SCIENCE AND MYTH

The Renaissance did not spring up in Italy
Myths of "scientific truths" 

On an arduous journey from Asia, over Asia Minor to the prominent scholastic centers of Damascus (Daman) and later Baghdad, Muslims and Eastern and Syriac Christian sages, inter alia, sampled and translated the most articulate scientific findings (as far as we know), innovative methodologies and philosophies of Classical Greece, translated and elaborated by Abu Nasr Al-Farabi (Alphardius) and Ibn Sina Also known as Avicenna the Persian philosopher and scientist known for his contributions to Aristotelian philosophy and medicine known popularly as "The Second Teacher", and spread it via North Africa or the Mediterranean Sea to the intellectual melting pot of Cordoba. Andalusia, Spain, where the foundation of El Renacimiento (The Renaissance) was laid by learned women and men from a variety of different ethnically backgrounds and creeds before it spread to the Italian peninsula which already had had numerous contacts with Muslim geniuses as the above-mentioned and even Chinese tradesmen and intellectuals with State of the Art Chinese science and inventions in city states or ports like Salerno/Napoli and Palermo in the Middle Ages and probably even before.

*Sicily, per se, was under heavy influence of the expanding Islam from the 900th century and onward. The road signs were written in Arabic as well as Latin during the Middle Ages and can still be found (*Marc Furstenberg).

Andalusia had been annexed and  incorporated in the Moorish empire, one of a succession of Islamic empires for a millennium, ending with the Ottoman collapse at the gates of Vienna. The Muslim Mosque affiliated scholastic institutions, later known as universities in Europe, which were copies of the Islamic Education Centers spread at major Arabic and Persian urban conglomerates, the most famous in Damascus and later Baghdad where Asian, Syriac and Muslim knowledge  were cross-fertilized and developed to an explosive potential, bound to travel in all directions and to Europe, among others.

Knowledge paired with Insight dos not just fall from of the sky at a certain place or in a certain era. Coincidence does play an important part when agents of information, later to be known as facts, per definition, will land on a risky ground because of no automatic following up or elaborating on the pieces by coincidence and social determinants. Manna may drop from heaven but everybody does not have a spoon. The time, mindset and preparedness must coincide with the otherwise insignificant entities of information and it will be ignored. The wheel was discovered in the pre-Columbian highly stratified societies but only used as a symbol of the metaphysical and never used as a means of transportation (!) in empires covering territories from Baja California to the Tierra del Fuego in the extreme south of Chile/Argentina.

The theory of diffusion, (Thor Heyerdahl with his balsa boat Ra was a famous advocate of the theory of Ethnographic Diffusion) however, cannot fully explain how an idea can spread all over the globe in historic times. We can see how astronomy at El Caracol in the Mayan Empire (Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico) had developed the science of astronomy to a level of sophistication that surpassed the rest of the world and with a higher degree of precision with regards to time, calendars and the movements of the planets without any contacts with the rest of the world.The European discoveries of the similar phenomenons differed over time and the whereabouts even if the sciences eventually came to more or less the same conclusions.

The theory of diffusion, however, does explain the spreading of what became known as the Renaissance, although we must observe the two movements resulting in the northern and the southern renaissance which differed substantially in creed, philosophy and implementation. This is often forgotten and normally the focus centers on Italy which distorts the phenomenon which developed by cross overs from the North and the Mediterranean.

We know that scholars in the Far East, the Middle East and Greece all knew that the earth was round and that it circled the sun and not the reverse thousands of years before it could be made public, without risking the scientists to be decapitated. A fact may house "objective" contents which, however, is of little importance if the cultural and social context has no preparedness to accept it or understand it. When I was a child the atom was considered the smallest ingredient of matter. 

We have come a long way from that conception during the last sixty years and an absolute "truth" has been revised in a large succession of discoveries which are ongoing.

Mr Hawkins "Selfish Gene" evolutionist credo is yesteryear´s news, a tragic-comical but recurrent phenomenon when it comes to the beliefs of "ultimate truths" which usually are discarded rapidly because of the speed of research made even faster by assistance of the IT technology and where telefacsimile technology seems like something from the Middle Ages... Most contemporary scientific giants die with the discomfort of having their findings dismissed...

Being a scientist is tough, simply because they have earned their elevated social position globally because of their capacity to prove hypotheses, often formulated by social and cultural needs in the social context they have been active, and by their labor to formulate theories which are interpreted by the non-scientific world as truths and reliable facts  in any constructive work or context, individual or collective, A number of famous scientists (so we have reason to believe believe) have passed on when their maxims have been dismissed and are spared the shame of being defamed or even accused for being liars and an anomaly to the civil or divine order. This gratification is rapidly becoming extinct and the idea of keeping a more apprehensive scrutiny of science by the public eye may even serve future scientific development.

As long as we are prepared to "believe" in science for a certain period of time, we can find a common platform from which we can cooperate in the social and scientific engineering, even if it means that every once in a while we have to find a new platform.

No society was ever built on collective doubt.

Just a thought

Douglas
Painting by Andrea Mantega: "Gonzaga Family"