In case the link goes dead before you can read the actual article for yourself, my main point is that there seems to be a great deal of “reporting” of “science” issues that contains little more than wild speculation. Not that that is all that new.
What tantalizes me is the hubris involved in using recent technology and the ability to perform some new sleight of hand with new materials and new methods to ascribe similar abilities to ancient (or alien) peoples.
The most blatant example of this in my lifetime was the advent of the UFO phenomenon after it was demonstrated that human beings could fly faster than sound. Like, “yeah, we can do it, therefore every other life form in the galaxy must be able to as well.”
We go centuries and millennia without knowing how to do something and then some individual or group labors for years in a laboratory to develop some new gismo or technique and then, once this idea is sprung on the world, it’s always been available, even to cavemen, pharoahs, alchemists and wizards who had little more to work with than cast iron cauldrons and some sulphur.
Something more specific than your OP, I guess. Sure, I’ve seen fictional cartoon shows where pharoahs or wizards were doing stuff with energy weapons and flying vehicles or whatever, but that was fiction. Are there any reports that this somehow happened in reality?
The thing is that this “gizmo” is not obviously more complicated than, say, a lodestone. So it is not in the category of stone-age rocketships or whatnot. However the fact that the idea is not supported by either remains or writing (after all, the vikings were hardly unlettered; Iceland has records going back the 10th century, I believe) does make it hard to credit. There is much worse being passed of as “science” these days (cf. http://www.badscience.net/).
One of the sciences that strikes me as more than a little bit speculative is Archaeology. Some of the conclusions these people leap to are hard to swallow. Finding a stick or piece of bone with some scratches on it and coming to the conclusion that it’s a calculator or calendar or accounting system is at the very least not all that persuasive.
There was a PBS (I think) program called Odyssey that dealt with some of the methodology of archaeology and it was almost comical how the leaps from a shard of metal to a fully functional machine with how it was used and who might have used it made me wonder if the show’s producers wanted their audience to take them seriously. I certainly didn’t.
My kid got a set of videos from various DC programs, and the first one he popped in was “Dragons.”
It started out promisingly enough, showing images of dragons from various cultures from antiquity to more recent and speculating on why almost every form of ancient civilization had some representation of a dragon. It then jumped into the wild speculation that, with all this evidence, maybe something like a dragon did in fact exist.
It went sort of like this: “If dragons ever existed, here’s what they might have been like,” and then went through the entire life cycle of a CG “dragon” from hatching to death. It included a lot of very specific things, as if it were a documentary being filmed about an actual dragon, on the order of, “dragons are solitary creatures but now, with her race dying out, she must seek out another of her own kind, no matter how far she must travel to do so.”
It drove me crazy.
It drove me so crazy that we’ve never looked at another one of those Discovery videos, not even the “Dirty Jobs” one. Sorry, DC, your credibility is gone.
Actually the link says there was reference to it in one of the sagas (actually it seems via googling there were more than one: Hrafns Saga, Saga of St. Olaf).
No, no - if you’re at all unsure about the find, it’s a ‘ritual object’. In fact even if the object is very obviously a child’s plaything, or a chopping board, or a stone dildo, it’s a ‘ritual object’ if calling it that sounds better.
It’s hard for people who don’t know a specific science to recognize what’s a reasonable step in that science, and what isn’t. This means some things get frequent criticism when they shouldn’t (I think the search for extraterrestrial intellegence with radio telescopes is an example). It also means some things get a pass when they’re not really credible within their field (I think the scientist who disagrees with global warming (Grey?) is an example of this).
It bothers me when people outside of my field (physics) refer to some things as “just guessing”, and it bothers me when I read things that I think are silly passed off as science, including creationism and astrology and perpetual motion machines and - now - dragon physiology.
Actually, for all of you ridiculing the article, it makes it quite clear that it was not proof that it happened that way, but was a demonstration that that type of stone can be used in the manner described in the sagas.
I found that particular instance quite interesting, partly because I’ve seen photos of Viking ‘goggles’ that acted as spectacles - they could have come from Constantinople, the Vikings got around.
I suppose that this sort of stuff is a matter of degree, the jump from speculation to pseudo fact is dangerous - but speculation can be fascinating.
I read an article in early February, on this. It was better at presenting it as a possible way to navigate. It was an interesting way to concider clouldy navigation. I won’t credit the Vikings as using it, but it’s a good example of thinking outside the box. The reporter has so much to do with the public preception. The article I read was presented as think of the possibility of navigating this way, and by the way Vikings could have done this. The other end is to start out. Vikings use sunstones to guide their lives. Their ships were their lives right?
I’ve been following this story for years. It was first suggested, IIRC, circa 1970, and the way it was suggested is significant.
