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 "New Chronology": As Requested.

 Author:  Topic:  Posted:
Feb 04, 2002
 Comments:
The "New Chronology" by A.T. Fomenko is an attempt to rewrite world history, based on the principle that world history as we know it today is flawed, put together by unscientific methods. The author is an accomplished professional mathematician; this is seen as qualfication enough for him to rewrite all of world history as he sees fit, even though his grasp of history is undergraduate-level, at best.
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The idea is that since historical facts aren't "science" and they are not "logical" we can butcher them in any way we please -- the author, for example, uses all sorts of statistical voodoo tricks to compress the historical timeline, dropping whole centuries out, compressing several historical persons into one, and generally completely wrecking history as we know it today.

In any case, the whole idea is quack science of the most lowly sort, similar to UFO conspiracy theories and mystical healers. Some of the ideas he makes are so preposterous that nobody in their right mind would take him seriously.

I'm having trouble finding a useful English-language site on the subject -- I guess this will have to do. Don't miss his version of English history, if you have the patience to wade through all of that,

       
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And this is diffrent than (none / 0) (#1)
by Anonymous Reader on Tue Feb 5th, 2002 at 01:42:39 AM PST
Almost every article posted on this site. I read on this site that facts are just used by people to manipulate the truth. I mean maybe he wanted a book as controversal as Adequacy.com

If so, (none / 0) (#2)
by tkatchev on Tue Feb 5th, 2002 at 01:51:32 AM PST
Then he got what he wanted. Regardless of the retarded science used in his "works", he got cheap controversy very quickly.


--
Peace and much love...

 
Mathematicians wearing historians' hats... (none / 0) (#3)
by Anonymous Reader on Tue Feb 5th, 2002 at 03:28:33 AM PST
...are as bad as linguists wearing political scientists' hats, or theologians wearing biologist's hats. People are quite entitled to have opinions outwith their field of expertise, but a fallacy is committed if people mistake them for experts.

 
Interesting (none / 0) (#8)
by hauntedattics on Tue Feb 5th, 2002 at 06:26:04 AM PST
This view of history is reminiscent of a lot of the academic work being done these days in political science and other social sciences. The idea is to stuff as many numbers and graphs into articles on government and international relations in a pathetic attempt to gain the same 'respect' for these disciplines as the hard sciences.

It's too bad, really, because this phenomenon is producing even more unreadable crap in the social sciences than would have been there anyway. It also misses the point that government and IR, like history, are fundamentally about people and thus not subject to logical, data-driven measurement.



 
Thanks (none / 0) (#11)
by First Incision on Tue Feb 5th, 2002 at 10:39:00 AM PST
Thanks for the info, tkatchev. My Russian friend has been mostly in the US for the last 6 years, and hadn't heard much about it, but was thoroughly confused by where it came from.

Is it true that people are trying to get this taught in schools? How much respect are they getting?

As a student of science, I am familiar with this attitude. Science-minded people often dismiss the subjective as useless or not even worth thinking about. Or even worse, they think because it is subjective, they can apply their "rationality" to it with only a minimal amount of study.

My (least) favorite example was in a Medical Ethics class. A classmate realized that the definition of "dead" (in the case of the comatose) and the definition of "alive" (in the case of the unborn) are very subjective matters. He was in favor of dismissing the whole subject and moving to something else "harder."
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Do you suffer from late-night hacking? Ask your doctor about Protonix.

Not true. (none / 0) (#12)
by tkatchev on Tue Feb 5th, 2002 at 10:51:37 AM PST
Nobody is trying to get this stuff taught in school. As far as I know, this stuff never left the "pop-pseudo-science" stage.


--
Peace and much love...

 

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