There’s a Giant Flaw in Human History
- By Hans Blaster
- Physical & Life Sciences
- 746 Replies
This might be the most inane comment you've written. It was in response to this statement:Hum dictionary meaning of metrology (the scientific study of measurement).
They are math, numbers and science. You cannot speculate about a measure like that shown in the last post on a guage sensor. It is what it is.
"Measures themselves are not science, they [sic] speculating on the skills of egyptian artisans is not science."
The vase people are measuring things. They are not studying how measurement works and the mechanism of measuring tools. It would be really good if they knew how those tools worked and what kind of data can and cannot be extracted with them, but their measurements of objects are studies of the objects not the measurement tools and methods.
Let's think of an analogy for a moment -- a simple wrench turning a nut on a bolt. The wrench (and the threaded bolt/nut combo) is built on simple physical principles and machines -- the kind students learn about in primary school. Knowing some of those principles will likely improve your utilization of a wrench, but using the wrench is not studying simple physics it is using a wrench to do a task.
Your vase people are using scanning tools to measure objects and analysis tools to extract information from the measurements. Neither of those is "metrology". An awareness of metrology is useful to know when a tool is appropriate just as a knowledge simple machines is useful for understanding the limits of ones wrench. After all a wrench makes a lousy hammer and a hammer makes a lousy wrench.
Given what others have posted here, some of the measurements and analyses seem to be inappropriate. This is the kind of thing that a methods section of a formal paper would clear up and a peer reviewer would raise questions about if any bits of it were missing. Important questions like "how was this setting set?" and "how was it calibrated?" and "how did you determine the reference value (mean,median, etc.)?".
Finally, measuring stuff isn't science. Science is hypothesis testing. The hypothesis seems to be "did predynastic Egyptian stone artisans have advanced tools not found in the extant archeological record?".
"The science" is testing that hypothesis including designing and documenting experimental protocols, using appropriate materials for the experiments, cross checking against alternative hypotheses, etc. This is where the vase people seem to be lacking the most.
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