4 ms·

The Greeks (or, more precisely, the Eastern Mediterraneans, since a ton of these guys were Phoenician) were jaw-droppingly awesome at this stuff. I wish I could

The Greeks (or, more precisely, the Eastern Mediterraneans, since a ton of these guys were Phoenician) were jaw-droppingly awesome at this stuff. I wish I could have seen it. It makes you wonder how much knowledge from other places - places with wetter climates, and/or further from the colonial powers of the 19th C - has been lost. One of the contributing reasons heliocentrism disappeared from view was that a large quantity of the Pythagorean and Neo-Pythagorean texts were systematically destroyed. When the texts from Umayyad Spain were translated back in Italy, there were simply very few heliocentric-themed writings among them. It's somewhat remarkable we even got mention of Anaxagoras and Aristarchos. There's a growing suspicion among some in physics, so far as I can tell from my layman's chair, that many qualities like distance (i.e., the spatial dimensions) could be emergent phenomenon, resulting from a sort of bulk degree of freedom exhibited in macro structures (aka "Space from Hilbert Space"). It's an evocative notion, along with MOND and LQC and suchlike; it sometimes does rather seem like we're looking with the wrong set of eyes, or, rather, assuming things we perhaps shouldn't assume. I wish I had a time machine to, say, 2523, to see how this all resolves. How does it interact with the measurement methods cited in this presentation? Whether the cosmos is far larger than we think, or far smaller, or - perhaps most likely - that the thought of a cosmos being "larger" or "smaller" was an absurd starting point to begin with.

thechao 3y ago
I had a history prof address these feats-of-observation of these primordial scientists: you've got a group of totally idle wealthy, with up to 16 hours of day time to fill, across millions of people and thousands of years. Eratosthenes could've thought about this problem — and nothing else — for a thousand hours in just six months, with plenty of time off to pursue other hobbies. When's the last time you dedicated 1000 hours to a single problem?
- MilStdJunkie 3y ago
  Absolutely! That's absolutely a prerequisite for these periods of very sudden advancement. Look at the 19th century! Very nearly the entire world's capacity was pulled into a very small geographic area, which then made the modern world. It's a bit depressing because of the brutality that's involved, but let's not write off Europe and Greece quite so quickly. There's plenty of powers in world history that established a similar level of "excess capacity" re: labor but didn't engage in anything that could be interpreted as "societal advancement". England, during the rise of its supremacy, decided to end slavery. Yeah yeah yeah I know - there were very good realpolitik reasons for this, and England over the centuries has had some very good PR agents, but in the end, they did it. The Enlightenment was, compared to the theocratic/autocratic fusion of the early modern era, an advancement[1]. I'll die on that hill. It wasn't possible without the blood and labor of countless aboriginal peoples, who we should honor in the same proportion, of course. [1] There's some disagreement about this in the current era, which I won't express an opinion on. "Palingenesis" is an applicable cautionary term.

thechao 3y ago

I had a history prof address these feats-of-observation of these primordial scientists: you've got a group of totally idle wealthy, with up to 16 hours of day time to fill, across millions of people and thousands of years. Eratosthenes could've thought about this problem — and nothing else — for a thousand hours in just six months, with plenty of time off to pursue other hobbies. When's the last time you dedicated 1000 hours to a single problem?

MilStdJunkie 3y ago
Absolutely! That's absolutely a prerequisite for these periods of very sudden advancement. Look at the 19th century! Very nearly the entire world's capacity was pulled into a very small geographic area, which then made the modern world. It's a bit depressing because of the brutality that's involved, but let's not write off Europe and Greece quite so quickly. There's plenty of powers in world history that established a similar level of "excess capacity" re: labor but didn't engage in anything that could be interpreted as "societal advancement". England, during the rise of its supremacy, decided to end slavery. Yeah yeah yeah I know - there were very good realpolitik reasons for this, and England over the centuries has had some very good PR agents, but in the end, they did it. The Enlightenment was, compared to the theocratic/autocratic fusion of the early modern era, an advancement[1]. I'll die on that hill. It wasn't possible without the blood and labor of countless aboriginal peoples, who we should honor in the same proportion, of course. [1] There's some disagreement about this in the current era, which I won't express an opinion on. "Palingenesis" is an applicable cautionary term.