The importance of Truth in the Holy Writ

Louis R wrote:I am not aware of any significant debate on the subject post-Principia, although it's always possible that every one of the authors I have on my shelf has dismissed the naysayers as fringe elements. I rather doubt that, since the best histories of science are written by trained historians who don't have dogs in any of the fights. [You should see them tying into people like Kuhn ] It would be another 2 centuries before observations improved far enough beyond the data Newton worked with to show up the incompleteness of his equations.

However, that's not really the point. If the Writ supplies sufficiently-accurate algorithms for predicting the positions of heavenly bodies, it doesn't much matter how they are _explained_. Heck, without a good analytic geometry, the actual equations could be Newtonian and nobody would have a clue that they actually describe conics, not epicycles.

The Principia was several decades after the quarrels I mentioned, and if you read a history of the Royal Observatory, you'll find a history of the rather fraught relationship between Newton and Flamsteed. Newton did not think sheer mathematics was sufficient to prove his ideas; he wanted real-world evidence from astronomers' observations. Of course, real-world evidence would later disprove some bits of his ideas, but that's the problem with mathematical models. They're models of the world, not the world itself.

Getting back to Safehold, you can see the technical requirements for disproving the Writ coming into place. Firstly, the Royal College now has access to the necessary mathematics. Secondly, the science and technology of optics is improving steadily. Thirdly, Charis is a maritime power that will benefit from more accurate navigation, which leads naturally to an increased interest in the sky and the things that move thereof.

Denmark wasn't the only nation who believed in studying the sky, but in England's case it was combat navigation that propelled a deep interest in astronomy. I can see the same thing happening in the Charisian Empire.

And finally, Charis (or the Inner Circle) knows what the Safeholdian system actually looks like, which should be a big help.

I think one reason Langhorne and Bedard might have really liked a Ptolomaic system is the PTSD RFC mentioned. If they desperately, desperately want to keep humans on this one tiny planet, far enough away from the Gbaba that they're safe, how better to do that than to convince people that there is no wider universe beyond? That those little dots of light they see are simply little dots of light, placed there by God to show His glory?

Safeholdians aren't going to want to travel the universe if they don't know it exists.

Bluesqueak wrote:
<SNIP>


Safeholdians aren't going to want to travel the universe if they don't know it exists.

Exactly.

Bluesqueak wrote:Safeholdians aren't going to want to travel the universe if they don't know it exists.

There's always the Crystal Spheres model. It's basically the heliocentric model, but posits that the planets are embedded in transparent spheres which is why they orbit the sun at a set distance. The outermost sphere of course is the starry sky.

isaac_newton wrote:going back to something I asked earlier... do you know in what form these calculations [and the original observations] were stored? do we have any of such records?

Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) published several books during his lifetime, including star catalogs. I believe copies still exist (he didn't live that long ago), though since I read neither Latin nor Danish I can't really investigate that.

Bluesqueak wrote:[...]
I think one reason Langhorne and Bedard might have really liked a Ptolomaic system is the PTSD RFC mentioned. If they desperately, desperately want to keep humans on this one tiny planet, far enough away from the Gbaba that they're safe, how better to do that than to convince people that there is no wider universe beyond? That those little dots of light they see are simply little dots of light, placed there by God to show His glory?

Safeholdians aren't going to want to travel the universe if they don't know it exists.

I've wondered just how much certain aspects of the Writ were written for the colonists, and how much they were written for the command crew instead. Or for both. Keeping the colonists from ever thinking about the stars as destinations would certainly be of interest to Langhorne, but that might just be happy side effect.

If they believed that they were capable of building a static, non-technical society that would never return to the stars or doing anything to attract the Gbaba's attention, there's an implicit assumption that the Gbaba won't--on their own accord--stumble over Safehold. They had a new home, and they were safe. On Safehold, the Gbaba couldn't get them; and in any case, any future threat from the Gbaba was so far distant that it effectively didn't exist for them.

