Iceland Spar

Wed Mar 6 17:13:13 CST 2013

Just a knee-jerk on my part: as a former science writer and dilettante historian of a few sciences, I’m allergic to the breakthrough-du-jour mode.

Not that it’s always or entirely the journalists’ fault: medical researchers are especially prone to deprecate exaggeration of cures and “genes for X” in news reports, but a recent analysis <http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001308>  shows that the best predictor of hype in such reports is – are you sitting down? – hype in the researchers’ abstract at the top of the published paper.

From: Markekohut [mailto:markekohut at yahoo.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2013 5:20 PM
To: Monte Davis
Cc: James Kyllo; p-list
Subject: Re: Iceland Spar

Some of us like "overheated" .Smile. Old sunstone is the new Iceland Spar. Vkings!  "we've gone to look for America." ---Simon & G.

What a symbol-finder is TRP. 

Sent from my iPad

On Mar 6, 2013, at 2:33 PM, "Monte Davis" <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

That first paragraph is a little overheated: what is actually new, I think, is the first discovery of Iceland spar (1) *in a navigational context* (“next to a pair of dividers” on a sunken ship), and (2) in connection with Tudor English sailors, even after magnetic compasses came in. Both of which are indeed cool.

But Newton and Huyghens were studying calcite’s double refraction in the 17th century; Arago showed in 1809 that sunlight is polarized, allowing the sun’s location to be narrowed down through overcast or over the horizon; and in 1967 “Danish archaeologist Thorkild Ramskou posited that the [Viking] sunstone could have been one of the minerals (cordierite <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordierite>  or Iceland spar <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceland_spar> ) that polarize <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarizer>  light and by which the azimuth <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azimuth>  of the sun can be determined.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunstone_%28medieval%29) That’s been widely cited since by historians. So this is more of an incremental, all-but-clinching step than a sudden emergence from a cloud of medieval woo.  

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of James Kyllo
Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2013 2:00 PM
To: p-list
Subject: Iceland Spar

"...the French-led team have concluded that shards of Icelandic spar can act as a remarkably precise navigational aid..."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/not-just-the-stuff-of-legend-famed-viking-sunstone-did-exist-believe-scientists-8521522.html

Fascinating stuff

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