hehe, Not to slam Russian science in general (there are some very, very sharp fellows out there that foreign universities fight over), but that reminds me of the last guy I met from the Russian Academy of Science.
Some mathematician dude.
He came to Paris to lecture at the once-and-future education minister's institute (Allegre's/IPGP) and since it was supposed to have an historical nature, I went. Here are my notes:
March 12, 1632
I heard this most fascinating lecture today by Mikhail Postnikov, a professor at the University of Moscow and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It seems that we need to seriously rethink our chronology. Perhaps the reason why I am humbly offering this for your consideration was the plea that he echoed throughout his 1:15 talk:
"As physicists, or scientists, it is our duty to give expert consultation to others not in our field. But whenever I show these facts to historians, I never get a convincing explanation. They have not offered mere irrefutable facts to the contrary."
I was forwarded an email 4 days before.
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Bonjour a tous,
Prochain mardi (12 mars) a 16h30 en salle bleu, nous aurons un seminaire special qui interessera tous ceux d'entre vous qui travaillent avec des donnees historiques
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(The name and pedigree of Mikhail follow here)
"Peut-on faire confiance a l'echelle de temps historiques avant le 8 siecle?"
(french deleted to save space)
Discussion des deviations physiques.
I show up for the thing ten minutes early; it starts fifteen minutes late. After the head of the institute gives the general introduction to the guy, telling us that he's written some 25 books and, although they're in Russian, and maybe a couple in English, he's a-gonna speak in French today. This is followed by one of the many Russians at the institute saying more or less the same thing.
Finally, this man in his late fifties in the third row gets up and proceeds to deliver a lecture in English. Well he starts, but sotto voce. Someone goes to get a microphone and he says, "oh, the acoustics in this room must not be so good." Thus he kicks off a sequence of restrained tittering that ripples through the scientific graduate students in the audience for the next fifteen minutes. After that, silence. Even the most immature French student knows how to behave in the presence of genius. I just wish I were selling overripe vegetables.
First of all, he starts boring us with a chronology of Roman Emperors. Not exactly what I'd expected to be shown to these people -- as purebred Parisian academics, most of the audience surely had some familiarity with Roman history. What he does, is slap a transparency on the ol' Overhead projector, then turn it the right way. A few minutes later, someone focuses it for him. It's a graph, the contents of which he has mostly obscured with some other papers. What we can see is Cyrillic. In short, each Roman emperor, starting with "Lucius Sulla," a triumvirate interpreted as Pompeius, through Julius Caesar, Augustus, et al. As he announces each emperor (or a series of extremely short reigns, multiple claimants and the like under the eloquent label "Trouble"), he reveals the name, and his part of the graph. The graph basically has a center line, and each emperor is as far away from the center according to the length of the reign. He ends the first column with "Trouble" and starts the second, parallel to the first, with the chart going from the center the other way, so that a mirror image is created, with Constantine up to Theodoric. When he's done, he's got two graphs that are extremely close (e.g., reigns of trouble-18-31-24years-trouble on one side, and trouble-17-37-23-trouble on the other). He assures us the probability of this happening at random is virtually nil, yet historians discard this evidence as merely a "chance occurrence," and refuse to speculate any further.
"I am a mathematician, a statistician. It is my job to find these patterns -- it is up to the historians to explain them. I'm not the first to come up with this. Molonov (sp.), a great Russian who was imprisoned for 25 years under the Czarists did. But historians build their chronologies from what say, a chronicler in Marseille said about this time and this person in Egypt at another time said about what went on then, and when they give different names they put them at different times."
I think I missed his point. Here is another, according to Bochum(?)'s study of some 80 solar eclipses and their descriptions in the literature, 52 occur before the 4th century. Of those, some 10 are fully detailed no-doubt descriptions of this celestial event. None of these occur on the same day as one really happened. Out of 42 more hazy descriptions, only 13 seem to relate to eclipse days.
