Rating: 
Summary: Radiocarbon dating has precision of +/-1800 years at best
Review: There are a host of problems with radiocarbon dating. It assumes the isotope always decayed at the same rate. You simply cannot make those assumptions and call yourself a scientist. In many instances, items with known dates were given to several labs to be tested and the dates came back way off. So far off, in fact, to make radiodating a joke. It also does not take into consideration a different prehistoric atmosphere which would inhibit the sun's radiation from hitting the earth, thereby making radiocarbondating extremely tentative.
It relies on too many assumptions to make it scientifically accurate.
Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly researched challenge to "Scaligerian history"
Review: This english translation may well be source of the same sort of paradigm shift that Bjorn Lomborg has instigated in environmental research when he exposed many researchers as scaremongers that put us on the wrong track to improvement.
Although the tone is sometimes pedantic the content surprises with a matter of fact and extremely intelligent and consistent presentation using 1500 (!) sources. All arguments in the amazon.com reviews so far that try to "debunk" this book as nonsense are dealt with in a very thorough and convincing fashion in the book.
The picture that very clearly emerges is that of a house of cards where different disciplines (C-14 dating, dendrochronology, archeology and history) need eachother in order to stay consistent about the timeframe from say 2000BC to 1500AC. I was particularly surprised about the fact that most C-14 datings are rejected and they are often off by 1 or 2 thousand years. The procedure seems to be one of carefully choosing the datings that confirm expectations. This is not only the view of renegades like Christian Bloss and Hans-Ulrich Niemitz but also of articles in New Scientist and Nature and the evidence (wrong datings) speaks for itself.
It seems that nobody really ever questioned the datings that where invented by Scaliger and Petavius (based on interpretations from the bible) after the XV century. All the outrageous claims on the back cover are very well substantiated. For me it was interesting that the "dark ages" finally made sense.
Does this mean that I think Anatoly Fomenko is right on all points? I don't think so. Many of the hypotheses that he presents will without doubt be corrected after thorough research. But I do think that his critisism is so valid and so fundamental that it will change or even obliterate current beliefs about ancient history.
I am very curious how the scientific community of historians will react to this outstandingly researched work now that it's available in English.
Rating:
Summary: Crackpots. Conspiracies. History. Science.
Review: When I picked up "History: Fiction or Science?" for the first time, it was out of sheer curiosity. I appreciate crackpots and crackpot conspiracy theories of all sorts - one could say that I have a private freak collection on a separate bookshelf. Therefore, this entire history revision business looked very much like it belonged there as well, so I decided to give it a go. My initial reaction was disappointment; the author sounded perfectly sane, which is simply out of order, if you ask me (a good crackpot theorist is always stark raving mad, hence the interest - never a dull moment anywhere). Then I started to read deeper into the book and, as I submerged about thirty pages deep, the remnants of my ironic grin dropped to the floor along with my jaw. The stuff actually made sense. No hysterical overtones or complex paranoid theorizing anywhere - it is certainly a scientific work written in a manner that has academia stamped all over, no doubt about it.The critic in me would keep arguing with the authors every now and then - yet they never fail to emphasize the hypothetical nature of their reconstructions. Some of the hypotheses make perfect sense, others do not - which pleases me greatly, since I am most wary of books that make me agree with everything instantly; their integrity is nearly always heavily compromised in some way, yet never too obviously (the best crackpot conspiracy theorists are the ones you can't help agreeing with, and once you agree with enough, you find yourself ready to agree with the bloke who says reptiles rule the world). Here, you may be offered several contradictory renditions of the same historical event. Once again, I wouldn't have it any other way - anyone who is gullible enough to believe simple and unequivocal explanations offered by the official historical sources is usually unaware that those, in turn, contain numerous gaps, inconsistencies, and contradictions. I always knew that history, especially ancient history, has been a collection of fairy tales all along; still it took me some time to accommodate the thought that, for want of a better metaphor, even the fairy tales it consists of were culled from a wide variety of books, shuffled together like a very dodgy deck of cards, then put into a random sequence, given a new index and proclaimed the only authorised collection of fairy tales in the world (and children who ask silly questions about why certain things make no sense or whether there are any other, more interesting tales available elsewhere need spanking, of course - a time-honoured tradition, isn't it then?). Well, the Russian mathematicians do ask questions. Lots of questions. Questions which there was a very long tradition of not asking; ones that concern the very foundations of modern chronology (although "modern" might be a misleading term here, since said chronology is a child of the Middle Ages). And the historians who demand a spanking shaking fists and frothing at the mouth make me want to put every book on history that I own on the crackpot shelf - certainly not Fomenko and team. Indeed, I haven't put them on any shelf yet, since I'm reading the book for the third time over, and eagerly anticipating the second volume.
|
