The Lost Millennium

Five things Florin Diacu told me but I didn't believe in The Lost Millennium:
1- All historical dates are either false or at the very least, open to question, even if exhaustively documented.  Minute astronomical observations, on the other hand, are infallible. 

2- Augustus, the first Roman Emperor and the guy in charge when Jesus Christ was born, actually reigned from 1175 to 1205 AD. 

3- Troublesome historical sources contradict this theory? No problem! Take the Almagest, which refers to "Alexander" in a context that refers almost unarguably to Alexander the Great.  Well...uh...maybe it refers to Alexander II of Byzantium, who reigned from 886 to 913 AD.  See?  This totally works!

4- What about the Popes?  Whatever you think of the Catholic Church, don't we have a chronological list going back to Peter and extending all the way to Benedict XVI?  Well, many of them were duplicates.  What?  Exactly.

5- So what year is this?  After 257 pages, Diacu says...he doesn't really know. Lucky for him, I'm reasonably sure. 


Around the Second World War, Isaac Asimov wrote a fantastic series of short stories about a mathematician named Hari Seldon who discovered a way to mathematically predict the future. While individuals were unpredictable, huge numbers of people were not - and their reactions could be charted and predicted with near-100% accuracy.

This was fiction, mind you, taking place in the (very) distant future when humans had settled the entire galaxy. Florin Diacu, the mathematician who wrote The Lost Millennium, apparently thinks Seldon and Asimov were onto something. 

The Lost Millennium starts with a funny hypothesis: what if we have history all wrong? Specifically, what if there's a lot less of it (history) than we think?  What if our ways of measuring time - the rotation of the Earth, orbiting the Sun - are fundamentally flawed? 

Best of all, what if all this could only be proved with math?

Every once in a while, you come across a book that...just...fails.  The Lost Millennium is that book.

This either never happened, or quite recently.

The main problem?  There are two.  First, Diacu needs to get out more.  He's the perfect stereotype of the hard science genius who flunks the social sciences, because he has zero understanding of  how people actually think and act, either as individuals or societies.

Let me illustrate this with an example.  Diacu presents language - and specific words, especially in Russian - as evidence.  "Linguistic changes are neither individual nor random - they follow rules."  So when a certain word borrowed or adopted from another language survives more or less intact for suspiciously long, the obvious answer is TIME ITSELF is wrong.

Bullshit. 

Proof that everyone else is wrong about everything.

That's the thing with the social sciences - it's not reducible to formula.  There is simply no way of predicting how random people will act with any certainty.  Sometimes a word survives because people find it useful, elegant, or even just fun to say.  (The word "fuck" is a great example - flexible, very old, and undoubtedly fun to say.)  Math doesn't ever come into play.

The other problem is Diacu uses evidence so selectively, it's hard not to burst out laughing.  Certainly I did more than once reading it.

Consider the problem: you're going to disprove HISTORY, but the only way to do that on more than a theoretical level is to use evidence...from history.  Which apparently is wrong; or at least, parts of it.  Most of it? 

Again, Diacu ignores things like Chinese astronomical observations, which go back thousands of years, or even simple lists of kings from the Greeks to Romans to Carolingians to the English, and many more.  They're all wrong.  But a zodiac painted on an Egyptian tomb ceiling - with characters "commonly associated" with certain planets and constellations, not actual star charts - is conclusive proof: we've got it all wrong. 

The New History

I'm not imagining there are no errors in history.  Maybe the pyramids were built substantially earlier or later than we think.  Maybe we've skipped over a French King or two, or taken a few folk tales as literal truth.  Hell, maybe Beowulf was about a real dude who really did fight and kill a monster called Grendel. 

But no, I don't believe we're collectively stupid enough to invent a thousand years of history - comparatively recent history, too.