After seeing off the guests from the Chamber of Commerce, the Tower of the Great Sage returned to its usual calm. After leaving a bunch of trivial matters to the two young apprentices, Lin had extra time to think about astronomy.
Astrology is a long-established science in the Lost World. However, the main purpose of this science here is to solve the problem of the two satellites in the sky.
When the earth has only one moon, the earth's tides and weather will be affected by the only satellite.
The world of Lost World has two satellites, which causes more complex changes in the weather system. The weather is related to agriculture and food, so naturally a specialized profession is derived to predict the weather. This profession is an astrologer, a branch of the magician.
one.
The knowledge that magicians need to learn also includes astronomy combined with occult science. Predicting the weather can only be regarded as entertainment in leisure time. But for conscientious rulers, the weather is related to the harvest of food in the territory. Naturally,
It cannot be taken lightly.
Gradually, some magic apprentices with poor talents and insufficient resources gave up their accumulation of magic power, which was equivalent to giving up their improvement in magic. They turned to serve the lords everywhere. Because astrology and weather prediction
, focusing on knowledge. The name astrologer is independent from magicians, and is despised by magicians...
There is no way, any astrologer is unable to move forward on the path of magic, so he settles for the next best thing and turns to begging for food from the nobles. Therefore, the two professions use contempt and jealousy as their main emotions, and they are not friendly to each other.
But Lin's point is that astrologers still have some accumulated achievements in astronomy. Just like the star map he was looking at now, which he bought for a lot of money. The astrologers in the Mysterious World have not yet done so.
The group of scholars in ancient Greece on Earth started with such great imagination, they picked out some stars from the entire starry sky, made them into constellations, and added a touching and pathos story to them.
There are only 417 stars marked in the entire star map. The main ones are the orbits and changes of the two satellites, which span the entire star map. Compared with the ancient times of the earth, the number of stars in both Eastern and Western astronomy is in the thousands.
The above is far inferior.
Looking at this star chart, Lin felt a little helpless. The circle of astrologers was more closed than that of magicians. Perhaps due to the influence of inferiority, astrologers were more self-conscious about the knowledge they had developed and were rarely willing to share it with others.
share.
The map Lin bought was an amateur version compiled by a magician. It had more stars than the standard version of the star map provided by the association. But Lin was still disappointed.
In the nights of the past few days, the main task was to fill in the blanks of my own star map, a flat version. The most difficult point was to first determine a North Star and use it as a benchmark to draw a sufficiently accurate one.
Star map.
Due to the Lost World, most people who study astronomy focus on the two satellites. In addition, the gods really exist. There is a saying that exploring the starry sky is spying on the kingdom of God, and it will also offend the gods. Therefore.
Most people are very secretive about research in this area, so they have to do a lot of the work themselves.
When I think about my workload, which has to go all the way from the era of Greek philosophers to the era when the general theory of relativity is established, this part of the technology tree that needs to be illuminated makes my scalp numb just thinking about it.
Now that there were nearly two thousand stars on Tripwood's version of the star map, Lin began to think about another thing, which method to use to measure distances.
The most primitive parallax method requires measurement in two places, so I basically gave up on it first. As for the radar method that uses sonar principles, I looked at the pure sky outside without industrial pollution, so I gave up and started to use radar again.
The idea of a tech tree.
What is more feasible are the many methods derived from the annual parallax method and the red shift phenomenon. However, the accuracy of these methods depends very much on the accuracy of observation. Just find a way to measure one second of angle (1/3600 of one degree of angle)
), with the existing equipment and the magic knowledge available, it is impossible to know how many brain cells will be killed.
In addition, in order to use the annual parallax method, it is necessary to re-measure the Astronomical Unit of the Midi world. It is the average distance between Midi and the sun. Together with it, the radius of Midi's body, as well as the revolution and rotation period
, even the unit of time needs to be accurately measured or defined again.
Thinking of this, Lin had to think about the star map on the wall of the restaurant. It is one of the few things in the Tower of the Great Sage that has been handed down since the beginning of its construction. It clearly shows the star where Midi is located.
System. This also confirms that people in the lost world have abandoned the geocentric theory and entered the heliocentric theory that is closer to reality.
In that star system star map, although the distances between the planets are not correct, and equidistant concentric circles are generally used as orbits, the orbital periods of the six planets are very accurate.
Not to mention anything else, just because the star map has been running for thousands of years, the current star map positions of the six planets are almost the same as the actual results of Lin's observations, which shows how amazing the astronomical achievements of thousands of years ago were. And then there are the thousands of years.
The lack of progress... is similar to the problem of a country that claims to have a five-thousand-year-old civilization.
Lin also wanted to study the operating principle of the star map. However, the results of the actual investigation only confirmed that the magic principle behind the star map was so complex that it could not be understood in a moment.
In addition, most of the end points of the energy channels are concentrated at the position of this star map, which also prevents Lin from rashly changing or stopping the energy supply here. Except when the magic tower was rebuilt, when he was unclear about the situation,
After a tower-wide power outage, I unexpectedly discovered that this star map could still continue to operate, obtaining energy supply from unknown sources.
