More scientific misrepresentations from the media

On my first day every year, lecturing in the degree on Telecommunications Engineering, I used to say this to my students:

Don't believe any scientific news published in the press or in generalist media. Most of them are false or have been misunderstood.

In previous posts I have mentioned several cases of scientific misrepresentation by the media, although sometimes the fault lies not with the journalist, but with the scientist, who tries to sneak in philosophical ideas based on reductionist materialism as if they were science. In this post I'm going to comment on three relatively recent news stories, published in the Spanish press, and try to explain what is really behind them.

Did Dante anticipate Einstein?

A recent article has stated that Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy offers a cosmology that closely resembles what Einstein expressed in his general theory of Relativity. Is there any truth in this?

In another post in this blog I summarized the history of cosmology, from the geocentric Greek version formalized by Ptolemy, to the modern version by Copernicus, Kepler and Newton. It is evident that Dante, who wrote the Divine Comedy at the beginning of the fourteenth century, could not know about modern cosmology, but he did know the Ptolemaic system, which he adopted in its entirety, with an important addition.

The relationship between the systems of Dante and Einstein was pointed out in an article published in Scientific American in August 1976, written by J.J. Callahan and entitled The curvature of space in a finite universe. This article compares Newton's universe (finite, non-homogeneous, Euclidean and with one center), Leibnitz's (infinite, homogeneous, Euclidean and without a center) and Einstein's (finite, homogeneous, non-Euclidean and without a center). By adapting to Euclid's plane geometry, the first two can be represented by graphic models as those in the attached figure.

Chronologies and Julian days

Joseph Justus Scaliger

One of the fundamental concerns of civilized man is the study of the past, natural or human. For this, it is necessary to be able to fix the date on which each event took place. This is the goal of a science called chronology.

If the exact date of an event is known, we can define it by giving the day, month and year in which it took place. For example, we can say that the Second World War began on September 1, 1939. We have no problem with the day and the month, but how are the years numbered? Obviously we must take an origin or starting point that everybody will agree to use.

This dating system causes a curious effect: the numbers assigned to the years after the origin grow towards the future, while the previous years grow towards the past. Thus, the year 2000 of our era came after the year 1000, but the year 2000 B.C.E. came before 1000 B.C.E. (see below the meaning of these acronyms). The years prior to the origin work as negative numbers.

Additional author rights

James H. Schmitz

In addition to copyright (the right of the author to receive a part of the profits from the sale of his work), other rights should also be guaranteed. The most important is the right to the integrity of the work, recognized by the Berne Convention:

The author shall retain the right ... to object to any deformation, mutilation or other modification of his [work].

The downside is that dead authors can hardly object. 

Unfortunately, this right is less protected than the copyright, as a few examples will show: