The amount of time that understanding of scurvy was lost is short compared to amount of time classical knowledge was lost, but why use that metric? I think a better metric is the speed at which it was lost. That is hard to measure, requiring the reconstruction of history, but Lucio Russo claims that it was quite quick, comparable to the 150 year story of scurvy. Russo suggests that Ptolemy was not the apotheosis of classical astronomy, but someone trying to salvage the wreckage. Russo’s hypothesis was the most interesting thing I got out of the post.
The amount of time that understanding of scurvy was lost is short compared to amount of time classical knowledge was lost, but why use that metric? I think a better metric is the speed at which it was lost. That is hard to measure, requiring the reconstruction of history, but Lucio Russo claims that it was quite quick, comparable to the 150 year story of scurvy. Russo suggests that Ptolemy was not the apotheosis of classical astronomy, but someone trying to salvage the wreckage. Russo’s hypothesis was the most interesting thing I got out of the post.