This is the first time I heard that the Chinese were Muslim.

Who knew?

they did actually invent moveable type. a printing press where characters of uniform size could be exchanged between printing runs. the fact that it wasn’t alphabetic is trivial. the wikipedia article has more.

I thought that was on Obama’s list of what the Muslim culture gave the world.

One of the insights Einstein had in developing special relativity is that time cannot be separated entirely from space. He combined the two into a four-dimensional frame of reference he called “space-time.” This is frequently interpreted by people as saying that time is “just another dimension” and that’s not true. Even under Relativity, time is unique and has properties none of the other dimensions has, it is just WOVEN into the other dimensions at the most fundamental levels.

So under Einstein’s relativity theories, frames of reference INCLUDE time.

I’m not sure it is accurate, though, to say that there is no special frame of reference for time. Time is still special in relativity, and since time always has a DIRECTION, it is probably not fair to say that all frames of reference are equal for time.

But this is getting pretty esoteric and is starting to go beyond my comfort level. ;)

no kidding re: difficulty copying things by hand on vellum. imagine the increased breadth of our history if we’d have managed to get on the ball and borrow/steal papermaking and the moveable type from china 500 years earlier.

i am vaguely aware of the efforts of irish monks. when i visited ireland 10 years ago, i remember passing through a (restored) church that had been ransacked and burned either by the vikings, british, or both, and they managed to destroy (of course) thousands of rare and priceless books in the monks’ library.

I made the point immediately that the inertial frame of reference argument was more of a classical physics argument than a relativity one. In fact Galileo himself may have been the first person to have published the concept of inertial frames of reference in the famous Dialogue book itself. He was reacting to the argument that if the earth was moving, then if you dropped something, it would fall at an angle. He used the example of people inside a ship with no windows being completely unable to tell if the ship was docked and stationary, or was moving at a constant speed in calm waters. Galileo extended this to say that within an inertial reference frame ALL physical laws remain invariant. This is really a remarkable insight and is one of the things that Hawkings and Einstein point to when they described Galileo as a great scientist. In fact this is known in physics as “Galileo’s principle of relativity.”

Einstein’s special theory of relativity essentially takes that same argument and says that it holds true for any speed you travel, meaning that if you measure the speed of light inside a ship moving at near the speed of light, you get the same result as if you measured the speed of light in a stationary laboratory. This is completely counter-intuitive and has some profound consequences if true. Among those is the prediction time dilation and length contraction.

The equations which come out of this application of the concept of invariance of physical laws in inertial frames of reference, when combined with Maxwell’s electro-magnetic equations, produce the famous “E=mc2″ formula. This was not what Einstein was driving for, but he immediately understood its significnance. It’s not completely accurate to say this, but basically special relativity is “special” because it excludes the effects of gravity and acceleration (which Einstein believed to be indistinguishable).

General Relativity was Einsteins attempt to show that the same concept hold true even when you take gravity and acceleration into account. Special Relativity is fairly understandable by most educated lay people. General Relativity is not. Much as Newton invented an entirely new form of math to pursue the expression of his Laws, Einstein did the same thing with General Relativity.

A book you might like is Thomas Cahill’s How The Irish Saved Civilization. Cahill’s both a real scholar and an engaging and fun writer, and in that book he documents the little-known fact that while much of Europe was burning in the 5th Century as Rome was collapsing from internal chaos and external invasions, Christian monks way way up in isolated Ireland were spending their entire lives painstakingly and exhaustively preserving and making handwritten copies of works of the great writers and mathematicians from antiquity. Some of those monks wouldn’t have even been able to really read what they were copying, but they painstakingly and lovingly duplicated each shape on the page so copies could be distributed and preserved. Libraries all over Europe were being sacked and burned, and here were these monks in an obscure backwater Roman province laboriously saving enormous amounts of it. “The Church says we need to keep copies of this stuff, so, that’s what we’re doing.”

Cahill’s thesis is that *most* of what we have that survives of the writings of the ancients is due to that project up in Ireland. His book probably wouldn’t have sold quite as well if it had been “How Irish Monks Saved Civilization,” but either way Cahill’s a crackerjack scholar and writer.

Can you imagine what life was like before the printing press, let alone cheap paper? Working all day, probably from sunup to sundown, using a feather quill to scratch out letter-by-letter copies of important books that you yourself might not even really be able to read? Whoof. I’d go insane.

glad you liked the link – liked your commentary on it as well. wish i could say i knew about it all along, but honestly i just ripped the link from wikipedia ;)

as a weak unbeliever (agnostic who generally operates assuming god doesn’t exist) in my very humble opinion, the church’s greatest lasting legacy will be the sheer amount of things it and its monks have painstakingly preserved – art, literature, science, etc. How cool is it that 3.5-4 centuries after the fact we can have discussions based on direct translations of the original source material.

anyone is welcome to say what they will about how many documents or cultural artifacts were destroyed by the church, the fact remains that without the church and its monks the absolute number of historical artifacts left in this world would be significantly lower.