Rob
venicebard said:Are you aware that Newton himself -- who despite Einstein is not in the least outdated (well, except of course for his view of light) -- was a seeker of the prisca sapientia, the pristine knowledge of an age before man degenerated to his present state? He found a morsel or two of it, to be sure, and I have since confirmed that even more exists, embedded in Tarot of Marseilles and the Hebrew and Keltic traditions whose partial preservation of earlier science through numerico-alphabetic symbol informed that deck. It was an understanding that corrects modern physics on several counts, one being that quark theory is a bridge too far (the need to go back to the original parton interpretation, where mesons, not 'gluons', were the medium of the strong force), plus demonstrates clear understanding of how atom-types (chemical 'elements') interact in living matter.
I can of course back the above up with detailed argument, detail only depending on others' interest (and my limited ability to 'surf' the net). (Outta time, but will return in a moment.)
I said "doesn't necessarily." What I was arguing here is that the fact that a given piece of knowledge is old doesn't immediately make it correct, since that argument is used entirely too often to back up otherwise unsupportable conclusions. Saying something like "It came from the ancients" simply doesn't mean, support, or especially, prove anything. At the same time, the fact that a piece of knowledge is "modern" doesn't make it correct, either.
I think you missed my point, which was that there is no causal relation between the age of a fact and its correctness...not that ancient knowledge is necessarily wrong or that there can't possibly be very old truth that was lost over millennia. Mere age can't be used as an argument supporting or denying the truthfulness of any fact.
Your theory sounds interesting, mostly because you've indicated that you have detailed argument for it beyond "he found morsels of knowledge from before the degeneration of man," since it would be no less true if discovered (or not lost but already commonly known) now than millennia ago. Please post it somewhere! Perhaps in a new thread for discussion?