About "Most amazing crackpot!" (lockable also)

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Fenerit M
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About "Most amazing crackpot!" (lockable also)

Post #1by Fenerit » 23.03.2012, 04:10

Unfortunately I found the relevant thread already locked.
Just to say that in my opinion several "crackpots" are just ancient and medieval ideas about the light and the colours. For matter of language, I take up citations from "The Science of Optics" of David C. Lindberg, chapter 10 of "Science in the Middle Ages".

"our man" says that:
1) Everything else is color;
2) The vacuum is a painting that paints the distance of the universe;
3) The waves are information emitted by the particle "color";
...
then follows the magnify glass' example. Now compares all that with Epicurus' words as cited in the book above:

" ...particles are continually streaming off from the surface of bodies, though no diminuition of the bodies is observed, because other particles take their place. And those given off for a long time retain the position and arragement which their atoms had when they formed part of the solid bodies... We must also consider that it is by the entrance of something coming from external objects that we see their shapes and think of them. For external things would not stamp on us their own nature of colours and form through the medium of the air which is beween them and us, or by means of rays of light or currents of any sort going from us to them, so well as by the entrance into our eyes or mind, to whichever their size is suitable, of certain films coming from the things themselves, these films or outlines being of the same colour and shape as the external thing themselves".

About Aristotle, Lindberg says: <<...colored bodies produce qualitative changes in the transparent medium and these changes are istantaneusly propagated to the transparent humors of the observer's eye. Thus a green object in some sense colors the observer's eye green>> and that <<the light is not itself visible, but it is a state of the medium that makes colored bodies on other side of it visible; color, rather than light, is the "proper object" of the sight>>.

About Avicenna (Ibn Sina) <<...color is a quality of opaque bodies>>, and <<...exist only in potentiality when unilluminated and unobserved>> ("the hole in the distance of the universe" of our man).

Finally, the "Animal Espinoza Guedez", concern the point of view of Averroes (Ibn Rushd) when says:

"...the fact that large bodies can be percieved by the sight through the pupil of the eye, despite its being small... is proof that colors and whatever is connected with them are nor conveyed to the sight materially but rather spiritually...".

Lots of other thinkers are intentionally omitted.

All that to say is not only a stravagance about the modern science, but also an ignorance about the history of science from a humanistic point of view.
Never at rest.
Massimo

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