
A Prayer for Archimedes (2007) - signa11
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/prayer-archimedes
======
hermannj314
While it sucks the original work was erased to be overwritten by prayers, I
wonder if the book only survived this long on account of being an heirloom
prayer book rather than a dusty old math tome.

------
noobermin
I'll say what's probably on everyone else's mind: if this had not been lost
and/or had been taken seriously, we'd probably be in space by now. At the very
least, we'd be nearer to a theory of everything, figured out fusion, etc...

~~~
ch4s3
Maybe, but probably not. I don't think math alone get you all the way there.
Think about some of the non or less mathy things that are required for large
technological leaps. First, I would argue that prolonged periods of political
stability are required in order for resources to be put towards something
other than conflict. That took Westphalian sovereignty, not a treatise on
fluid dynamics or even a theory of economics.

Consider also trade, a necessary framework accumulating the necessary
ingredients to build new technology. Sure, Archimedes or his successors could
have likely worked out optics mathematically, but could they have come by the
necessary raw materials and put together a large enough cohort of glass
workers to develop sufficient lenses to build telescopes? Probably not. The
idea that trade is not zero sum, and should be open didn't come about until
the 1700s. Once this ideas was in place, prices fell and it became cheaper to
develop new types of goods.

I could go on, but my point is that it's far too tempting as a technologist to
assume that people in the past were more backwards than us, and if only they
had been enlightened enough to follow (insert name of really smart dead
person) society today would be so much more advanced. It is easy to forget
about all of the social, political, and cultural constructs that allow us to
go to the Moon, build power plants, and microwave frozen burritos.

~~~
atmosx
> Maybe, but probably not. I don't think math alone get you all the way there.

Hm, I'm not so sure. When I was studying anti-coagulants, I came across a
wikipedia excerpt. Apparently until 1700 AD the most advanced information
about blood circulation came from Egyptian texts written in 200 BC. This
knowledge came from mummification techniques. Egyptians knew the difference
between veins, arteries, amongst other things.

So for nearly 2000 years no advancement has been made on the topic, because
religion. Indeed, if I'm not mistaken the period is called "the dark ages" and
"the middle ages" to signify the lack of any advancement in science - or at
least that's how I've always perceived that period.

Aristotle had described a sort of _scientific method_ but we had to wait for
the Royal Society and Newton to establish what the actual _scientific method_
is. It would have taken only one step between the two in my mind, 100 years
should/could suffice.

I think parent comment has a valid point. Of course I reckon that all this is
pure speculation.

~~~
riffraff
> Indeed, if I'm not mistaken the period is called "the dark ages" and "the
> middle ages" to signify the lack of any advancement in science - or at least
> that's how I've always perceived that period.

and that is how most people perceive it, but it's a lie :) Basically, they are
called the dark ages, because the people who came just after them (i.e.
renaissance) wanted to show themselves as "better than the old guys".

The middle ages in europe saw the adoption of spectacles, arabic numbers,
mechanical clocks, universities, paper and a bunch of other stuff. The muslim
word, arguably more religious, had it's golden age during this period too and
vast advancements in a ton of scientific fields.

~~~
acqq
Actually, in the field of medicine, in the Western world, really nothing good
happened at the times between the Christians came to the power and until the
Italian Renaissance, check any good history of medicine. And it was really
only because of the dogmatic approach that Christians had.

Also, for professional historians, "dark ages" don't mean something "bad" but
is a term used to refer to some historical period of some observed area where
there's significantly less information on which history can rely to. It's not
judgemental, it reflects the facts. And yes, there were periods when the most
cities or the infrastructure of some region broke completely.

Here's one look at the fact that for almost 200 years there were no coins in
England:

[http://www.numsoc.net/darkages.html](http://www.numsoc.net/darkages.html)

And of course it's a local effect, the Eastern Roman Empire at the same time
functioned as a real state and produced new money. And some periods can "go
dark" for us not because of something occurring during some time but because
something later destroyed most of the evidence.

~~~
foldr
There are a lot of myths about medieval medicine too. See e.g.:

[http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/04/debunking-a-
my...](http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/04/debunking-a-myth/)

[http://www.medievalists.net/2013/08/04/medieval-medical-
expe...](http://www.medievalists.net/2013/08/04/medieval-medical-experiments/)

~~~
acqq
Thanks. Let's take as an example somebody we know more about, Paracelsus who
died in 1541:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracelsus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracelsus)

"Paracelsus grew up during a period of Renaissance humanism"

"He is also a famous revolutionary for utilizing observations of nature,
rather than referring to ancient texts, something of radical defiance during
his time."

