Florin DiacuRecensioni

A book about the chaos theory and about the celestial mechanics. Too bad that it's very dry and has too much high math for a layman... Sorry, but these are not the properties of a good science book for everyone...½

The book puts out a provocative hypothesis: that history has somehow miscounted, and our past is actually 1,000 years shorter than we thought. Unfortunately, the author seems to spend as much time undermining the hypothesis as exploring it. If the idea is so stupid, why write a book? If there's merit to it, the book did it a grave disservice. At the heart of it, the book had glimmers of potential, but was overall very disappointing. At least it was short.½

This book examines the ideas of a controversial Russian mathematician, Anatoli Fomenko, who argues that traditional calculations of ancient and medieval world history are incorrect, by as much as 1000 years. Arguments are brought forward from celestial mechanics, radiocarbon dating, and historical chronology, to suggest that our calendar is wrong, perhaps by a great many years. Maybe "the Middle Ages never happened"?
Steve (my husband who is a scientist) found the book to be interesting, but not convincing. Most of the theories are coming from non-historians, and none of the evidence is complete or water-tight. The author is a mathematician, and he cites the work of a Russian mathematician and other scientists, who are working outside their fields with this theory that traditional historical accounts are wrong.
Still it's an interesting challenge to historians to re-examine their accepted wisdom, and prove the accuracy or errors in these claims.