Hello, On Fri, 26 May 2006, Simon Plouffe wrote: ... ...
In my opinion this is what caused most of the delays, something like 300,000 (some say 500,000) documents burned, they burned because most of the documents were scrolls.
The second cause is religion, from 380 to 1500, well, nothing significant in western culture happened in terms of scientific discoveries or advances, for example in 1252 a papal bull stated that heretics should be tortured and killed. Remember that most of these people (men and women) were inventors, scholars or scientists, I have heard once a statistic saying that as much as 30,000 people died because of religion in those times. Many of them could have been Archimedes or Leonardo Da vinci. ... ...
On the other hand, on May 25, Michael R. Bloomberg, Republican Mayor of New York, to the graduating students of John Hopkins University School of Medicine: Today we are seeing hundreds of years of scientific discovery being challenged by people who simply disregard facts that don't happen to agree with their agenda. Some call it pseudo-science, other call it faith-based science, but when you notice where this negligence tends to take place, you might as well call it 'political science'. Emeric Deutsch