Cold SnapDragon

After being in Delhi for what’s hardly a short length of time, I finally went to the Jantar Mantar. It’s full of people during the day. And not one of them knows how exactly it works. Although the Jantar Mantar was built only a few centuries ago, no records survive from the period when it was built which tell contemporary scientists how to use it. The only documents which are in existence are records of observations which are not especially useful in terms of understanding how the observations were conducted. What’s surprising is that in addition to none of the original blueprints being available, the records of subsequent restorations are not easily available either. This doesn’t mean that just the records of 19th century restorations are unavailable but also that records of just how the structure was reinforced with concrete sometime in the 1980s are (I'm told) unavailable. What this effectively presumably means is that astrophysicists have no easy way of knowing what was a part ...