captures a fraction of disciplines.
618 days ago [-]
thesuitonym 618 days ago [-]
Email the authors. They will often send you the document for free.
mikeytown2 619 days ago [-]
Our main result is that Betelgeuse was recorded with a color significantly different (non-red) than today. Hyginus (Rome) and Sima Qian (China) independently report it two millennia ago as appearing like Saturn in color and `yellow', respectively different from today.
From the article
619 days ago [-]
619 days ago [-]
aaron695 619 days ago [-]
anigbrowl 619 days ago [-]
I have doubts about the ability to control for atmospheric changes, cultural differences, and linguistic drift.
not_kurt_godel 619 days ago [-]
Did you read the paper or are you just spouting off about the most obvious possible issue and assume that people who write and review papers on this subject for a living didn't think of it?
irrational 619 days ago [-]
Well, HN could stand for Hubris News. There do seem to be a lot of people around that seem to think that they are smarter in every field than actual experts in those fields.
everdrive 618 days ago [-]
It's also hard not to be that person every so often. Lots of things seem simple when you don't know anything about them. If every commenter on HN makes this error only once a year (which seems generous!) I bet we'd still see this problem a lot.
BurningFrog 619 days ago [-]
There may be a forum somewhere where those people don't post, but I have not yet found it.
googlryas 619 days ago [-]
Those forums are all over the internet, generally from people running a phpbb instance by mistake.
aaron695 619 days ago [-]
spoonjim 619 days ago [-]
freemint 618 days ago [-]
Wow. Hubris found. Do you mean experts when you say experts or are you limiting yourself to "experts in the USA"?
Because i am quite certain you would not out do the experts running Taiwan or Japan.
spoonjim 618 days ago [-]
I do mean “experts” in the USA
not_kurt_godel 618 days ago [-]
What specific examples are you talking about?
spoonjim 618 days ago [-]
When Fauci said there’s no need to wear a mask in February, I was buying up N95s. When the CDC waited six months to declare COVID airborne, the rest of the world knew it was. When schools shut down, any discerning parent could tell that the damage to the kids would be severe and all parents who could afford to, like me, sent their kids to private school (I couldn’t get my kids into a local public school so I moved to a different state during the pandemic so that that they could attend school). When they said the kids vaccine should be given three weeks apart I did the reading and learned that it’s much more effective if spaced further apart.
I am not arrogant enough to believe that I am some kind of Isaac Newton level genius. All I did was think for myself.
gfodor 619 days ago [-]
I don’t think I’ve ever seen put to words the question that runs through everyone’s minds at least once for any HN thread, but you’ve done it.
anigbrowl 618 days ago [-]
I went by the abstract, and didn't have time to look for a preprint since I don't have institutional access. Did you read the paper or are you just snarking for social points?
ateng 618 days ago [-]
And the abstract mentioned the colour changes are compared with Saturn. Surely that’s sufficient to address your concern on linguistics and cultural drift?
anigbrowl 618 days ago [-]
That defends on how broad or narrow bands of color similarity are across different cultures. Those do vary and mutate, and three are also zones of indeterminacy - remember the arguments over 'what color is this dress, blue or gold'?
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.
not_kurt_godel 618 days ago [-]
The paper is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.04702.pdf and goes into great depth discussing those exact concerns (approximately 7 pages), including comparing historical observations from 5 different cultures, Chinese included.
tomrod 618 days ago [-]
I share the concern.
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.
anigbrowl 618 days ago [-]
wine-dark sea
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?
619 days ago [-]
teraflop 619 days ago [-]
It's not perfect, but those factors are largely controlled for because the authors are comparing descriptions of different stars from the same source relative to each other.
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.
vlovich123 619 days ago [-]
It certainly sounds like an interesting and novel approach. Is this the first paper ever to do something like this?
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.
Cthulhu_ 618 days ago [-]
What doubts are those? What atmospheric changes? And can you share with us which particular cultural differences and lingustic drifts you mean?
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.
anigbrowl 618 days ago [-]
The atmospheric changes I had in mind were the expansion of human population and burning of wood. I wrote about cultural factors in a sibling comment.
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.
tomrod 618 days ago [-]
I share the doubts with the OP.
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?
Can you confirm this is the post-publication print, not a pre-publication? Not that the content is changed substantially -- but it could have.
beowulfey 617 days ago [-]
Well, the paper was released on July 29th, and the last revision (v2) of the ArXiv document was July 27th, so without going through the whole thing twice I would strongly suspect they are the same.
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
Because i am quite certain you would not out do the experts running Taiwan or Japan.
I am not arrogant enough to believe that I am some kind of Isaac Newton level genius. All I did was think for myself.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.04702