Re: Anachronisms in LOTR

"Stan Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> in
> rec.arts.books.tolkien, Douglas Eckhart
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >Amazing guys the Greeks; they even came up with atomic theory (Atomism-
> >where we got the word 'atom') first proposed by Democritus in 5th/6th
> >century BCE, only to be proved as (substantially) correct in the late
> >19th/early 20th!
>
> Democritus was nearer right than his contemporaries, but I don't
> think it's fair to say that modern science proved him correct.
>
> He was essentially guessing, just as his contemporaries were. The
> big problem with Greek science is that nearly all of it was guesses,
> with very little experiment to confirm or refute those guesses.
>
> Giving Democritus credit for being "correct" about atoms is
> basically mistaking a coincidence for actual knowledge -- sort of
> like that "Bible code" nonsense.
> <http://www.math.temple.edu/~paulos/bibcodes.html>
>
> If you give Democritus credit for being "correct" about the
> existence of atoms, then you also have to blame him for being wrong
> about their shape, how they combine, how many different kinds there
> were, and what internal structure they had.
>
> Now all of this is not to say Democritus was a dolt. In his place
> I'd have done no better, and probably worse.

More than 'probably'; the man was a genius, as were many of the great Greek
philosophers
I think you regard him somewhat negatively.

Douglas
.