Can we get an oopart thread?
Post your favorites, debunk fake ones, discuss the most probables, anything welcome
Ooparts
Oliver Garcia
Hunter Scott
They're much, much more likely to be scroll holders than batteries.
Elijah Williams
My biggest problem with the OOPArts concept is that most of them are not out of place at all. I mean, assuming the Baghdad "battery" was indeed a battery, it's not any stranger than Heron's aeliopile or Franklin's kite, it's perfectly doable with the contemporary technology and I would actually find it a bit reassuring that they figured out batteries back then, because it's harder to believe that it took so long to discover something elementary schoolers routinely make with lemons or potatoes for science class.
As for the alleged depictions of helicopters and astronauts there's not, again, anything strange about them beyond our interpretation of the shapes they carved into stones.
Once we eliminate all those, the few remaining OOPArts are indeed worthy of their name but we find out they were scams or dating mistakes.
Asher Morris
This. It is always assumed that ancient peoples were dumb and stupid and so anything that doesn't fits the narrative is seen as "out of place".
Perhaps people back then imagined, and even created stuff that was more advanced for their time but due to limitations or the lack of any genuine application it was discarded or forgotten. There's a satyrical work from the roman era that mocks religions and cults and it includes space travel, it's considered the first SF work.
Say, you could make penicillin but never find the medical application due to your era's limitations. Then, if that penicillin was discovered among ruins 1000 years later people would say "the ancients knew the use of penicillin" while they maybe knew how to make what we would call "penicillin" but never applied to modern usage.
Justin Taylor
dumb phoneposter
Colton Clark
>replication is at all comparable to discovery
come on mate. The concept of electricity is absolutely alien to someone who doesn't grow up with it being around him at all times. You need a serious understanding of physics for it to be in any way imaginable at all.
Luke Moore
Long before any knowledge of electricity existed, people were aware of shocks from electric fish. Ancient Egyptian texts dating from 2750 BCE referred to these fish as the "Thunderer of the Nile", and described them as the "protectors" of all other fish. Electric fish were again reported millennia later by ancient Greek, Roman and Arabic naturalists and physicians.[2] Several ancient writers, such as Pliny the Elder and Scribonius Largus, attested to the numbing effect of electric shocks delivered by catfish and electric rays, and knew that such shocks could travel along conducting objects.[3]
Ancient cultures around the Mediterranean knew that certain objects, such as rods of amber, could be rubbed with cat's fur to attract light objects like feathers. Thales of Miletus made a series of observations on static electricity around 600 BCE, from which he believed that friction rendered amber magnetic, in contrast to minerals such as magnetite, which needed no rubbing.[6][7][8][9] Thales was incorrect in believing the attraction was due to a magnetic effect, but later science would prove a link between magnetism and electricity.
Electricity would remain little more than an intellectual curiosity for millennia until 1600, when the English scientist William Gilbert made a careful study of electricity and magnetism, distinguishing the lodestone effect from static electricity produced by rubbing amber.[6] He coined the New Latin word electricus ("of amber" or "like amber", from ἤλεkτρον, elektron, the Greek word for "amber") to refer to the property of attracting small objects after being rubbed.[11] This association gave rise to the English words "electric" and "electricity", which made their first appearance in print in Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica of 1646.[12]
Now, can you explain what "serious understanding of physics" William Gilbert had in 1600 that earlier people lacked? They both knew rubbing amber rods produced static electricity.
Eli Peterson
>unknown electrolite
its like finding a cave and calling it a fusion reactor, its just that it used to contain unknown machinery
Jaxon Long
"OUT OF PLACE" IS AN EUPHEMISM BY THE PSEUDOSCIENTISTS ILLEGITIMATELY CONTROLLING ACADEMIA TO REFER TO SOMETHING THAT DOES NOT FIT THEIR FICTITIOUS HISTORICAL NARRATIVE.
Lucas Butler
>Neanderthals were aware that objects fell to the earth, therefor they are pretty much like Newton.
