Testimony And Evidence

"The Man Who Came Early."

On the testimony of Eilif Eirikson, who served in the Varangian Guard, Ospak accepts that:

Greek fire burns on water;

the Emperor has "'...a beast of gold before his high seat which stands up and roars.'" (p. 185)

I suspect that Eilif, former Varangian or no former Varangian, has heard of this beast from someone else but not seen it for himself.

At school, I read a story about Galileo which, whether or not it is historically accurate, epitomizes scientific method. According to the story, Galileo did not accept accounts of tides in the Atlantic because:

there are no tides in the Mediterranean;

he did not accept sailors' stories of mermaids or sea serpents;

the suggestion that the tides were linked to the Moon was even more dubious because that would be astrology.

I concluded that, temporarily and provisionally of course, Galileo was right to come to what we know to have been a wrong conclusion. Shown a tide, he would immediately have accepted it but why should he accept anything in advance of convincing evidence? A guy I knew thought that it was contradictory to say that Galileo rightly accepted a wrong conclusion. However, this same guy:

thought that the "logical" was merely the familiar or expected, thus that a talking lion would be illogical;

seemed to get his understanding of logic from Spock, not from Aristotle;

when I had said that a single discontinuous timeline (with an uncaused event preventing the event that would have caused it) was counter-intuitive but not illogical, misquoted me as having said that it was illogical;

when I had said that Zen meditation did not give me one particular insight, misquoted me as having said that I got nothing from Zen;

when I suggested, as a fictional premise, that Wells wrote a true account of the Time Traveler's adventures, thought that that I did think that Wells had written a true account;

thought that scientists claimed infallibility and showed themselves up to be charlatans every time they revised their conclusions;

accepted science when it confirmed his preferred views but otherwise rubbished it;

dismissed the mathematical proof that there is no highest prime number as "gobbledygook" merely because he did not understand it (I did not understand it the first time I read it).

How much misunderstanding remains in a scientific age?