Stats for nerds
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15mentions
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2014–2025years
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- if you read the charges against galileo or bruno, specifically what they're accused of is dissent from church dogma, and many of the specific dissenting opinions were in fact scientific truth. in galileo's case, their epistemological grounding was also entirely scientific in the modern sense
it's probably true that if they'd been easier to get along with, they would have gotten away with it. but a reasonable crude definition of 'scientist' is someone who cares more about the truth than about getting along with people
so your argument boils down to 'the church wasn't harassing scientists [and burning them at the stake], but rather harassing scientists [and burning them at the stake]'. and that's because they were not, in fact, interested in truth wherever it was found; specifically, as you acknowledge, they were not interested in finding truth in the opinions of bickering italians with good egos. in galileo's case, the church very much failed to live up to philippians 4:8, and continued to do so until 01992. bruno's case is still live
other authors in whose writings the church was not interested in finding truth, and in fact in whose writings it prohibited its adherents from seeking truth, include machiavelli, pascal, descartes, francis bacon, diderot, gibbon, erasmus darwin, and kant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_authors_and_works_on_t...
we're not talking about the period until 01758 (at which point heliocentrism officially stopped being heretical) but until 01966
that's not even including the authors whose inclusion in the index librorum prohibitorum was eventually reversed, including galileo himself, copernicus, and kepler
here in my own country of argentina, public education could not be instituted until 01862 because of the strenuous opposition of the catholic church
in short, your account of a church that did not oppose the forces of science and enlightenment is entirely false from beginning to end
as for the greek tradition, it very much did not fizzle after aristoteles; eudoxus was another student of platon, sure, but eucleides was a quarter century later, archimedes didn't die until a century later, and ptolemaios and galenos were almost 500 years later. i recommend reading lucio russo's the forgotten revolution, which makes an excellent case that there was a sustained scientific enterprise in pre-christian hellenistic europe
and, of course, today there is a sustained scientific enterprise throughout the world, and most scientists in the west are not christian; about half of all scientists are atheist or agnostic, with the numbers being much higher in the west: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/237802311666435...
- No amount of 'progressive' re-writing of history or (ironically) whiggish re-interpretations of what some non-western cultures (including mine) did will change the fact that science as we understand it began in Europe around the early modern period and it had the most revolutionary effect on the the world. This is why the oft quoted trivia that Cleopatra is closer to us than to Imhotep is so striking.
Having said that, there's an excellent scholarly work of revisionist history written by Lucio Russo called the Forgotten Revolution that I can recommend for some pleasuraeble outrage.
- I really enjoyed the post, even though I wasn't clear what part was fictional and what part was truthful.
You might be interested in Lucio Russo's book The Forgotten Revolution. He describes how the Hellenistic scientific and technical culture which gave us Heron's aeolipile, Greek fire, the Antikythera mechanism, Archimedes' method of exhaustion, Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's size, Eucid's axiomatization of geometry, etc.†, was lost. Basically what happens was that when centers of science like Syracuse and Alexandria were conquered by the pre-scientific Romans, the philosophers who weren't massacred were dispersed to the four winds, preserving their knowledge in foreign lands if at all. In later generations, Christian fanatics lynched Hypatia and threw down the Egyptian temples, extinguishing the millennia-long knowledge of hieroglyphics.
Russo reaches some conclusions that aren't generally accepted, but much of the history he reviews in the book is uncontroversial, if little-known — but starkly horrifying.
It wasn't a gradual process of forgetting, but a series of genocidal catastrophes. Similar processes obliterated the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the Maya codices, the khipu, and in our own time most of the world's languages and folklore, much of the Timbuktu libraries, the Afghan relics of early Buddhism, and the collections of the archaeological museums in Iraq.
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† I have omitted Roman cement and the separation of gold from silver because I don't have any reason to believe they came from the Hellenistic world.
- Rome itself was partly/largely to blame - the idea of a unified greco-roman culture is a myth. When thinking about ancient science and technology, its useful to divide antiquity into three periods:
the classical greek period 600-350 bce
the Hellenistic Greek period 350 - 150 bce
the 'imperial' period 150 bce - whenever ce
Virtually all of the great scientific and technical achievements of antiquity were from the Hellenistic Greek society - the society of euclid, eratosthenes, archimedes, ctesibius, hipparchus, chrysippus, herophilus, supported by the Ptolemies in north Africa.
All this scientific work came to an abrupt end around 150bce due to the roman conquests, and the political atmosphere they created. Carthage (itself a cosmopolitan center of learning with close ties to the greek world) was not he only north african city razed to its foundations by Rome. Its easier to list the survivors: (1) Alexandria and (2) Rhodes. This completes the list. And the academics didn't survive: in 145bce Ptolemy VIII persecuted the city's greek elite so all the intellectuals fled, and the romans made a hobby of enslaving greek intellectuals, to have them work as copyists and teach their children to read.