This is what your post reads like to me.
Nicholas Garcia
I can spend hours listing all the prerequisite knowledge and technologies Neanderthals probably lacked, on top of pointing out they were biologically (and neurologically) different.
I repeat my question: Can you list what knowledge and technology William Gilbert had in 1600 that ancient Greeks may have lacked to make the same discovery or reach the same conclusion?
Aaron Cruz
>There's a satyrical work from the roman era that mocks religions and cults and it includes space travel, it's considered the first SF work.
what's it called?
Kayden Anderson
Also, some ancient greeks could have discovered gravity just like Westerners did. It's just that it apparently took 2 thousand years for someone (Galileo) to call Aristotle on his bullshit and test if heavier objects really fall faster:
"Salv: I greatly doubt that Aristotle ever tested by experiment whether it be true that two stones, one weighing ten times as much as the other, if allowed to fall, at the same instant, from a height of, say, 100 cubits, would so differ in speed that when the heavier had reached the ground, the other would not have fallen more than 10 cubits.
Simp: His language would seem to indicate that he had tried the experiment, because he says: We see the heavier; now the word see shows that he had made the experiment.
Sagr: But I, Simplicio, who have made the test can assure[107] you that a cannon ball weighing one or two hundred pounds, or even more, will not reach the ground by as much as a span ahead of a musket ball weighing only half a pound, provided both are dropped from a height of 200 cubits."
"Salv: Aristotle declares that bodies of different weights, in the same medium, travel (in so far as their motion depends upon gravity) with speeds which are proportional to their weights; [...] But if you wish to maintain the general proposition you will have to show that the same ratio of speeds is preserved in the[110] case of all heavy bodies, and that a stone of twenty pounds moves ten times as rapidly as one of two; but I claim that this is false and that, if they fall from a height of fifty or a hundred cubits, they will reach the earth at the same moment."
en.wikipedia.org
After that it was natural for someone like Newton to come along eventually.
It seems some Indian astronomers from late antiquity actually came quite close to Renaissance astronomy and physics too.
Cooper Cox
He's talking about Lucian
en.wikipedia.org
Ryan Perry
o fuck this ass is shitting up Veeky Forums AND Veeky Forums? why?
Benjamin Baker
The only one "shitting up" in this thread is you.
Brody Brooks
>en.m.
Joseph Richardson
>acorn-dogs
>dog faced men riding on winged acorns
L U C I A N
Cooper Powell
Your Gilbert had no fundamental understanding of the concept of electricity at all. The only thing he did was observe things. I'm going to guess that you have only a basic understanding of physics and that is why you can't differentiate between observing electricity and understanding it such that you can use it for practical purposes.
>It's just that
It's just that Caesar didn't build a nuclear fission reactor in his palace, else... I think you really don't understand physics very well and that's why you think its just some random shit anyone could have come up with at any time, they just didn't...
Justin Perez
Hindsight is 20/20, user. I'm sure people 300 years in the future will be facepalming that 21st century 'tards didn't even understand something as obvious as dark energy.
Jeremiah King
Instead of questioning my education you could finally get around to explaining what insurmountable obstacle the ancients faced that prevented them from reaching the same level of understanding Renaissance and Early Modern Europeans did, as I've repeatedly asked you to do.
>differentiate between observing electricity and understanding it such that you can use it for practical purposes.
Moving the goalposts? Or do you think a potato battery has more practical applications than Gilbert's static electricity or Galvani's galvanism?
I have no idea what you're trying to communicate by calling him "my" Gilbert either, he was a mildly famous early scientist.
Zachary Ward
Look, a (((shitposter)))
Robert Turner
Splendid argument.
Ayden Adams
>Neanderthals didn't know as much about gravity as newton, so they couldn't have dropped a rock on someone's head
This is what your post reads like to me.
Asher Taylor
They faced no obstacles? Nor did the Neanderthals face any obstacles to formulating the same things Newton did.
Yet
they
did
not.
