Destroying facts in favor of religion: not just a modern idea!
2 Likes
Fortunately there were scientists in Leningrad with a more long term view. They guarded a seed bank, starving to death rather than eat the seeds, because they knew how important they would be for the Soviet Union.
3 Likes
Everyone did it isn’t the best defense I’ve ever heard.
But you are right, many palim…psests exist.
(SCNR. This only makes sense if you are speaking German, and above a certain age.)
5 Likes
And that the Catholic Church was big on trying to limit any knowledge that it didn’t impart. What better way to stop heresy than to scrape it off the page and replace it with dogma!
I mean come on… they didn’t switch the mass to English until 1965 and from what I’ve been told it wasn’t being taught to the church at large… just trust that priest! ( Of course he isn’t buggering your children)
Thank God the Islamic world rescued all the information the church sought to suppress.
1 Like
And for anyone wanting some lay-person intelligible, academically led discussion of who Galen was and why he was important, listen to this.
ETA … ref vellum, still just about in production today, there’s this news from 2 years ago.
3 Likes
In fact, using the modern techniques on the Galen manuscript was almost certainly inspired by the analysis you cite of the Archimedes palimpsest. It was known going back to something like the 13th century that the Archimedes Palimpsest contained some of his math, the cool thing about the recent work is that it uncovered figures almost indistinguishable from the ones Kepler used in his monograph on computing the volume of wine barrels, which we still teach today as volumes of rotation.
4 Likes
If it makes you feel better, religious texts were sometimes used as waste paper in science book bindings. As mentioned before, paper was expensive and not just tossed.
2 Likes
I don’t know if you did, but I forgot to take my daily anti depressant and aspirin.
The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is directed by noted physicist J.R “Bob” Dobbs, PhD.
2 Likes
(Abridged but still enjoyable.)
I recalled parts of it when I was reading Anathem by Neal Stephenson.
WTF! I thought I was the only one who ever read that book! Weird, because I found it my school’s library, and no had ever checked it out in what must have been the 15 years since the library was built.
2 Likes
Well, I don’t know if an anti-cookbook will sell as well, but there is a well regarded book on how not to hit people.
It seems to me that religious texts have often been the means of preservation of non-religious historical texts, and vice-versa. I love the way this technique allows both texts to be readable.
2 Likes
This probably wasn’t the Catholic Church, since the hymns were in Syriac, and since the book ended up at St. Catherine’s monastery (Sinai), which is Orthodox.
2 Likes
Hmm wouldn’t the orthadox church be a splinter of the main disease…I mean church?
1 Like
Is it OK to turn the last white rhinos into stew if you’re starving to death? You probably think so
I think if I were starving I’d choose smaller prey. And one without armed guards, certainly.
I acknowledge the long-term view is better, and I’m all for following it, but I’m trying to have some empathy for those who were freezing and/or starving rather than shaming them for their ignorance.
While we’re at it to scoff at religious books: when did Jehovah’s Witnesses drop the paper? I’ve seen them around trainstations offering their Watchtower bullshit on friggin tablets.
You can recycle those, of course, or simply wipe them. Win-win, I would wager. How religion embraces scientific progress’ results and still stays dogmatic about, say, the age of earth and evolution eludes me, kind of. But its fun to witness.
2 Likes
Sherlock Holmes studies palimpsests (of course he does) and thereby introduced at least one youngling to a new word.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
