by eesmith | 2025-12-08 06:28:54+00:00
Don't use the term "Dark Ages". The article does not. Use "early European medieval period". Repeating it perpetuates the myth. If you must use it, say "European Dark Ages", and be aware that you are still perpetrating a false anti-religion narrative.

> if in the future scholars were dismissing Newton's novel contributions to astronomy because his physics model is not that accurate compared to Einstein's.

Newton's came first. Einstein improved on Newton.

The example you point to came after the Ptolemaic system and made worse predictions. Plus, there are no compounding rotations of homocentric spheres. And there were other heliocentric models.

> of western biased scholars making their scientist/engineers/technologist contributions even more significant

Sure. And you didn't mention ancient Indian contributions to tides either, like the one I quoted from Wikipedia.

I see from your posting history that you posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37184786, with someone else posting a comment linking to https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/10/03/the-unfortunate-back... . Quoting from it:

"In earlier versions of this narrative, its European propagators claimed that the Islamic scholars who appropriated Greek knowledge in the eighth-century and then passed it back to their European successors, beginning in the twelfth-century, only conserved that knowledge, effectively doing nothing with it and not increasing it. ... a later generation of historians of science began to research the work of those Islamic scholars, reading, transcribing, translating and analysing their work and showing that they had in fact made substantial contributions to many areas of science and mathematics, contributions that had flowed into modern European science along with the earlier Greek, Babylonian and Egyptian contributions ... Unfortunately the hagiographic, amateur, wannabe pop historians of science now entered the field keen to atone for the sins of the earlier Eurocentric historical narrative and began to exaggerate the achievements of the Islamic scholars to show how superior they were to the puny Europeans who stole their ideas, like the colonial bullies who stole their lands."

You believe I am solidly in the first camp, and you in the second. I believe your comments strongly support my belief that you belong in the third category - a part of the forest you should be aware of because that comment was directed to you.

If I were in the first camp then it should be very easy to refute me by pointing to concrete examples, but your examples fall apart under simple scrutiny, often even by reading the references you give.

If your knowledge were deep, you never would have written "Romans however, had a very limited exposure to ocean tides" as if that were meaningful - or you would have explained why I was wrong, rather than ignoring the problem.

Even now, you write "In research and scholarship this mentallity is frowned upon and illegal."

Plagiarism is NOT illegal per se. Your own [1] says "Plagiarism and copyright infringement functionally overlap, depending on the copyright law protection in force, but they are not equivalent concepts,[19] and although many types of plagiarism may not meet the legal requirements in copyright law as adjudicated by courts, they still constitute the passing-off of another's work as one's own, and thus plagiarism. "

Nor is it always plagiarism to not mention the prior researchers who did the work before you. That's actually quite common, because 1) finding previous work can be hard, and 2) people don't like digging into the literature. If you don't know about previous work then that's called independent re-discovery, not plagiarism. Ramanujan rediscovered known theorems. He did not plagiarize them.