Is that a myth? And still:

"Much of his theoretical work does not withstand modern scientific thought,
but his insights laid the foundation for a more dynamic approach in the
medical sciences."

Had the medicine been good before him, it would be even better afterwards, but
we can actually evaluate the quality of his achievements and therefore we get
the idea how it was before.

We can even use much more recent example, Semmelweis, died 1865:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis)

"Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality
to below 1%, Semmelweis' observations conflicted with the established
scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the
medical community. Some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they
should wash their hands and Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific
explanation for his findings. Semmelweis' practice earned widespread
acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ
theory."

~~~
foldr
>Is that a myth?

Well, yes. The second article I linked to quotes several physicians explaining
the importance of observation hundreds of years before Paracelsus lived. And
the fact that people were performing dissections hundreds of years before the
Renaissance is a clear demonstration that they knew the value of observation.

>We can even use much more recent example, Semmelweis, died 1865

This example only goes to show that there was nothing special about the
medievals. New advances in science are often initially rejected by the
scientific community.

~~~
acqq
The second article gives some quotes, but does their mere existence change
anything, if the medical science remained where it was even in 1541, or much
later? Apart from learning that some people wrote something clever, is there
any evidence to some meaningful _results_? That's what counts. I don't see
them still. Until then, I don't consider the poor state of medicine between
Galen and Renaissance a myth.

The periods of the strong religious dogma de facto existed and they really
significantly limited the advance of sciences. The opposition to science is
strong even in the present times among the "fundamentally" religious. It
surely wasn't better before.

~~~
foldr
There was certainly progress in anatomical knowledge. Reliably effective
medicine is really a very modern development.

~~~
acqq
> There was certainly progress in anatomical knowledge

Are there any preserved books with the anatomical drawings that can prove that
or something equivalently indisputable? I've expected some link already.

EDIT, what follows is written _after_ your post that mentions de Liuzzi: I
don't see how he actually supports your claim of a visible progress _before_
Renaissance:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondino_de_Liuzzi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondino_de_Liuzzi)
\-- an Italian who died 1326 (14th century) and the Renaissance is considered
to originate in Italy in late 13th and to include 14th century. Moreover:

"He is often credited as the “restorer of anatomy” because he made seminal
contributions to the field by reintroducing the practice of public dissection
of human cadavers and writing the first modern anatomical text."

How come he had to "restore" anatomy at all?

EDIT2: And what _were_ the reasons for the poor state of medicine between
Galen and Renaissance when not the religious/dogmatic ones (as in "the Bible
says how God made a man and the animals, separately")? We see these arguments
even now.

EDIT3: Just like you admit "beginning of Renaissance" I admit I formulated
somewhere my view of poor state of medicine as "between Galen and Renaissance"
which even (probably wrongly) includes some years between Galen and the
Christian dominance, and I still stay behind the point of my claim: there's an
immense period of time where we don't have any good example of functioning
scientific approach to the medicine, and the fundamentalist understanding of
Bible was the very significant cause for that.

EDIT4: Your "printing press" excuse doesn't correlate with all the progress in
antique and also at the start of the Renaissance (and before the printing
press), the very example you gave, but my "religion" argument not only
correlates with the "dark medicine ages" but also with many source texts that
we can read. So I still see your arguments more as wishful thinking than
anything else. You can't excuse the religion holding on to the "it's written
in this fine book, and that's it."

