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The BBC’s Stargazing LIVE recently showed how you could predict eclipses using Stonehenge. It’s true but also really boring because there’s next to no evidence for it. How convincing it is depends on how excited you are by the number 56. So I just blogged it in Welsh as practice, but while I did I realised part of what the problem might be.
The idea of using postholes at Stonehenge as markers for tracking the Sun and Moon started with Gerald Hawkins, but Fred Hoyle refined the system. He showed how, with 56 holes and 3 markers you could predict when eclipses were likely to occur. You can draw really impressive looking diagrams, so some people think there must be something in it. However, there’s just as much evidence that Stonehenge will be used to predict eclipses in the future as there is that it was in the past.
Would you be so impressed if someone drew an impressive diagram of Stonehenge and then said they’d worked out how it would be used in the next century?
We don’t know if the holes will be accessible in the next century — but we don’t know they were accessible in the past. The postholes could have been in use. Or they could have been filled almost as soon as they were dug, as Stonehenge was often remodelled. Everything else, every mathematical argument is just as true for the future as it was the past.
This wouldn’t have been a problem for Fred Hoyle. He was a very good physicist and in physics he aimed to find permanent truths. He wouldn’t have wanted to argue that Gravity worked now, but it didn’t really apply in prehistoric times. This is very different to #archaeology, where things can have very different meanings over time. So coming from Physics was a problem, it means his theory makes no connection to the actual people who built and used Stonehenge.
The difference between the timelessness of Physics and timed-based nature of Archaeology also helps explain another, more recent puzzle. Some physicists have been researching how Vikings could have used Quartz to navigate, after a stone was found on a Tudor vessel. The quartz they test tends to be modern. It’s nominally a historical investigation, but it seems to have very little connection to the past. Philip Ball has recently tackled the disconnect between the physical experiments and the historical context.
I also wonder, looking at Philip Ball’s latest post, if timelessness could also explain why Weinberg does #science history so badly. Weinberg is interested in whether something is right or wrong. In theory that’s a timeless question. I know scientific knowledge is provisional but, to pick an example, we’re not going to discover that the Earth is as flat as Herodotus thought. Of course, if we simply divvy up the scientists according to right or wrong then we’ll know what our current state of scientific thought is, but we won’t have much idea of what the state of scientific thinking was in the past.
The puzzle for me is: what is going on when people simultaneously connect to the past and ignore it?
For example, why cover the mathematics of eclipse prediction at Stonehenge, without any reference to reasons that people would do it? Simply going through the mechanics of the system tells us nothing about Stonehenge, nor is it a very effective way of saying how we predict eclipses these days.
Cornelius Holtorf has described what he calls #archaeoappeal which is an attraction of archaeology, often in exotic locations, that seems to have no strong connection to the content. Marko Manila interestingly expands this to war-appeal. Exotic wars being more appealing.
If you take Stonehenge as a brand for awe and mystery, then the goal is to borrow that sense of awe and mystery and pass it along to eclipses. The sunstone research is associated with Vikings who are daring and adventurous rather like physicists — if we ignore the lack of Viking artefacts. Is the superficial connection with the past not so much a flaw, as the point of the exercise? The lack of historical test means that the science looks sound. However, instead of studying the past, instead the past becomes a metaphor for how we feel about science.
That’s fine — if we remember we’re talking about feelings and not the past.
This is not a finished idea, it needs more work.