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One quibble — the author credits Boethius with having attempted to translate the works of Aristotle, but having died before he could complete the project. But he did finish the stuff on logic. The author refers to this as "luck" but shouldn't we give a little credit to a Dark Ages philosopher who chose to make his life's work the translation of Aristotle ? Starting with logic was almost certainly not luck.
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Crichton is a really bad person to count on as a paragon of science reporting beyond being a journeyman doctor. He's a climate change denier, among other anti-science stances. And if you disagree with him, he might put you in a book, using your name and profession, but making you a child molester.
What are some of his other anti-science stances? (genuinely curious)
Crichton does have a point that computers models are not valid replacements for repeatable, empirical testing of hypotheses.
But then he went far, far past what his skeptical attitude supports empirically. He flipped from "we can't prove the anthropocene hypothesis is true" to "it's very false, and funded by a conspiracy of enviro-nuts".
One quibble — the author credits Boethius with having attempted to translate the works of Aristotle, but having died before he could complete the project. But he did finish the stuff on logic. The author refers to this as "luck" but shouldn't we give a little credit to a Dark Ages philosopher who chose to make his life's work the translation of Aristotle ? Starting with logic was almost certainly not luck.
Curious - why a 'life's work'? Wouldn't it have taken a few months?
A medieval translator tackling Aristotle would face several challenges, some insurmountable, but Boethius had many unique advantages.
Boethius was one of the most powerful bureaucrats in the Latin Empire (the "magister officiorum"), so he had the influence and access to manuscripts that few others could match. He was classically trained in his youth and could speak, read and write in both classical Greek and Latin, a skill that was becoming rare among his contemporaries, a good thing for him but also a problem since there weren't many colleagues he could confer with.
If a word or phrase was unfamiliar --and in a technical work like Aristotle's there could be plenty of vocabulary that wasn't common-- Boethius would need to research and document it. That wasn't as simple as it would be today, there were no real dictionaries or reference books to assist in translation. So he would have to access other manuscripts, which might involve a painstaking copying process by hand, travel over large distances, and other numerous challenges the modern translator rarely needs to face. Fortunately Boethius had the power, influence and wealth to do this.
Making things even more difficult is that the Aristotelian corpus was fragmentary even in Boethius' time, much of what survives from Aristotle aren't anything close to completed manuscripts but more like class notes, compiled and edited by students and later scholars. This meant that Boethius wasn't able to do just a word-for-word translation or a paraphrase, he needed to analyze and comment on each section so that nuances weren't lost. Without a large body of existing scholarship, Boethius had to do a lot of the work on his own.
Given that translation wasn't his day job, each document could take years or even decades of work.
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What are some of his other anti-science stances? (genuinely curious)
There's this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Fear Crichton does have a point that computers models are not valid replacements for repeatable, empirical testing of hypotheses. But then he went far, far past what his skeptical attitude supports empirically. He flipped from "we can't prove the anthropocene hypothesis is true" to "it's very false, and funded by a conspiracy of enviro-nuts".
The original comment implied that along with denying climate change he's also like, an anti-vaxxer, a creationist, or a flat-earther.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Fear Crichton does have a point that computers models are not valid replacements for repeatable, empirical testing of hypotheses. But then he went far, far past what his skeptical attitude supports empirically. He flipped from "we can't prove the anthropocene hypothesis is true" to "it's very false, and funded by a conspiracy of enviro-nuts".
That's still not one of his "other anti-science stances." The original comment implied that along with denying climate change he's also like, an anti-vaxxer, a creationist, or a flat-earther.
This speech is the other notable place Crichton made specific scientific comments. It's possible he's wrong about some of his claims, but he approaches them from the point of view of a rationalist:
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Your point about the domes is quite interesting. Can you imagine what it was like to be a citizen of Rome in the year 800, looking at a dome that is hundreds of years old and having no idea how people could possibly do that. I can't think of a modern analogue. It would be like finding the monolith from 2001 on the moon.
> I can't think of a modern analogue. There are plenty. Ironically, building a medieval cathedral is one of those analogues. Yes, we can build a cathedral with modern equipment, but we don't know how much of it was done without it. Much of the knowledge was considered too commonplace to be worth writing down. A modern one ... how about a Saturn V rocket. We no longer have the steel mills with big enough tooling in or…
Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark
On youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElcYjCzj8oA
I had my opinion of the christian church dramatically overhauled a few years ago, paradoxically by a great scifi novel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
Funny, I had the opposite reaction when reading A Canticle for Leibowitz . There's one scene near the end where a refugee mother and baby are dying. They are crippled, burned, and suffering radiation poisoning. Both are in great pain, and the mother wants euthanasia for herself and her baby. A priest first tries (and almost succeeds) to talk her out of it. He then resorts to force, trying to kidnap the baby and event…
* SPOILER *
Later, as the priest lay dying himself, again the moral argument was raised; but this time (with the reader identifying more closely with the protagonist) Miller wrote eloquently about the importance of 'natural' death.
I didn't necessarily agree with his point of view while I was reading it, but (like the best science fiction) it became something I thought deeply about for a long time afterwards.