Who Were the Sea Peoples?

At about 1:37 in the video below, Professor Roger Bowley begins to recount the "history" of the number zero: The problem with Bowley's account is that, like with so many scientists, he apparently thinks it is A-OK just to make up history as you go along. First of all, he can't even get the little facts right: the Muslim author he wants to cite was "al-Khwarizmi," not "al-Khwazimi," and he was a Persian living in the Middle East, not North Africa. But the heart of that passage is how the Catholic Church fought against Fibonacc's introduction of Arabic numerals, since it was the time of the Crusades, they were Muslim, the "work of the devil," as a result they were banned in Florence, etc. This seemed like typical invented-from-whole-cloth anti-Catholicism, and so I immediately wrote Thony (an actual historian of mathematics), who responded: "No, I have never come across anything like that in all that I have read about ...

Some people like the idea of "persecuted scientists" so much that they take any scientists who was arrested or punished for anything and call that person "persecuted." Like here : "Turing was famously chemically-castrated after admitting to homosexual acts in the 1950s. Turing isn’t the only scientist to have been persecuted for his personal or professional beliefs or lifestyle." First of all, Turing scientific work, as far as I know, had nothing whatsoever to do with his punishment. Furthermore, he plead guilty to what were, at the time, criminal acts in Britain. We might thing it is wrong that these acts were criminal, but if we think marijuana criminalization is wrong, does that mean pot smokers are being persecuted ? This is, of course, a matter of definition, but that's not how I would use the word. Some of the other parts of the article are pretty bad too: "[Rhazes] was responsible for introducing western teachings, rational thou...

One of David Wootton's contentions in The Invention of Science is that the Scientific Revolution is the most important even in human history since the Neolithic Revolution . So it is, per Wootton, more important than, for instance, the Axial Age , the discovery of monotheism, or the rise of Christianity. I suspect that if Wootton were challenged on this thesis, he would point to the material transformation of the human world occurring in the wake of the Scientific Revolution. But why should that be decisive? "Importance" is itself not a material concept, and thus Wootton certainly cannot indicate material reasons for giving material transformations priority over spiritual ones.

Noah Smith is trying to defend empiricism in economics , but when it comes to empirical facts about the history of science... well, those we can just make up to suit our purposes! And so he writes: "Our most spectacularly successful leaps of theoretical insight - Newton's Principia , Einstein's relativity stuff, Mendel's theory of inheritance - were all very closely guided by data. The general pattern was that some new measurement technology would be invented - telescopes, plant hybridization experiments, etc. - that would provide some new unexplained data. Then some smart theorists would come up with a new theoretical framework (paradigm?) to explain it, and the new framework would then also explain a bunch of other stuff besides, and so people would switch to the new theory." Now, I haven't studied the history surrounding Mendel much, so I am not going to comment on it (imagine that: choosing not to write about something because one doesn't know muc...

A few quotes from the work with the above title by Richard C. Dales: "The really important thing to be noted, however, is the rapidity with which the scientists of the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries learned to differ with Aristotle..." (quoting Lynn White). "The striking thing about this [twelfth] century is the attitude of its scientists. These men are daring, original, inventive, skeptical of traditional authorities although sometimes overly impressed by new ones, and above all steadfastly determined to discover purely rational explanations of natural phenomena." "Despite the fact that many excellent illuminating studies of medieval science, as well as the texts of the works themselves, have been published in easily accessible volumes during the past fifty years, it is not unusual to find even well-educated people abysmally ignorant of the subject. Unfortunately this does not inhibit them from writing authoritatively about it."

Says physicist Carlo Rovelli : "I show that Aristotelian physics is a correct and nonintuitive approximation of Newtonian physics in the suitable domain (motion in fluids) in the same technical sense in which Newton's theory is an approximation of Einstein's theory. Aristotelian physics lasted long not because it became dogma, but because it is a very good, empirically grounded theory. This observation suggests some general considerations on intertheoretical relationships.

Renaissance Mathematicus gives an example here . The author of the piece critiqued -- which was published by Scientific American ! -- puts forward nonsense like "Copernicus's system did not explain retrograde motion of the planets" -- when, in fact, the major advance of Copernicus's system was its natural explanation of retrograde motion! -- and that Galileo "discovered that Venus was a planet and not a star" -- something the ancient Greeks knew quite well. I studied the history of science for a year at King's College in London. Pretty much the first thing our lecturer told us was that pop history of science was complete nonsense. And note: although sometimes the junk pop history of science involves religious issues, nothing in the Scientific American piece has anything to do with such matters. It just seems that, concerning the history of science, lots of people who have no idea what they are talking about want to publish on the topic.

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...

At the History of Economics Society meetings this past weekend, there was some talk about internalist versus externalist histories of science. The first traces the development of a science through the development of the ideas "internal" to the science. (E.g., "After Galileo's advances, the stage was set for the work of Newton.") The latter looks to the larger society to explain what science is up to at some point in time. (E.g., "The Protestant Reformation enabled scientists to more easily question the ideas of Aristotle.") But surely both ways of doing the history of science or partial and one-sided. To do a merely external history ignores the obvious fact that scientists develop new theories in response to the inadequacies of older theories. But a nearly internalist history is incomplete as well: as Bosanquet said, "It is impossible to state the idea fully and correctly without including the environment on which it rests, and the activities i...

As evidenced by this great post on science advancing through conflict.