Did you know that in the year 5215BC, a dude in modern day Zimbabwe, called Mbutolu Mbetze, postulated the theory of relativity? You see there was no obstacle to prevent him from reaching the same level of understanding as Albert Eintstein, therefor he did it.
Juan Morgan
Then you're pretty dumb
Elijah Barnes
And we're back to square one:
Are you ever going to post something worth reading?
Sebastian Green
What square is that? The square where you post bullshit about random ancient peoples inventing modern day science "because they could have!"?
Parker Cooper
not that gy but the answer to your question is science
no literally the whole idea that you do experiments on stuff and then extrapolate that your observing a phenomena present everywhere would have seemed ridiculous to many people for most of human history, certianly to the natural philosiphers who dominated study of the material world for european history post-rome.
most medieval people thought that pretty much everything you witnessed was because god put it there for you to see so, god being omnipotent, there was no reason everything he put into the world should be bound by laws, god certianly aint.
furthermore another big problem was that maths wasnt advanced enough for most of human history for people to preform experiments that could be considered in any sense scientific. you couldnt even fucking multiply with roman numerals, how the hell would you ever get to something like calculus, which is sort of necessary for anything above basic mechanics.
Julian Davis
Here's a real oopart, in the sense that it's extremely out of place: the Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca head.
>Found in 1933 by an archaeologist in a Mayan burial site
>It's an obviously Roman looking terracotta head, thought to date to the second century AD
>Some theorize that it's a sign of Roman-era contact with the Americas
>Others believe that it was on a shipwreck and ocean currents brought it over to the Mayans over 1000 years after it was carved
>Others still accuse Payon, the archaeologist, as planting the head on the site, as he didn't release his findings until 1960
en.wikipedia.org
Jaxson Sanders
>ad hominem
Opinion discarded
Asher Morris
Maybe it comes from a spanish ship
Mason Cox
Apparently, a dating test established that it was made sometime between the 9th century BC and 13th century AD. However, one of the theories is that a Spanish conquistador brought it over and it ended up in a Mayan burial ground somehow.
Cameron Hill
I'm not claiming anyone invented anything that isn't in the historic record, you must be confused.
Of course. I know the importance of the scientific method, which is why I noted that as soon as Galileo tried to replicate Aristotle's """findings""" on gravity it basically opened the floodgates and led to Newtonian physics just a few decades later. They went from rediscovering Greek treatises and understanding about as much as the ancients (if not less) to completely bulldozing and paving over ancient science in less than a century.
>Roman numerals
Greek and Arabic numerals were good enough to do complex calculations with, not to mention they had geometry as a crutch. It did much to cripple Western Europe, sure, but that only makes it more impressive that Westerners figured it out first in spite of their obvious handicap.
I must mention Indian astronomy again too.
Brayden Gomez
Not an oopart but I'm still waiting to see it tested IRL
Isaac Ortiz
>god being omnipotent, there was no reason everything he put into the world should be bound by laws
That's contrary to what the scholars of the middle ages believed. The general thought that developed by the high middle ages was that God's perfect natural world functioned on its own by the laws set by God; intervention was possible but exceedingly rare. The universe created by God was fundamentally one of perfect order; this is in pretty start contrast to previous beliefs, where the universal was fundamentally chaotic.
There's one case dealing with the idea of perfect vacuums. The Greeks said a perfect vacuum was impossible. The medieval scholars agreed that it was impossible by natural law, but believed by God's will it could theoretically exist.
Ethan Gray
>most medieval people thought that pretty much everything you witnessed was because god put it there for you to see so
How do you figure?
William Fisher
Bump
Levi Young
Bumping for this. Any more info on it?
Dominic Thomas
So if a caveman rubbed the fur on his saber-toothed cave-cat, and then touched his cave-buddy, they would not get shocked, just because they did not know modern physics?
Logan Ross
What did he mean by this???
Wyatt Hughes
Bump
Ryan Baker
Perivians can look like that
Jaxon Cook
t. el peruANO