Wuz we scooped? Maybe not.
Cornellian said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_ancient_India
Found this on Wikipedia while reading bunch of articles. It amazes me that many theories and ideas that we *Claim* to have been recent discoveries (i.e. 1400AD-late 1800's) seem to have been discovered in other parts of the world, especially India and China... Seems like the more we discover other cultures, the more interesting things we find...
Restating what siddharth said in my own words:
I would be very cautious about accepting uncritically what you read in the Wikipedia, particularly if you haven't verified everything from a printed encyclopedia. (And who, I ask, wants an encyclopedia which can't be used without verifying everything someplace else?
We do, apparently, even though we know or ought to know better I include myself in this criticism since I've cited WP articles myself here from time to time, even though I know very well how unreliable is "this thing often called an encyclopedia", to paraphrase the disaffected cofounder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger.)
In particular, the article you cited, and related articles in WP, have (at times, in various versions) suffered from a pronounced "patriotic bias", or what in WP they call "POV pushing", which Mars their value for students, and also in my view does a disservice to those who wish the real achievements of Indian civilization before the colonial era were better known in "the West". The current version as I write
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Science_and_technology_in_ancient_India&oldid=133749930 is better than some past versions, but some of the linked articles have at times contained such misinformation as the claim that ancient Indian "physicists" possesed the theory of relativity. (Scare quotes suggest that applying this term to pre-Newtonian "physicists" in any nation is problematic and potentially misleading.) Unfortunately, there are some individuals on the web who tend to overstate the achievements of "Vedic science" to an embarrasing extent.
There are even more contentious "patriotic" articles in the WP which tend to overstate the technological achievements of other ancient civilizations, so this fits a broad (and deplorable) pattern at WP. And speaking of "patriotic" POV-pushing, one might note an internal struggle between Teslamaniacs, over whether Telsa was "Serbian" or not. The common theme here is that the verifiable, noncontroversial roster of achievements of Indian civilization, Persian civilization, and for that matter, of Nikola Tesla, are all so impressive that I can't help thinking that insistence on endlessly repeating such over-the-top exaggerations represent some kind of monomaniacal obsession.
Another recent claim which received much uncritical coverage in the news media was that quasicrystals
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A6582675 were "known" to the Persians c. 1450 http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20070224/mathtrek.asp
Don't get me wrong--- I think the observation of apparent
almost periodic tilings as decorative art in the Darb-i Imam shrine is interesting, in fact I wish I could go back in time and ask exactly how they came up with that pattern, because they
might have discovered an actual mathematical rule which really does produce almost periodic tilings, and they
might even have proven that their construction works, and if so that would be a very remarkable discovery indeed in the history of mathematics. But I suspect that it's more likely that some geometric tinkerer discovered an aesthetically pleasing pattern without quite having an actual rule, much less mathematical understanding at the level of Conway and Penrose in the very early days of the "modern" theory of almost periodic tilings.
Don't misunderstand--- this stuff doesn't require a huge amount of machinery, and we know that people were thinking about mathematics in that time and place, so it is certainly entirely
possible that some ancient Persian
did have a proof of some theorems about "quasicrystals". I am simply saying that I would hesitate to infer this from a wall decoration, however impressive.)
My objections to the press coverage would have been moot if reporters had been more careful to sprinkle their stories with "perhaps" and "possible". And I am disposed to chide those American reporters who passed up an opportunity to point out to their readers that ancient Persia became modern Iran, which some Americans seem to assume must be a barbaric place indeed
Terminological note: a tiling of E^d can be said to
periodic, with period \vec{p}, if it is invariant under translation by \vec{p}. It is
almost periodic if given any \varepsilon > 0, one can find translation vectors such that the translated tiling agrees with the original over, roughly speaking, a fraction 1- \varepsilon of E^d by volume. Exercise: make a photocopy of a Penrose tiling pattern on white paper, then another on a transparent sheet of plastic. Mark one vertex on the paper copy as "the origin". Try sliding one over the other (without rotation) until you see "almost agreement". Write down the translation vector as an integer vector in E^5, using the five edge directions which occur in the original tiling. Repeat. Try to find some longer vectors? What do you notice about the integer coefficients?
What do you notice happens as you let the length of your translation vectors vectors grow?
Question: in the Age of Wikipedia, is critical thinking an endangered skill? Is the very notion of scholarly research itself endangered by the universal sloppiness which some critics feel that Wikipedia and other aspects of Web 2.0 tends to encourage?