When I first read OAR, Shan-wei's final attempt to persuade the council made me think of Kurt Vonnegut's introduction in Mother Night: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

Living in a world where the play the part of angels and the Ptolemaic system is Truth would inevitably distort the command crew's thinking. Most of them might not think they were actual angels, but a lot of them probably came to see themselves as close enough in the end. Intellectually, they'd know that the Ptolemaic system Langhorne forced on Safehold was false, but emotionally, it'd have carried a powerful message. "There's nothing out there. We're safe."

We look at Langhorne and Bedard's actions through the perspective of the colonists, since those are the characters we directly experience. No matter how you look at it, though, their "plan" only works if the Gbaba are no longer and never will be a threat unless someone does something to attract them. Shan-wei and her supporters were making an appeal to reason. Langhorne didn't bother. He sold them the most comforting dream in human history, given what happened to the TF: "We survived. We're safe now, unless we do something to attract the Gbaba."

From the very beginning, everything was probably meant to reinforce that message. If there's no threat, if there's no possibility of a threat, then there's no reason to risk trying to undo what Langhorne did. Honestly, that story alone could probably fill its own novel. Just don't take that as a hint; I want to see humanity return to the stars, first.

There's an inherent misconception here that keeps on coming up. And one that I rather suspect that Langhorne & Co. suffered from as well. Nimue Alban, too, come to think of it.

Arithmetic notation has _no_ direct relation to algebra, analysis or analytic geometry. Or differential geometry or topology or group theory. Or even number theory, for that matter: a goodly number of results in that domain predate any form of positional notation by as much as a millenium. [Not that anybody was organising mathematics into those domains at the time] What it does do is affect the calculation of numeric results if and when you decide you want those. And Roman numerals aren't _that_ difficult to work with if you're accustomed to them. They are slower, especially in complex multi-step calculations, but by the time you break out the numbers all the hard math has been done - and no branch of math other than arithmetic needs a positional notation at all. Those branches developed from the need to answer a variety of questions. And advanced when those answers piqued somebody's curiosity.

Langhorne & Bedard appear to have operated on the premise that they could, by supplying easy answers, keep anybody from asking tough questions that need complex methods to answer satisfactorily. They also seem to have had the atheist's total incomprehension of the true nature of religion and its position in human history [typically, at the cutting edge of thought]. Chances are very good that even without any spokes driven into their wheel, the beginning of the collapse of their system would have come from _inside_ the Church.

Kael Posavatz wrote:
So what you're getting at is the inherent flaws in the heliocentric model weren't something Langhorne was concerned with because it wasn't the integrity of the heliocentricity that he saw as the potential failure point. The failure point would have been in lacking the math needed to break it, and he was able keep that from becoming a problem by 1) not including it, 2) using the roman system, and 3) starting everyone with a mono-culture that they were able to evolve away from (rather than diverse cultures developing different ways to do the same thing).

I can see that making sense in a 'has to last for a thousand years or two' model. But in the truly long-term (forever-and-ever) I have to wonder if someone wouldn't start counting on fingers and toes and develop some sort of decimal system, and that would make practical a lot of things that roman numerals...don't.

Kael Posavatz wrote:I can see that making sense in a 'has to last for a thousand years or two' model. But in the truly long-term (forever-and-ever) I have to wonder if someone wouldn't start counting on fingers and toes and develop some sort of decimal system, and that would make practical a lot of things that roman numerals...don't.

I recall one of my history books saying that merchants in pre-Arabic numeral Europe used counting boards (gridded boards and counters) to keep track of things, only going back to Roman numerals when they needed to write something down. Which makes it surprising that no one in Charis beat Merlin to the decimal system -- country of merchants, after all.

Counting appears to have been something Langhorne overlooked. We know from OAR that Father Paityr scoured his library looking for anything that would say whether the new numbers were banned or approved (and went with approved because he couldn't find anything saying "Roman numerals are the only way to write numbers").

