• zokier 6 minutes ago

    tbh I would love to see full length video walking through the work that Kepler did with actual numbers, to me that part remained bit unclear.

    > In principle, using the measurements to all the planets at once could allow for some multidimensional analysis that would be more accurate than analyzing each of the planets separately

    (from the blog post)

    I'd also love to see this idea expanded further. Intuitively it feels like adding Venus into the calculations should dramatically help constrain the orbit of Mars, but how exactly that would work out I'm not sure.

    • j7ake 2 days ago

      The corrections in his blog post show you the level of precision mathematicians are used to.

      A regular interviewer would have left the inaccuracies as they are because it’s too tedious to go over all of them when you have a casual conversation.

    • jessriedel an hour ago

      Note that the modern cosmic distance ladder has multiple partially independent paths using different techniques, making it more like a DAG. The wikipedia page has a nice diagram.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder

      • dang an hour ago

        Related. Others?

        Climbing the cosmic distance ladder: Terence Tao book announcement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24743177 - Oct 2020 (13 comments)

        Terrence Tao: The Cosmic Distance Ladder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1782398 - Oct 2010 (6 comments)

        • Gunax a day ago

          This was very entertaining. I had a rough idea of the timeline before, but had never thought about it in this way (that is, a ladder).