Who Were the Sea Peoples?

It is extremely easy muddle together the scientific concepts of atoms and elementary particles, and the philosophical idea of atomism, and speak wrongly as a result. The worst example I've ever seen of this, which appears frequently in science textbooks (and which I have mentioned here before), runs something like: "The ancient Greeks incorrectly thought that the atom was an indivisible entity. But modern science has shown that the atom can be further sub-divided." This is such a crass error that it is almost unbelievable that it appears in so many textbooks. To understand what has gone wrong, consider the following analogy: Joe moves to Brooklyn. He has heard reports of "the best bar in Brooklyn," one that has the best drinks at the best prices, served by the best bartenders. He spends a few weeks exploring, after which he dubs Bar X "the best bar in Brooklyn." But couple of months later, he stumbles upon another bar, Bar Y, which has even...

I saw this one on a poster discussing the "history" of science in a physics classroom: "[Marie Curie's discovery that elements undergo radioactive decay] shattered the belief inherited from the Greeks that the elements are immutable and their atoms indestructible." The Greek atomists had said there are indivisible particles "at the bottom of things." They never said that what  we moderns call atoms are indivisible! They had never discovered those things! What happened was that the originators of modern atomic theory misapplied the Greek word, because the first modern "atomists" thought they had found these indivisible substances. If one introduced a Greek atomist to modern sub-atomic theory, he would say something like, "Ah, the quark: that is what you should have named 'atom.'"  (See here : "I explained that our current theory makes the assumption, which has not been experimentally verified, that quarks are indivi...

Surprisingly, my post on probability theory has generated quite a discussion thread. (And here I thought I saying Ron Paul won't win the GOP nomination was the key to lengthy threads!) In the course of the discussion, I thought of a way to refine my first example to clarify the issues a bit. Instead of an infinitely fine-pointed dart, let's take an ordinary one, and instead of the real number line, we'll just throw it at the wall. Now, I ask you, "Does the exact middle of the head of the dart have some exact x, y coordinates on the grid of that wall, despite the fact that, of course, we could never measure that exact x or that exact y?" If you answer "yes," then I will note that there was a 0% chance that the dart would land at those coordinates, and yet there it is. If you answer "no," you have adopted a respectable philosophical position, denying the physical reality of the continuum. But you have changed subjects on us: you've do...