Some of you may be inclined to suspect that I am rough on pop history because pop history is sometimes rough on religion. This, despite the fact that I keep noting that serious historians who are atheists are pretty rough on the pop history of the church versus science as well. But the latest episode of Cosmos dealt with an episode in history where religion does not really enter in at all. And it just completely bungs it up . For me, the most stunning howler was that Neil deGrasse Tyson says that the Principia was where Newton introduced calculus. Of course, it has no doubt been the topic of many a PhD thesis to ask "Given Newton had already invented calculus, why didn't he use it at all in the Principia ?" In other words, the complete absence of calculus from the  Principia  is a famous problem in the history of science. But the scriptwriters for a show supposedly about the history of science completely overlooked this, and claimed instead that the  Principia ...

For one thing, he was no scientist. But, "for those who prefer simple slogans and caricatures to the hard work of actually analysing and understanding history, Bruno is a simple answer to a intricate question." See more here , and learn that Neil deGrasse Tyson's history is as badly mangled when he does a major documentary as it is when he does a podcast . NOTE: The author of the post I link to above describes himself as "an arrogant Irish-Australian atheist bastard." The debunking of the "Church as the foe of science" myth has not been a project of solely, or even mainly, Christian scholars. It is simply the work of serious historians, many of them non-believers, finding out what actually occurred in the past. If you think something like "The Church held back science for hundreds of years," you simply have no idea what you are talking about.

Neil deGrasse Tyson apparently feels confident in discoursing on history without bothering to look any of his "facts" up . One reason I note this is because several times I have pointed out this type of thing in reference to people who are trying to attack Christianity with bogus history. However, in this case, NDT believes he is defending a Christian accomplishment, but it turns out he simply has no idea what he is talking about. Almost every single "fact" he offers is untrue! It is as though NDT was doing a documentary on physics based on misremembered material from a high school class, theories discredited decades ago, and snippets culled without discrimination from the popular press, and didn't think there was any point running any of the material by any actual physicist before presenting it. As Renaissance Mathematicus notes, NDT could have significantly improved the factuality of his account simply by consulting Wikipedia for a few minutes! One wou...

You know the story: 1) how the rise of Christianity destroyed Greco-Roman science; 2) how it threw us into the "Dark Ages"; 3) how the church carefully monitored every scientific idea, holding back science for centuries; and 4) it was only with the overthrow of Church authority that science began to advance again. Unfortunately, every single point in the above narrative is false, has been known to be false for many decades, and is acknowledged to be false by essentially all professional historians of science. When I studied the history of science at King's College in London, right away the lecturer, who as far as I could tell is an atheist, began debuking the above story, since it is the main obstacle to learning the actual history of science for most students. Here is another actual historian of science noting the same problems with the commonplace narrative, and also noting that the above story is "Far from reflecting the latest considerations of the hist...

An actual historian looks at a pop "history" of science column and discovers it is about as accurate as an explanation of evolution that says, "And one day a fish grew legs and walked up onto the land." And Christie even missed a problem with the pop history account, in which Potter wrote: "...how the young Newton, sent home from school at Cambridge to avoid the plague of 1665, was sitting under a tree one day, saw an apple fall to the ground, and, in a flash of insight, came to understand the workings of gravity." Christie notes that "the flash of insight" part is absurd, and it took Newton another twenty years to put his thoughts in publishable form. But the problem Christie misses is the idea that Newton ever "came to understand the workings of gravity": he did not. He devised a formula describing how objects under the influence of gravity would behave. But he had no model or theory of how gravity was producing this behavior...

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.

Over in the comments at Bob Murphy's blog, George Selgin writes : "That many of the most illustrious members of this tiny group [of scientific thinkers] suffered severely at the hands of religious persecutors is (or ought to be) notorious." I do not mean to pick on George, whom I regard as a very bright man, but here he is expressing a bit of "folk history" that I just don't see has much basis in fact. My interest is really about why this idea continues to circulate. One of the first things our history of science lecturer at King’s College, John Milton , told us was that on the vast majority of scientific topics, the church simply did not care . So when Buridan and Oresme challenged Aristotelian mechanics: the church just did not care at all, one way or the other. Secondly, on the very few topics it did care about, it was always prepared to regard scripture as figurative, if the literal interpretation could be proven false. (So, since ev...

to a man (sorry, in those days they were all men), all thought like this: The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.… Just as the eye was made to see color and the ear to hear sounds, so the human mind was made to understand quantity. -- Johannes Kepler The success of science was yet more proof of the reality of God, and was in no way seen to be in conflict with religion. That sense of conflict only arose in the nineteenth century, and the reasons were not scientific, but political: progressive politics was (often) anti-religious, and scientists did not wish to seem backwards in their politics! (Hat tip to Thomas Treloar. )

Klein is trying to knock Krugman by rejecting the idea that we can have a science of higher-level phenomena before understanding the lower levels that make the higher level up: "Methodological individualists don’t deny that there are interesting macro-level regularities that should be recorded and studied, only that claims about them don’t reach the status of science until we understand the underlying causal mechanisms." And that denial is nonsense. Kepler certainly was doing science, and good science, when he developed his laws of planetary motion, without having any idea what underlay those laws. And so was Newton, when he developed his law of universal gravitation, without the least notion of what underlying casual mechanisms were behind this regularity -- something he freely admitted himself. And both physics and chemistry would have been stopped in their tracks by trying to be Kleinian "sciences": they progressed for centuries before it was even clear tha...