Posted on 02/22/2007 6:15:51 PM PST by xcamel
There are certainly individual Muslims who contributed a great deal to science.
"Muslims", however, have done no such thing, no more so than "Christians" or any other group. That's just silly.
I think what many Freepers are objecting to - at least, what I object to - is not the notion that this or that Muslim could have been a genius (clearly there are examples!) but rather, the patronizing, condescending quest we've witnessed in recent years to find, dig up and publicize "Muslim" accomplishments from history. And which insists on oohing and aahing and clapping over the slightest sign of brainpower and inflating it all out of proportion.
These are some pretty tilings. But they are not evidence that the people who made them understood the mathematics that Penrose described. And frankly, if the tiler hadn't been a Muslim, no one would have suggested such a thing in the first place. The tiler is Muslim, so a certain type of person wishes to pretend it's evidence of a "breakthrough" and applaud over it. This is neither accurate, nor helpful, nor even all that complimentary to the Muslims that the condescender means to flatter.
"Ooooh, looky what your ancestor did, he was so smart!" This is the way you talk to babies, or doggies, not humans.
Oh boy, do I dispute that.
The mathematics governing tilings that do not repeat is MUCH MUCH MORE likely to show up in the work of people who make tilings than is the mathematics of wavefunctions on six-dimensional manifolds (or whatever math governs string theory exactly) likely to show up in the music of Bach.
In fact, if I put you in a room with some tile (or pencil/paper), under armed guard, and gave you the order "make a tiling that doesn't repeat!", and didn't let you go until you succeeded, you'd probably end up stumbling upon a way to do it sooner or later. (In fact, that may be a reasonably good description of what actually happened!)
But if I put you in front of a piano and said "Compose some music whose pattern mirrors the ground state of pi-mesons" (or whatever), you'd die before you even got close.
Just think about it. It's the nature of the thing. The fact that people who presumably spent their entire adult lives as professional tile artisans (in a culture which prohibited depictive art) stumbled upon nonrepeated tilings is nice, but gets less and less impressive the more you think about it.
Which is sad.
But what's also sad is that there are some who think it's a useful and complimentary exercise to attempt to flatter and fawn over an entire race (or religion) of people by finding individual examples of achievement, inflating them to a significance that is completely unwarranted, and attributing said examples to the culture at large. Hence, "some unnamed artisan(s) in this town made some pretty tilings that don't seem to repeat (yet)" becomes "The Muslims discovered the mathematics quasicrystalline, infinite nonrepeating tilings 500 years before Penrose" or somesuch (utterly, pathetically condescendingly patronizing) nonsense.
Pox on both yer houses.
Rather, scientific discovery involves finding explanations for how the natural world works. Penrose (so I am given to understand from the article) found an explanation for understanding how/whether a nonrepeating tiling could exist in a 2-D plane. That would be a scientific discovery.
The artisan who put those tiles up and seems to have come across an instance of what Penrose was talking about, was not creating an explanation and hence did not make a scientific discovery.
It's the difference between throwing a ball up in the air and watching it fall down, and coming up with Newton's gravitational theory. Someone who does the former hasn't demonstrated an understanding of the latter and certainly has made no "breakthrough".
(They post here, but usually disguise themselves in 'angry conservative' condescension, not the typical leftist condescension).
So since my comments were directed to those posting on this forum, my focus was on the ignorance here, and not the ignorance in the Ivory Towers.
So tell me, does your tinfoil hat actually keep them from implanting thoughts in your brain?
I'll get back to both earth and the pursuit of the actually extant heaven now.
Course not, but the article at the top of this thread is an instance of 'Muslims were so great' fawning condescension, and that's what people are reacting (in some cases overreacting) to. I'm just saying there's an understandable reason people are reacting that way.
"they also made advances by themselves."
Can you provide the documentation for ANY advances they made by themselves?
Algebra and zero came from India. The Muslim conquerers tended to look down on actual work, and most of the real work was done by their conquered, second-class citizens (dhimmis).
The Islamic "Golden Age" occured during the period where they had freshly conquered the established civilizations of Babylon, India, and the Eastern Roman Empire. When Islam no longer had fresh supplies of loot and slaves who knew how to run a civilization, their Golden Age came to an end
After that, the Arab race went into a period of decline that was only temporarily reversed when they found themselves in possession of a new source of unearned wealth -- oil
I expect the kind of nonsense in this article from the left, but even after six years of seeing too many irrational posts steeped in emotion and not thought, I still have high expectations and standards for those of us who are conservative.
Maybe I'm the one who's not so bright, but, IMO,if we just allow the overreacting go unchecked, there is very little that separates us from the non-thinking left.
I thought the muzzies believed in allah - the large rock at mecca they all travel to see and praise during rum-a-dum-dum.
I don't know what the rock is about, but I do believe that they believe in the Allah who is referred to as the God of Abraham.
As HE said : when you hear the TRUTH does your heart leap for joy upon hearing it?
I can only say, thanks. You have pointed out a flaw in my understanding. I'll check into it and attempt to re-educate myself.
Mathematics In Ancient Egypt
Al-Ahram | 1-26-2007
Posted on 01/26/2007 6:09:50 PM EST by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1774358/posts
Africans Invented Arithmetic and Algebra [double bagger barf alert]
Black Voice News | Sunday, 27 August 2006 | Joseph A. Bailey, II M.D., F.A.C.S.
Posted on 08/30/2006 1:41:19 PM EDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1692648/posts
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