EDIT5: You can disprove my claim of "poor medicine" for many centuries
influenced by the Christian dogma if you can quote some text or drawings made
between cca 300-something AD and 1200-something AD of any author actually
correcting Galen who died 216 AD and who made very obvious errors in his own
writings. His writings were dutifully copied through almost 1000 years but, to
my knowledge, not corrected during all these centuries until the Italian times
you link to. The times also known as Renaissance. We can nitpick the dates,
but nobody can refute that Renaissance actually existed. How can I prove that
it's religion that suppressed the science? Simply because the written (and
other) material available to history shows people spending immense energy to
the religious questions, but not to the science. That's the main period we can
observe that in that amount. During these times the Church surely didn't have
to explicitly forbid something that simply nobody did. They've spent the
energy on "heresies" they were confronted to -- like was Jesus ever made or
was he always his own father, are the icons allowed, stuff like that. You
consider that "not fundamentalist," call it what you want, it was the
religion-and-dogma-caused blindness for science.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_of_the_12th_centur...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_of_the_12th_century)

~~~
foldr
Mondino de Luzzi's _Anathomia corporis humani_ , written in 1316 and based on
dissection of cadavers.

 _edit_ : The other links I gave indicate that dissection was practiced
earlier. The reasons for it not being more widely practiced were not primarily
religious. As the articles make clear, the church never banned dissection.

You are right of course that the early 14th century is technically the very
beginning of the Renaissance by most definitions, but the standard myths have
it that dissection was still banned by the church much later than that. The
misinterpreted papal edict that supposedly banned dissection was issued in
1299, so if you're going to be pedantic about time periods, you'd have to say
that it's the Renaissance that suffered from a ban on dissection and not the
medieval period!

>And what were the reasons for the poor state of medicine between Galen and
Renaissance when not religious?

Scientific progress ebbs and flows for all kinds of reasons. I should think
the invention of the printing press played more of a role than religion. Note
also that dissection was banned in many non-Christian societies:

[http://www.livescience.com/27624-mummy-head-middle-ages-
anat...](http://www.livescience.com/27624-mummy-head-middle-ages-anatomy.html)

>there's an immense period of time where we don't have any good example of
functioning scientific approach to the medicine, and the fundamentalist
understanding of Bible was the very significant cause for that.

You've provided no evidence in support of this claim. It seems to be something
that you're just going to keep insisting on, so I'm not sure how to respond.
The "fundamentalist" understanding of the Bible did not exist in the medieval
period, when only highly educed people read the Bible. It has its origins in
the 19th century as a consequence of mass literacy and the translation of the
Bible into the vernacular hundreds of years previously.

>Your "printing press" excuse doesn't correlate with all the progress in
antique and also at the start of the Renaissance (and before the printing
press), the very example you gave, but my "religion" not only correlates with
the "dark medicine ages" but also with many source texts that we can read.

I don't understand what you mean by "religion" here. Religion existed in
Ancient Greece and it existed during and after the Renaissance. You'd need to
show specific evidence that specific religious institutions in medieval Europe
played a significant role in impeding the progress of medicine, in a way that
they did not before or since.

> How can I prove that it's religion that suppressed the science? Simply
> because the written (and other) material available to history shows people
> spending immense energy to the religious questions, but not to the science.

I don't see how that proves anything. At most, if it is true, it proves that
people were overall more interested in religion than science. That obviously
doesn't show that religion was suppressing science. People are nowadays much
more interested in reality TV and Facebook than they are in science, but we
wouldn't take that to be evidence of "suppression".

>You can disprove my claim of "poor medicine" for many centuries influenced by
the Christian dogma if you can quote some text or drawings made between cca
300-something AD and 1200-something AD of any author actually correcting Galen
who died 216 AD and who made very obvious errors in his own writings

The second article I linked to already did that:

 _[...] the year 1200, when a famine broke out in Egypt. While thousands of
people died, it was also an opportunity for ‘Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (d.1213)
and other physicians to find out the answer to an anatomy problem. According
to the writings of Galen the lower jaw bone was made up of two bones. Al-
Baghdadi and the other medical experts disagreed, and with all these corpses
around they thought of making a study of them. They arranged to see over two
thousand skulls to observe their jaws before making their determination – all
of them had a lower jaw made up of one bone, not two – and they then had a
second group of physicians come in to verify their findings._

See also this:

[http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/39136101/02e7...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/39136101/02e7e51aee712cfc3f000000.pdf20151012-16080-5h3yv2.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1470840010&Signature=jnLb%2Bd1Zt%2FNDSOtMSLWNkyb4JZ4%3D&response-
content-
disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DSpecial_article_contributions_of_medieva.pdf)

~~~
acqq
Ah yes, the parrot wasn't dead because after he was lying on the floor for
almost a thousand years, once he had been prepared to be cleaned away we can
view it as it was his own voluntary movement. And he was just resting. Good.
I've understood the nature of your arguments, I have no more questions and
don't expect anything more in this discussion.

------
MichaelMoser123
there were some interesting talks on youtube that covered the Archimedes
Palimpsest

google tech talk
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe9uQVGkz9k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe9uQVGkz9k)

The Story of the Archimedes Palimpsest to 2000 (three parts)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rHv3OiaVC8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rHv3OiaVC8)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po-ueHf-
mDU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po-ueHf-mDU)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDPvAOLNXH8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDPvAOLNXH8)

there was an excellent BBC documentary on the subject, but the video was taken
down; at least there is the transcript
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/archimedestrans.sh...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/archimedestrans.shtml)

------
Noseshine
I think this comment from the reddit discussion nails it
([https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/4wxm2b/til_7...](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/4wxm2b/til_700_years_ago_a_monk_scraped_off_the_ink_of/d6as8le))

Comment included below:

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I don't think the invention of calculus was hard. Yes of course it takes a
"great person", but there always are some of those around at any one time.

What made calculus possible and the reason why it wasn't invented earlier was
that it just wasn't needed. All inventions are part of a _context_. In support
of my assertion: When it was needed it was promptly developed _twice_ on the
same continent and at the same time.

