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EDITORIAL February 1, 2000 VNN5377 Comment on this story Greek Past Is Modern Prologue BY JAN LAMPRECHT EDITORIAL, Feb 1 (VNN) — An excerpt from the book " Hollow Planets " by Jan Lamprect. http://www.hollowplanets.com The ancient Greeks were an amazing people. Many ideas which we consider to be "modern" originated from them. For example they thought the Earth was a sphere. We credit them with many great things which they did. It has even been said that they pre-dicted the existence of Antarctica. This is partially true. We derived many things from them. It is their science and learning which was their most impressive achievement. But we tend to only look back myopically at the good while overlooking some of their faults. In this book we will consider the dichotomy between theory and reality. It is taken for granted by many people that reality tends to match scientific theory. But just how close is this fit really? We are now so used to scientists being right that we find it impossible to imagine how they could ever be wrong about the great physical truths of life. Our civilisation todayis built upon mathematical science. And much of our mathematics came from those clever Greeks. But the Greeks made their fair share of mis-takes too. One aspect of their history which is never pointed out is that their "scientists" came to see the world through glasses which were heavily tinted with their favourite theories. In some aspects their theories were valued more highly than reality. I have wondered to myself for some years whether we aren't perhaps treading this same path ourselves. We are so used to our theorists being right that we accept their thoughts with-out question any more. It has often been joked that when the facts don't fit the theory one must then discard the facts! Many a true word has been said in jest. There are some theories which we hold as immutable, as fact and beyond question. In this book I will dare to offer sug-gestions that perhaps some of the facts do not nearly fit our theories as well as we like to think. When you only have one theory it is easy to say the facts fit it well for the simple reason that there is nothing else to compare it to. The Greek populace, like any population today, harboured their own unscientific beliefs and traditions. Their philosophers ( " scientists " ) did not agree with these views. For example, the general populace believed in a strange country called Hyperborea which existed far to the north. In this mythical land there lived one-legged people. It is commonly believed that the Greeks lived in a very limited world which con-sisted only of the Mediterranean region. But this was only true for their "scientists." The learned Greek philosophers of the time scoffed at ideas such as Hyperborea on the basis of theory. Climatic theory was among their achievements. They noted that south of them, in North Africa it was very hot, while in the north, in Europe, tempera-tures were much colder. They concluded that climate was dictated by latitude. Why? They reasoned that temperature was determined by the distance to the Sun. Since they knew the Earth was round, they came to the conclusion that as one travelled further south one was rising and the distance to the Sun was decreasing. As a logical consequence the temperatures in the south must be ever hotter. Similarly, as one travelled further North it should become ever colder. The Greek philosophers then predicted that there were five climatic zones on our spherical Earth. Of these, only two were habit-able. They theorised that the far North was too cold to live in, and the same would be true of the distant south. The torrid zone at the equator would be too hot for one to survive in. They went on to predict that the other habitable zone in the Southern hemisphere could never be reached because one could never survive the trip across the torrid equatorial zone and its boiling seas. Among their other theoretical ideas was one which held that there must be a very large land mass in the Southern hemisphere which was necessary to " balance " the world. On this basis it has been said the Greek philosophers " predicted " the existence of Antarctica. It is a quaint thought that one of these theoretical ideas should have panned out very possibly due to luck. The Philosophers said that no one could live up in the far North because it was a torrid zone where life was impossible. The general populace thus believed these far-out nonsensical ideas while their learned philosophers were unable to convince them oth-erwise. Thousands of years later we do indeed know the truth don't we? We know that both the general populace and the philosophers were wrong. But who was closer to the truth? Let us examine the logical content of those theories and try to determine what went wrong. Our knowledge of the Earth's climate shows us that indeed it is hotter at the equator than at higher latitudes. As a general principle the philosophers were right. But the reason they were right was itself faulty. The reason temperature rises as one nears the equator was not because it is closer to the Sun. Sure, the equator is closer to the Sun, but the Sun is so very far away that the few thousand miles that it is closer makes no difference whatsoever. They were right in ascribing the basic cause of climate to the Sun and one's relative position on Earth with respect to the Sun. Deserts tend to occur in bands across the Earth at similar latitudes but this has to do with the circulation of air and not with the distance of the Sun. North Africa was thus a particularly bad example for them to look at. It does not necessarily become hotter and drier south of the Sahara. The Greek philosophers made two basic mistakes. One was that they did not know the distance to the Sun and grossly underestimated it. That is quite forgivable. But the really unforgivable error lay in their