Julia Minor wrote:I recall one of my history books saying that merchants in pre-Arabic numeral Europe used counting boards (gridded boards and counters) to keep track of things, only going back to Roman numerals when they needed to write something down. Which makes it surprising that no one in Charis beat Merlin to the decimal system -- country of merchants, after all.

Counting appears to have been something Langhorne overlooked. We know from OAR that Father Paityr scoured his library looking for anything that would say whether the new numbers were banned or approved (and went with approved because he couldn't find anything saying "Roman numerals are the only way to write numbers").

It seems less overlooked but unable to find a true way of banning it. The roman numerals seem like a way to hamper it, but it is hard to ban mathematics without describing exactly what it is. Also since it is purely thinking required, it is hard to actually detect anyone thinking, and geometry is absolutely required for surveying land, building roads and cathedrals.
Trigonometry was invented/discovered by the Babylonians to divide up land, and geometry has been at the core of all mathematics up to probably the 19th century. The Greeks formulated all their mathematics as geometric problems, probably due to their equally horrible numbering system.
Which should point out that Roman numerals do squat all to stop anyone doing mathematics.

Whitecold wrote:

Julia Minor wrote:I recall one of my history books saying that merchants in pre-Arabic numeral Europe used counting boards (gridded boards and counters) to keep track of things, only going back to Roman numerals when they needed to write something down. Which makes it surprising that no one in Charis beat Merlin to the decimal system -- country of merchants, after all.

Counting appears to have been something Langhorne overlooked. We know from OAR that Father Paityr scoured his library looking for anything that would say whether the new numbers were banned or approved (and went with approved because he couldn't find anything saying "Roman numerals are the only way to write numbers").

It seems less overlooked but unable to find a true way of banning it. The roman numerals seem like a way to hamper it, but it is hard to ban mathematics without describing exactly what it is. Also since it is purely thinking required, it is hard to actually detect anyone thinking, and geometry is absolutely required for surveying land, building roads and cathedrals.
Trigonometry was invented/discovered by the Babylonians to divide up land, and geometry has been at the core of all mathematics up to probably the 19th century. The Greeks formulated all their mathematics as geometric problems, probably due to their equally horrible numbering system.
Which should point out that Roman numerals do squat all to stop anyone doing mathematics.

Yes - but at some point [both in development, sketches and stuff, and more importantly, in transmission to others] geometry and trig do have to be written down in some way.

I'm not saying that they could not do the maths, but that it is not just a purely solitary cerebral activity either.

It is very much a collaborative activity, learning, arguing, recording, disputing and passing on.

I imagine that the Inquisition might be a bit curious about wandering bands of mathematicians trying to keep under the radar.

Either Langhorne was an idiot or someone working for him was trying to subvert his system from the inside. The prime historical reason for the development of the Ptolemaic system was that it provided a framework for astrological calculations. It would be far simpler and effective to prevent the development of astronomy by anathematizing astrology. If he really did need the safety blanket of a fixed sphere of stars, a heliocentric model surrounded by a fixed sphere of stars serves perfectly well.

For that matter, one of the objections some natural philosophers, especially Cartesian philosophers, had to Newton's law of gravity when it was promulgated was that it posited a mystical force that acted at a distance, so the idea that gravity serves to keep the planets in their orbits doesn't need to be kept from consideration by positing planets embedded in crystal spheres. While there's no reason for Langhorne to provide an inverse square law in the Writ, a heliocentric Keplerian planetary system combined with a crystal sphere of stars and an anathematizing and/or dismissal of astrology would serve all the sociological purposes that a Ptolemaic system might serve and not face the problem of the Writ of Nature contradicting the Holy Writ.

The only complication I foresee with my preferred astronomical system to confuse the colonists is that the fixed sphere of stars would have to be defined as truly immense, as given how close the fixed sphere of stars was presumed to be (roughly the orbit of Uranus since it was thought absurd for the sphere of fixed stars to be much farther than that from the sphere of Saturn) the lack of a readily observable stellar parallax was used by some 16th and 17th century astronomers, including Tycho Brahe, to justify sticking with geocentrism and rejecting Copernican heliocentrism.