Thus in a very short span of time, virtually all of the physical books were destroyed when the cities were destroyed, and the intellectual culture that understood the ideas was eliminated. There was a partial renaissance during the Pax Romana (ptolemy, galen, etc), but the understanding of the science was much more primitive and quickly faded with no state and cultural support.
As for technology - roman engineering was typically less advanced than greek engineering, and for technically difficult things the latin writing are both crude and wrong: their scientific engineering was done by importing engineers from the east. The antikythera mechanism (late 2nd century bce) is a good example of the decline: there is nothing of comparable mechanical complexity from the roman period, neither in archeology or in Heron.
See Russo[1] for very readable up to date academic scholarship on this kind of thing.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Revolution-Science-Born-Reb...
- Ofer Gal - Baroque Science. A highly academic history of the scientific revolution, not the most readable book. It focused quite a bit on mathematization, especially in optics (and Kepler's optics revolution in particular), and also in observation via instrumentation like telescopes and microscopes.
Paul Nahin - The Logician and the Engineer. About Boole and Shannon's work; I had already learned the material so i skimmed part of it and returned it to the library.
Ian Mortimer - The time traveler's guide to medieval england. Talks about what daily life was like for different social classes in 14th century England eg towns & cities, food, clothes, housing, employment, travel etc. I got about halfway through and lost interest in the subject matter.
Lucio Russo - The forgotten Revolution. A very readable academic history of the development of science in ptolomaic egypt (eg euclid, archimedes, etc). This was certainly the most surprising book I read all year. This time period has been almost completely deleted from history, which jumps straight from aristotle to the renaissance (with a quick stop in the islamic world if you're being spoiled), and their achievements were incredibly impressive!
Jim al-Khalili - The House of Wisdom. A pop-history book about arabic science that i got from the library. I was wary because it's written by a particle physicist and not a historian, and sure enough it is filled with so much nonsense that I through it down in disgust after a few chapters.
Colin Pask - Magnificent Principia. A brief tour of some of the highlights of Newton's Principia, using both newton's geometric diagrams and modern notation. Following the modern notation of course assumes some basic calculus. Highly recommended - it made me want to learn old fashioned celestial mechanics! Perhaps in 2019...
Randall Munroe - What if. A fun light read about whimsical scenarios.
Sigmund - Exact thinking in demented times. About the vienna circle, the philosophical group associated with logical positivism.
Newman [ed] - The world of mathematics vol 1. A varied Collection of mathematical writings, both contemporary and historical.
Richard J Evans - The Coming of the Third Reich. Evans has recently written a three volume treatment of the third Reich. this is of course the first and starts with the origins of the modern form of antisemitism in the late 19th century. I hope to read the next two in 2019!
Robert Harper - Practical foundations for programming languages. I've mostly just skimmed it so my understanding is quite superficial, maybe in a year or two I'll go through and do all the exercises. I liked that he avoided 'paradigms' and developed the subject more systematically. The book's table of contents is absolutely irresistible!
Tolkien - the Hobbit. I finally got around to reading it... I didn't care for it. I started the lord of the rings but i don't think i'm going to finish it.
Michael Chriton - Jurassic Park. The movie was better.
Agatha Christie - Murder on the Orient Express. I think i just don't like fiction. The few years before this I tried reading more fancy literature and i didn't like that, so this year I tried more popular literature... Recently i heard someone say they thought that history spoiled fiction for them. I think I've suffered the same problem.
Findlay & O'Rourke - Power and Plenty. (in progress) An economic history of the 2nd millennium, absolutely fascinating so far. The discussion of the black death was particularly memorable. It's become something of a meme to point out how the peasant survivors were economically better off than their parents and grandparents. In fact that effect was limited to western europe. In eastern europe the economics were different and feudalism deepened, and in the arab world the reaction was different still: (if i remember my reading correctly) it was certain sects of military men who came out on top. I'm bringing it up because it is a perfect reminder that reality is more complicated than memes.
Robert Harper - Programming in Standard ML. (in progress) Online notes about functional programming.
- Lucio Russo's The Forgotten Revolution points out somewhat indignantly that Dedekind was ("just") restating in modern number-theoretical language a definition of proportion or ratio that he found in Book 5 of Euclid.
The translation at https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/elements/bookV/bookV.html says:
> Magnitudes are said to be in the same ratio, the first to the second and the third to the fourth, when, if any equimultiples whatever are taken of the first and third, and any equimultiples whatever of the second and fourth, the former equimultiples alike exceed, are alike equal to, or alike fall short of, the latter equimultiples respectively taken in corresponding order.
This is a bit hard to understand, but I think it does come out to the same thing: positing the existence of ratios of magnitudes that cannot be expressed as ratios of integers, but which divide the ratios of integers into those that are less than or greater than the ratio of magnitudes in question.
Further discussion at https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/499395/how-to-best-... seems to agree.
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