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    Re: A Science or an Art
    From: Andrés Ruiz
    Date: 2010 Dec 10, 19:29 +0100
    2010/12/10 Tom Sult <tsult@mac.com>
    CelNav Requires (ok assumes) Facts NOT in evidence...that stars orbite the earth.  Like so many things in life CelNav is a consumer of science but not a science.  Sextant are art.

    Yes, what an interesting issue! . I think that all opinions say truths. An here is my own felling about it.
    I am not a professional sailor, but an amateur one, my training is technical, but I'm not a scientist, I am an engineer, but now I am not a technician. That said, my background is actually an advantage for understanding the science part of navigation, and I love the two parts. If you read some XIX century books about navigation most of them are like recipes for cooking, (and XX & XXI too), and navigation was near an art for a lot of captains all around the world, mostly merchant ships, not in the navy. When my brother browses my documents about navigation and math, (and his English is much better that mine, he lived in London for four years), he says: "I do not understand nothing".

    I thing, navigation is a tool and it application is near engineering, like Frank says.
    Science is done by men like Galileo, Kepler, Gauss, Mendoza y Rios, Sumner, Marcq Saint Hilaire, ...
    And like Brendadn says, Art is go and came safely in an hostile ocean. (Basque whalers go to Newfoundland across the Atlantic from XIII to XVI century.).

    I like to know everything about navigation, and for understood it more intimate nature, mathematics are necessary. The sextant is a precise instrument, and have the glamor of the old times, and is beautiful, like nautical charts. Is amazing to shoot a few stars and obtain your position on the mother Earth, a kind of magic even for a technical!, is not black magic because math is the tool.

    Brendan, did you readed the recent thread "Channel Islands", navigate without an ECS and a GPS in such waters is more an art that a science.
    Is good for NavList new blood to put a fox with the hens!
    Regards.
    -- 
    Andrés Ruiz
    Navigational Algorithms
    http://sites.google.com/site/navigationalalgorithms/

       
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