limited world view. The Philosophers only looked at the limited world around the Mediterranean when they searched for data. Their climate theory was based on a limited subset of all the available data. But perhaps they could not travel beyond the Mediterranean you might suggest? Not so. In the near east, roughly where Syria is today lived the famous Semitic traders known as the Phoenicians. In the Bible they are referred to as the Canaanites. They lived in several city states, the main ones being Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and Byblos. The Egyptians conquered them in the 16th century BC and in time they were to be ruled by different empires. The Egyptians gave them a considerable amount of independence and it was then that they developed a vast commercial empire which is the basis for their fame. The Phoenician traders and sailors carried goods from the Near East to Greece, Italy, Spain and the Mediterranean islands. Eventually they dared to sail beyond the Mediterranean to the Cape Verde Islands, the Azores and even to Britain. The backbone of their commerce was gold from Africa, silver from Spain and tin from Cornwall. The Phoenicians were great manufacturers as well. To further facilitate commerce they set up trading posts. Many of these eventually became great cities like Carthage and Utica in North Africa and Cadiz in Spain. The Phoenicians were also bearers of culture and helped to speed up the development of backward regions. It is they who first brought the alphabet to the Greeks. There is no question among the historians of today that the Phoenicians were the greatest sailors of antiquity. Yet, in spite of their contributions to Greece and their unmatched seafaring skills the Greek philosophers and scholars considered them to be liars. It is possible the Phoenicians deliberately embellished on their stories so as to protect their sources of tin in England. Nevertheless, the Greek scholars came to review the tales of their travels with derision. Their tales, while fascinating, were thought to have little or no basis in reality. While the Greek populace believed some of these tales, the philosophers on the other hand regarded them with contempt. Some of these tales told of journeys to lands which lay in the torrid zones. And this, in the minds of these philosophers only served to further confirm that these Phoenicians must in fact be liars. The Philosophers also explained away these tales by assuming that the Phoenicians had over-exaggerated the distances travelled north or south and that they had never reached the tor rid zones. By modifying the stories according to their theories, the Greek philosophers were able to convince themselves that indeed there was no credible evidence against their torrid zone theories. Thus, fact contradicted theory, and that fact was ignored even more so because of its contradiction to the theory of learned men. The crux of it all is that these tales were so utterly wild and so contradictory to carefully calculated theory and logic. Many tall tales abounded in those times. Tales of men without heads, dog-headed people and many other impossible and marvellous combinations of humans and animals. Those Phoenicians were probably embellishing their tales and making them even Hollow Planet more improbable than the truth really was and in doing so these philosophers tended to write all this off as garbage. But in throwing away and ignoring what they regarded as nonsense they were also throwing away something much more precious - the kernel of truth at the centre of all these tall tales and rubbish. For among all this nonsense there lay truth. The Phoenicians had indeed been to many distant lands, and they had indeed been to places which Greek theory determined to be uninhabitable. The history of all cultures in our world is filled with many very wild and improbable tales. Lots of rubbish floats out there and is passed on from one generation to another. It exists in many forms. As folklore, as religion, as tradition and as mythology. Perhaps 99% of it is rubbish, but in and amongst it there may lie truths - truths of enormous consequence. So before we consign it all to the rubbish heap we should perhaps wonder to ourselves if we are going to stultify our progress by thr owing away a valuable gem which may lie at the centre of it. One of the wildest claims of the Phoenicians was that they had sailed around The southern tip of "Libya" (Africa). The Greek historian Herodotus tells us that round about 600 BC the Egyptian pharaoh Necho commissioned the sailors of Tyre and Sidon to circumnavigate Africa. The Phoenicians set sail down the Red Sea and returned three years later. Herodotus did not believe their claim. He scornfully wrote "which some may believe, but I do not." There seems to be reason to believe their claim since they claimed that the Sun was on their right. If their ships were sailing westward and they were indeed south of the Tropic of Capricorn then the Sun would have crossed the sky on their right. There have been rumours that the Phoenicians made it across the Atlantic as well but these have mostly turned out to be hoaxes. The Greek writer Diodorus Siculus wrote that in the 1st century BC the Phoenicians had discovered an island beyond Africa. This island was said to be "... of considerable size, fruitful, much of it mountainous ... through it flow navigable rivers." To some this sounds like South America. If the Phoenicians did indeed travel around Africa then they beat that other great sailing nation, the Portuguese, by almost 2,000 years! What makes the behaviour of the Greek philosophers even more damning is when one of their own broke ranks and went in search of the truth. His name was Pytheas. Pytheas claimed to have gone on a voyage to what is now called Britain. He then sailed further north to an island he called Ultima Thule. Pytheas was considered the champion liar of all antiquity. No