A boy in one of the Scandinavian countries was watching a TV special about Vikings, and was told about the “sun stones” that are apparently mentioned in the sagas (I havebn’t been able to find these references in the sagas, but I haven’t looked recently. There might be something online). It sparked his interest because his father was an airline pilot, and in those pre-GPS days one of the things they used to locate the direction of the sun was a device called a “Twilight Compass”, which was basically a device made of sheets of Polaroid that found the sun’s relative position by using the polarization of the skylight.* (Light from the sky is polarized, mostly because of Rayleigh scattering, but with a plethora of other odd effects thrown in as well. see Jearl D. Walker’s Flying Circus of Physics or his new website for references.) He wondered if the ancient Vikings might have used essentially the same instrument when the sun was below the horizon, the same way his father did.
Please note how this hypothesis evolved – it wasn’t a case of some armchair theorsi (like me – I’ve done this sort of thing) wondering if maybe the ancient Vikings could have used some wild and wooly scheme to navigate. He was wondering if the Vikings, facing the same navigational problems as hius father, were tryinmg to use the same methods his father used.
This is, as I say, old news. I’m astonished at the amount of scorn that has been heaped upon it by Viking historians , and in the magazine The Skeptical Inquirer, which I generally love. Nothing I have seen presents any sort of coherent counter-argument, and boils down to “Well, we don’t think they did it.”
But the problem of navigation in Northern waters (see my footnote below), is a non-trivial one. if anyone stumbled across this method of navigating, and it improved their chances of survival, it seems all too likely that they’d use it.
The reason the used a “Twilight Compass” was that the standard magnetic compass becomes unreliable as you approach the North Magnetic Pole and start encountering the considerable variation. I think that gyrocompasses start having their own problems as you get too far north as well. Navigation by sunlight beciomes difficult when the sun disappears below the horizon for weeks or months at a time, as it does far enough North. But if you have a sufficiently large patch of clear sky (cloudy skies won’t do – multiuple scattering destroys the information) you can tell the direction of the sun using the poolarization of the observed scattering skylight.
Note that this is only a realistic solution in the far north or the far south. Once you get somewhere where the sun rises and sets every day you don’t need something that can tell the location of the sun from skylight. And you won’t be in a region where your other compasses are too easily confused or have too long a damping cycle. And in modetn datys we’ve had radio beacons, LORAN beacons and the like, and now GPS systems, and don’t need them.
Great post, CalMeacham, and if your treatment had been in Yahoo! News, I wouldn’t have even thought to complain about its tone or its contents.
I don’t have much doubt (sure, a little, I’m agnostic on most every issue – maybe skeptical, maybe just hard to convince) that “science” has made some clever leaps of logic and insight, and that some of those leaps have been borne out by later discoveries and advancements in technology.
But for the media to present stuff like that article as if it were an example of “science” as opposed to raw speculation is a disservice to their readers, especially those who don’t question stuff if it’s labeled Science. Some of these same blissful Science fans will condemn anything that requires Faith, without realizing they have put their own Faith in Science, even when its Bad Science.
Your approach, CalMeacham, where the nature of the inquiry is better labeled as investigation than discovery, or speculation as opposed to fact, would satisfy my complaints about the whole issue.
Thinking back to the 70’s when Leonard Nimoy hosted some Bad Science TV show (and I’m sorry to have repressed the name of it) and when the book stores were loaded down with paperbacks on all sorts of pseudo-science, it was fine just to ask the question without providing a shred of actual evidence, such as “Could dinosaurs have existed alongside early man?” and just leave it at that. Then, to pass that off as Science was hardly worth the laugh.
The biggest example I can think of from that era was Erich von Däniken, whose Chariots of the Gods and the many spinoff books of its ilk such as In Search of Ancient Astronauts were as close to a “Science Fad” as anything I can remember. As I see it, there’s still too much gullibility toward stuff like this, and the level of reporting on Pop Science only helps to fuel its spread. I object to that as being irresponsible, whether it’s reporter ignorance, media sensationalism or outright general stupidity.
I blame Thor Heyerdahl and Kon Tikifor popularising the methodology of “If I prove that they could have done it, that means I’ve proved that that’s how they did do it”
Good point. But in spite of my distaste for some of the “science” shown on that PBS show I mentioned upthread (Odyssey) I did see an episode that had some archaeologists reproducing stone tools in the American West plains region to simulate what methods and usages the Native Americans may have had to make knives and arrowheads and other implements. They showed the ways that flint and other stone could be chipped down to surgical precision and how the knives they made could effectively skin and clean bison hides. That one show made me a believer in the methods displayed. Subsequent episodes were not nearly as persuasive, especially one dealing with an old slave cabin in the Carolinas. You can’t imagine the leaps of logic they used there. It was downright disgusting.
The Heyerdahl theory about the Polynesians making ocean voyages from South America to populate the Pacific Islands was at least a little more plausible than the one that had an Egyptian raft heading out into the Atlantic. What was that one? The Ra Expedition or something like that? Obviously I’m not as familiar with its “conclusions” as the Kon Tiki ones.