Archimedes work found in prayer book

[merkavah12]

.....and people immediately flood in to tell us about the "Dark Ages caused by those religionists".

Here is the main article itself (from 2007 apparently)

www.sciencenews.org/article/prayer-archimedes

"A long-lost text by the ancient Greek mathematician shows that he had begun to discover the principles of calculus."

Apparently the Reddit crowd has made this old article go viral.

[timoneill]

Jan 9, 2014 5:40:19 GMT merkavah12 said:

Apparently the Reddit crowd has made this old article go viral.

Though my new pals on the BadHistory subreddit have been having a ball at their expense.

[fortigurn]

I remember this coming up years ago. I actually commented on it in 2007 when it was raised in a largely atheist forum. Here's my comment from back then.

Well it's clear that the text was available to the Greeks for centuries but they never did anything with it (due to the fact that Aristotle gradually went out of favour and the Greeks saw little reason to perserver his works - unlike the Christians). But let's provide a few facts which place this text in context:

* The manuscript in question is a 10th century copy of Archimedes' work, which means that Christians had been carefully copying this particular work of Archimedes for over 700 years, so they were in fact responsible for its preservation for some seven centuries

* This particular manuscript wasn't overwritten until another 300 years later, so it was carefully kept and preserved for at least 300 years before being overwritten (how many people do you know who have managed to keep a document intact and readable for 300 years?), indicating that it was certainly of value to the Christians who owned it

* This manuscript contains a very old Greek copy of seven works by Archimedes, four of which were already known in Greek, one of which were not known in Greek but had already been translated into Latin and copied repeatedly by Christians ('On Floating Bodies'), part of one work previously translated into Arabic and copied by Muslims ('Stomachion')

* It does contain large parts of one work which had previously been lost ('Method'), despite being previously copied (in Greek), by Christians for over 800 years

* The manuscript was chosen as a palimpsest because it was already old and the text was not in good condition - this was standard practice when choosing material for a palimpsest, and is not any indication of the attitude of the over-writer to the text - indeed, the most common manuscripts used as palimpsests by the Christians were copies of Scripture, not classical texts

* Indeed, this palimpset was not merely made from works of Archimedes, but includes Christian liturgical works as well (of course this is usually omitted from descriptions of the manuscript, since it doesn't sound quite as sensational as 'Religious nutter scribbles over priceless work of Archimedes!')

[wraggy]

And I see one sage by the name of bluSPECTRE has even put up the infamous graph of "Scientific Advancement" that demonstrates "The Hole left by the Christian Dark Ages".




link

bluSPECTRE:

And this is just one of who knows how many scientific documents that religion has destroyed over the years. Imagine where we would be or what we could do if the religious blight humanity has struggled to overcome for thousands of years ceased to exist in the first place.