man could ever have suffered from a lower reputation than Pytheas did for two thousand years. Pytheas told of how he sailed to Britain. He said that the people there were quite normal ( no one-legged folks! ). He then sailed further north and saw a strange sludge which floated on the sea ( ice? ). He reported that on Thule, " The barbarians showed us where the Sun goes to his rest for it happened about these parts that the night was only a little interval after the setting of the Sun before it rose again." This is a clue that he must indeed have travelled far north in the summer and that nights were short. Pytheas was reviled by all. The populace did not believe him because his version contradicted their belief in Hyperborea. But, worst of all, the other Greek philosophers rejected his story. They noted that he was normally reliable but as regards this trip of his he had suddenly become a teller of tall tales. He could never have gone that far north because it was in a torrid zone and it was far too cold for anyone to survive there. They did not believe any of this nonsense that people could live so far North. The polar explorer and scientist Vilhjalmur Stefansson presented an eloquent case for Pytheas earlier this century defending him and trying to determine exactly where Pytheas had sailed to. Pytheas may have sailed to either Iceland or the small volcanic Jan Mayen island which lies due north of Britain. Stefansson wrote: "However, the travel report of Pytheas, and not his scientific work done at home in Massilia, was what the philosophers denounced. Indeed, writers kept exclaiming for twenty centuries how strange it was that a man who had been respected by all who knew him, until he began to travel, should have developed into an aggregious liar as soon as his vessels got north beyond the countries familiar to the Mediterranean world." We now know that Pytheas was the only Greek who engaged in an Arctic expedition in ancient times. We know too that the Greeks would have advanced even more if they had been more open-minded to the information passed on to them by the Phoenicians and if they had listened to one of their own - Pytheas. The opportunities for the advancement of knowledge lay at their fingertips but they were so hide-bound to theory that they let it slip through their fingers. Strabo is another example of a highly intelligent but narrow scientific mind of his time. He wrote the encyclopaedic, Geography wherein he dismissed various tales of " men without noses " and battles between cranes and pygmies. While Strabo was logi-cal and careful and dismissed many tales for good reason he nevertheless went on to create new misconceptions based on his scientifically narrow mind. Among the tales he dismissed as fiction was one of "snakes that swallow oxen and stags, horns and all." The latter seems to be a very valid reference to pythons. It was Strabo who declared that one could not cross the torrid zones into the other inhabited portions of the world. He set the northern limit of life as being at the latitude of Ireland. As can be imagined, he was no fan of Pytheas. He accused Pytheas of being the "arch falsifier ", such was his belief in theory. Pytheas had made his own errors. He had said that the coastline of Britain was 40,000 stades ( 4,000 miles ) long and that it stretched far North. And he said that further north beyond it he had discovered a new island. This was more accurate than Strabo's assertion that Britain lay to the North-east along the coast of France. Others, like Crates, who was in charge of the library at Pergamum, were more open-minded. Crates believed that three quarters of the Earth might be inhabited. The Greek philosophers were so bound by the self-righteousness of their climatic theories that they just could not accept that they were wrong. They called others liars, and they even castigated one of their own rather than admit that perhaps reality did not match their theory. Their climatic theories seemed so utterly logical and so absolutely correct. But that was only because of their limited data and their limited view of the world. They did not cast their intellectual nets far and wide enough and they wished the contradictions away. Some of our theories today are like that. They seem so perfect, as long as you accept only some of the evidence. But there is evidence out there, scientif-ic evidence, which itself raises serious doubts about our most hallowed theories. There are quite a few scientists today who are cast in the role of Pytheas. (see: http://www.anomalous-images.com)There are a few discontented members of science whose general work cannot be criticised but then suddenly, regarding certain subjects they become "aggregious liars " like poor old Pytheas. And who will history prove right? We can of course ignore this evidence if we want to. Or we could expand our minds and accept that perhaps all is not perfect even within our high science. For as far as we have come there still lies before us an entire universe larger than we can even conceive of and as we journey into it we will make many mistakes along the way. Perhaps if we are open-minded we will not be so blind to our own faults and will correct our mistakes so much more quickly thereby making the journey faster, smoother and easier. ... As one looks back at the Greeks the irony of it all strikes one. The very people most suited to finding the truth, the philosophers, not only preferred to castigate one of their own, but they were too lazy or arrogant to do some field work of their own. Modern scientists consider it too demeaning for them to dig through all the modern folklore and religion because it might blemish their scientific reputations. And yet, there is no one better equipped to make sense of it than these very same scientists. Comment on this story  Contact VNN about this storySend this story to a friend
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