All these wonderful things made Lin decide to retain this star map and maintain its original appearance for future research and comparison. Of course, subsequent modifications to the magic tower also bypassed the energy supply of the star map to maintain its original appearance.
Operational continuity.
By the way, the phenomenon of six stars in a row will occur within the next year or two. That is, six planets will be connected in a line. This situation will always serve as some kind of astronomical warning in the ancient times of the earth; so that in the
In modern times, it has also become a subject of major books by novelists.
However, when he was on Earth, Lin only encountered the Seven Stars Lianzhu once in 2000 AD. I don’t know if the changes in Taiwan’s political scene were an impact. Other than that, nothing happened. The main reason was that the planet
The orbits are not on the same plane, but are slightly angularly deviated. It is impossible to completely connect them in a straight line in three-dimensional space.
Next comes the calculation part. The purpose of spending a lot of effort to build an alien version of the computer is to simplify the calculation process. Think about it, before NASA introduced the IBM computer, it had a whole team of calculation staff. And the mathematics of the Lost World
Talent can be described in two simple words: None. In a world where multiplication does not even exist, what can you expect?
It is actually not complicated to use computers to do calculations, but the difficulty lies in the accuracy of floating point numbers. The most primitive computers have decimal point errors that are lost to hand calculations. This is limited by the data structure and numerical values.
Formalization factors.
The program improvement in this area is to use array processing. Before time travel, various programming languages had already had quite mature developments and paradigms, but those were all based on binary...
In the world of Mystery, the octal computer based on the eight magical powers must have corresponding conversions for the relevant theories. This will cost someone a lot of brain cells.
In short, ever since he settled down in the Tower of the Great Sage and began to officially explore the stars and find his way home, someone has been constantly experiencing reincarnations of collapse and recovery. This is one of the reasons why he purchased so many materials from the Chamber of Commerce.
one.
In addition to having some ideas in my mind and wanting to try them out, when a person collapses, going into the forge and knocking around seems to help restore the soul. And by producing a finished product, it can more or less make up for the loss in astronomical research.
frustration.
And on a collapsed afternoon, simple knocking was no longer enough to restore the head that had turned to paste. Lin looked at the strange eyes of the two girls seeing the walking dead, and his whole body seemed to float into a world.
warehouse on the floor.
Godless eyes searched for materials that could touch his nerves, and the stones piled in the corner were high-grade stones used to build the walls of the magic tower. Originally, Lin had the idea of repairing the Tower of the Great Sage completely, but he had to keep it consistent.
Only by doing so can the overall energy balance be maintained.
Unfortunately, the Tower of the Great Sage has been built for thousands of years. Although the technology is backward, the materials are top-notch. This kind of stone, called blue scroll stone, is not only rare, but all the known veins have been mined.
In other words, if you have money, there is nowhere to buy it.
The stones brought here are the only ones in stock of the Xijia District branch, and they are used by some wealthy magicians to make important parts of stone golems. However, this amount cannot even erect a wall.
When the Chamber of Commerce steward came to visit a while ago, Lin did mention this issue. But the other party gave him a bad idea - how about demolishing other people's towers?
…
After the two of them looked at each other in silence, the matter was never mentioned again.
Now looking at this pile of stones that are neither high enough nor low enough, an idea arises spontaneously.
Without greeting anyone else, Lin was shirtless and carried the stones up to the open platform on the second floor alone, using only the power technique. A major feature of this kind of stone, which is the basic material of the magic tower, is its high density.
, heavier than a piece of iron. So even though Lin assisted himself with the power technique and moved all the stones to the second floor, he was still covered in sweat.
Because this kind of stone is rare and precious, no unnecessary cuts were made for the convenience of transportation. Instead, it maintained its original shape, with a round and irregular appearance, with traces of water erosion. This reminded Lin of
There is another thing that the Lost World lacks on Earth - an open-air hot spring pool.
No hot spring water?
It doesn't matter, magic can be used to connect to an alien plane. Magma can be removed, not to mention hot water with a bit of sulfur content. This project has been done once before when planning the tap water and sewage system of the entire tower. It will be done again this time.
, let’s start from the water elemental plane. Although it may be easier to find hot spring water that meets the standards from the abyss.
But considering the characteristics of that place, it is unknown whether soaking in it every day will have any adverse effects. Furthermore, if such a hole is opened, it is also unknown whether local residents will follow the hole and touch it.
Don't gamble on luck if you can't be sure. This is my experience after watching countless movies on Earth.
What does Mo Fei's law say? 'Anything that can go wrong, will definitely go wrong'.
Lin didn't want to have his anus erupted by a little devil in the middle of a hot spring bath.
As for the overall plan, even if Lin himself has never soaked in a few hot springs, he has seen many photos of open-air hot springs and even puzzles made in open-air hot springs. So after laying the stone slabs and setting up the stones to create height differences, he connected
Suspecting the elemental plane of hot spring water, I got some plants outside the tower and arranged them. I worked hard all afternoon. Although it was not as good as the famous hot springs in my impression, it still looked good.