Who Were the Sea Peoples?

I will be teaching probability and statistics in the autumn. I've begun reviewing my textbook ( Introduction to Probability , Freund), and in the introduction I find this claim: "everything relating to chance was looked upon as divine intent ... Thus, it was considered impious, or even sacrilegious, to try to analyze the 'mechanics' of the supernatural through mathematics; indeed, some of the mathematicians connected with the early study of probability theory were persecuted for this very reason." The author does not cite a single source to back his claim that studying probability was considered "impious." He does not mention a single actual person who was ever persecuted by anyone for studying probability theory. I studied the history of science at the graduate level for a year at King's College in London, and our lecturer assured us that on any scientific topic that did not seem to directly impact the interpretation of scripture, the Catholic ...

Some people suspect that all basic science is over, and henceforth it will take a supercomputer generating incomprehensible "theories" to make new major discoveries. Well... * An undergraduate student in Australia just discovered that the earth is surrounded by giant tubes of plasma . She did this by using spatially separated radio telescopes as sort of 3-D glasses, a technique she apparently invented as well. * A whole new system in the mammal body has been discovered. (New to science, of course: it's been there all along.) We've been dissecting corpses for a couple of thousand years, and everyone kept missing this!

And properly so: "It is plain that what we apprehend as 'reality' is only 'shadows cast from without into the shadows of the cave'. But it is only with these shadows that science can be concerned." -- G. L. S. Shackle, quoted in Earl and Littleboy, p. 23

Interesting post here : In 1618 the Jesuit astronomer Orazio Grassi showed by observation and parallax measurement that the comet of that year was indeed supra-lunar driving another nail in the coffin of the Aristotelian theory of comets. Galileo, who due to illness had been unable to observe the comet, was urged by his claque to enter the arena with his opinion on the nature of comets. Galileo then famously launched an unprovoked and extremely vitriolic attack on Grassi condemning his work and defending what was basically a version of the Aristotelian theory. It was one of Galileo’s less glorious moments, far from using mathematic to criticise a doctrine of Aristotle’s Galileo was defending Aristotle’s theory of comets against an astronomer who had used mathematic to disprove it. So, in this case, someone from the Church was disproving a theory of Aristotle's while Galileo was dogmatically defending it. Life is usually not as simple as we like to make it out.