Re: Anachronisms in LOTR

"Stan Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> skrev i en meddelelse
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.

   IIRC, Democrit used a faulty theory of mathematics to prove that there
had to be some undivisible constituents to matter.  It's much the same
mathematical fallacy that leads to Zenon's "paradox", in which the
thought-experiment is made with Achilles racing a turtle, giving it a head
start.  The theory "proves" that Achilles will never pass that turtle; he
will get ever closer to it but never quite reach it.  Which is a paradox,
since anybody knows from experience that Achilles will rather swiftly pass
the armoured little reptile.
   Let's say that Achilles runs ten times as fast as the turtle, and gives
it a one mile head start.  When the great hero has run a mile, the turtle
has progressed a tenth of a mile.  So Achilles runs that extra tenth of a
mile but by then the turtle has plodded on for another hundredth of a mile.
And so on.  Since "obviously" a sum of infinitely many numbers cannot be
finite, the turtle will always stay ahead of Achilles.
   Of course *we* enlightened people will realize that Achilles will reach
the turtle after 1 1/9 of a mile, and then run on ahead of it, in accord
with a billion experiments...

   As for the rise and fall of ancient Greek science, I have read only one
telling of the tale, namely that given by Carl Sagan in "Cosmos".  Their
science rose because they were a democratic society of merchants, exposing
themselves to many cultures, letting go of the concept of The Truth as an
authority-mandated belief.  And their science fell because they were not
really democratic; in particular, they had slaves, which led to arrogance
against manual work - such as experiments - and applause of purely cerebral
work, as befitted gentlemen, and also because they considered science to be
the province of an elite of educated nobility, not to be shared with the
unwashed masses.  I don't know if this analysis holds water.

Korax.