Which has implications for learning calculus: I guess it's especially hard to
learn this, or anything, if you don't see a need for it (in your life).

I - now pretty old - found out that while I had always been good at school I
had forgotten almost everything even slightly advanced in biology, chemistry,
and other fields. When I had to learn it I learned _only_ that particular
knowledge and only for the exam since that was the only use I had for it.
Recently, a few years ago, I suddenly became interested in medical topics -
only to understand how the body works, the pathologies don't interest me.
Anyway, I had to learn a lot of chemistry, org. chemistry, biochemistry
(citric acid cycle is fun, but understanding how mitochondria create energy
using that cycle is even more so), and it took me very little time, and this
time I won't forget any of it. That's because it now is embedded into a _big_
subject that I actually care about. If I had just to learn the citric acid
cycle and only to pass some exam I would learn it - and afterwards promptly
forget. Now it's part of a larger "story" that interests me and I actually
think about it occasionally while walking around town because it matters to
me, and I explain to my inner self whole physiological processes just because
I find it so interesting.

Same with calculus, if you are an engineer and care about e.g. building a
chemical plant to produce XYZ you _will_ care about calculus so much you will
learn it in no time. Simply because it helps you. You don't care about the
calculus - you care about what it can do for you.

Did you ever wonder what language the wizards in the fantasies movies speak to
invoke magic? It must be math. It is the language of miracles. You can move
mountains, you can put stuff into orbit, you can hit the moon circling around
a planet hundreds or even thousands of millions of miles away. Or you can
simulate ecosystems on earth. Or pretty much any somewhat advanced simulation
of anything, like the weather, or airflow, etc.

So the best way to learn calculus is to not care about calculus - but to care
very much about a subject where calculus is the magic language to get stuff
done.

By the way, the wizard/fantasy analogy can be taken further. The "magical
items" that they have are actually pretty much exactly how we use technology:
Somebody else made it and the person using it has no idea how. Basically, the
knowledge of many, in our time often _millions_ of people working together in
both space and time, is poured into "magical items". That can be electronics,
but even a piece of concrete or steel is a high-tech "magical" product these
days. So next time you watch a fantasy movie remember _it is actually real_ ,
they only got the language and the symbolism wrong. We _do_ live in a world of
exactly such magic, but the language is math and we don't wave wands around,
wear different clothing than in the movies, and use labs, computers, robots
and industrial processes. And boring team meetings to coordinate everybody :)

-

And a few words about the religion of Europe at the time - from an atheist. I
recommend reading up on European history. It seems to me from the things I did
read, although I'm definitely nobody who would be allowed to post in
/r/AskHistorians, that Europeans owe _a lot_ to Christianity. It seems to me
it was what kept Europe at least somewhat together, a unifying force spanning
all peoples and kingdoms. Also, the tension between worldly and religious
leaders seemed to have been advantageous because it didn't allow one party to
get all the power. Since it was a somewhat "orthogonal" force and not directly
competing like other kings it could exist in parallel. Also, from what I read
it _does_ seem to be true that the monks were chiefly responsible from getting
knowledge saved for when it was again needed centuries later, from old Greece
and Rome. As for the example of Galileo, I remember that it was in
/r/AskHistorians, the actual story is _far_ more complicated and the simple
story "church evil, Galileo good" not even close to true. [Here is one
thread]([https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/42bbfx/what_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/42bbfx/what_precisely_was_galileo_put_on_trial_by_the/)),
it was not the only one.

 _(End of included comment.)_

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The only thing I would like to add to the end is to point out another thing
that set organized religion positively apart: No inheritance. Today we
perceive the "no family" rule for priests as backwards, but it served an IMHO
good purpose. Even today we have the problem of wealth and power being
concentrated in families. That aspect of the Catholic Roman church was
incredibly advanced IMHO.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
>> I don't think the invention of calculus was hard.

If you look at it with ~2k years of hindsight and mathematical knowledge,
sure, it wasn't hard. Neither was it "hard" to think of using zero or
infinity, or even the unit.

>> When it was needed it was promptly developed twice on the same continent
and at the same time.

Most probably the right way to see this is completely the opposite: calculus
was needed countless times before and it was only developed twice.

~~~
aptwebapps
It would not have even been developed twice if Newton and Leibniz had not done
so concurrently.

------
ajdlinux
"(2007)" in the title, please.

------
Fej
So - are we going to blame religion for setting us back?

That's not a rhetorical question.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Blaming religion for setting back science is lazy. It's a nuanced topic - for
each instance of antiscientific pressure you can find instances of e.g. the
Catholic Church supporting scientific advances.