I'm still at a loss what he's trying to say. He gives another example of Kepler trying to determine when the eclipses (1 full solar, followed by a partial solar in the spring of seven years later and a lunar that fall) mentioned in Thucydides' Pelopponesian war. He couldn't do it; the closest he got was a partial solar eclipse for the first total one. "Twenty historians have tried to improve on it without success."
I've got a funny feeling this guy's starting to head back south of heaven. He goes into some long discussion about the first greek printing of Ptolemy's catalogue in 1539, claiming that bright stars were measured in the 4th C AD, and the others the 8 or 10th C.
When he got to the bible, a thin film, as if fish scales, fell from my eyes. It was clear. "Using metric analysis, there are many parallel words and events in the Bible. The earlier the book, the more parallel events."
It has become clear to me that a person is most likely to reveal to you the color and gender of their underwear during an Apocalypse commentary. "Everybody has commented on the Apocalypse at some time. Newton did one, Einstein did one -- one that is very interesting to read. So did Malonokov." Turns out the Apocalypse merits a more positivistic analysis that it has normally received. After all, most of it is a thunderstorm on Patmos. Well, the four horseman clearly represent the four planets, who took such a conjunction in 379. Moreover, because the Apocalypse has such a different distribution pattern from the other texts, indeed, apparently taking more words and phrases from a wider distribution (with suspicious jumps around certain major prophets), it is the first book of the bible, before Genesis. He offered astronomical data for Ezechiel (478 AD) and Amos (418 AD) as well.
"Of course, you don't have to take my astronomical data to date it. But if you don't, you have nothing."
Here's what it means: the details are uncertain, but approximately 364 years have been duplicated. We are reading twice what should only be seen once, just giving it different names. Thus the early and late Roman empire take place _At the same time_. See chart with Solomon and Nero. More than this, the Hebrew kings were merely the Roman emperors with different names. Indeed, as the empire split into two halves, so you have Judah and Israel. It's only those Good Samarian historians who want to ignore the parallels. So I drive wildly.
It's worse than that. The astronomical events mentioned in the Pelopponesian war did occur, around the year 1200. If I understand the professor correctly, Thucydides can take a place of honor among the Greek chroniclers of the Fourth Crusade and its aftermath.
Turn to saints, and another chart showing their distribution throughout history. There aren't that many before the Fourth Century, and many of those were apostles, disciples, or personifications of virtues. But all of a sudden, the fourth C. gives us so many saints.
and the same with popes. I was hoping he'd say something about the summus pontifex, maybe making Pope Gregory = Theodosius = Cleopatra = Hezekiah = Catullus, but no such luck. Just another silly mirror image transparency with Cyrillic annotations.
He concluded by suggesting that just as in physics, one deviation in experimental results can necessitate an entire change in the understand of the field, so in history. No historian has explained these or presented an irrefutable fact to the contrary.
Let's just say that there were a few questions. "What about Vesuvius?" "What about Chinese Dynasties?" "Have you seen the same effect for modern dynasties?" "How do you explain that all these people went by different names?" Answers: A. We're not so sure about Vesuvius as you volcanologists think. B. Those of you with a Sinological interest haven't realized that the subsequent dynasty wrote the history of the precedent one. C. In the US today, people are allowed to have nicknames.
As an historian, I had chime in,
"With your regard to saints, what are your sources?"
"I'm sorry, I can't understand your english accent"
I repeat the question.
after a long windup through, "Kepler, Newton, and other major scientists had gone through parts of this data before," he gets to "but it was Malonov who at the end of the nineteenth[=middle of the sixteenth] century, in prison, put all of the pieces together. Back in Moscow, I spent an entire semester with my students -- 50 hours -- going through all the facts. 99 1/2 % of all my data comes from him. This has to be the result of redundant chronology."
I left having learned things about history I never knew.
I guess I'm in favor of it just because it puts those classicists in their place. Imagine the gall of trying to tell us all these years that antiquity lasted longer than the time it took Moses/Romulus/Augustine to build a temple/aqueduct/City of God and part the crowds on his way to the parking lot.
