[TheForge] Re: How tongs came to be (Talmud)

[Mike Spencer]

Jeez, Bruce, you're talking about a text assembled in the 3rd 
century AD and written probably earlier. 

> Ummm, ah... It doesn't sound irrefutable to me!  Any of us on this
> list can see right through that argument.

Right.  But you're challenging the 3rd c. author because he failed to
to have a post-Enlightenment perspective?  Admittedly, the *current*
(2002) author, who quoted Mishnah, is writing an inspirational tract.
Attacking the logic, objectivity or scientific accuracy of the writers
of inspirational tracts, whether Christian, Jewish or from any other
major religion or tiny sect, is a fool's errand.

But you knew that.

> Over the past few years I have been reading the history of
> technology.  It's fascinating.

So you should know that the way technology was developed before, say,
the 17th century, was very different from the way it has been
developed since, say, the late 18th century.  In between those dates
fell the (so-called) Enlightenment.  In the 17th c. Newton was
discovering the inverse square law; he and Leibniz were inventing the
calculus.  And both of them (but especially Newton) were still
struggling with the conviction that theology -- for them, protestant
Christian theology -- had to precede and inform their science.  Before
the Enlightenment, in the part of the world dominated by
Judeo-Christian theology, God and, by extension, dogmatic theological
authority were the *first* principles.

> It is applied intellegence that differentiates man from animals.

Sure.  So Hooke or Boyle would observe and ask, "How did it get that
way?"  But earlier intelligent people, not excluding Newton, said,
"It got that way because God wanted it so. Why did God do that?"
That was not, in that era, zealotry but rather the default assumption
of society and prior to the *application* of intelligence.

Getting back on the ironwork topic, lets look at the original Rabbi's
assertion:

    When a blacksmith fashions a pair of tongs in the forge, the only
    way he can handle the red-hot metal is with tongs.

In Rabbi Judah's time, iron didn't come to the smith as 20' rolled
mill bars.  I doubt that it was even available as anything like the
large wrought bars produced by the indirect process under huge drop
hammers (as, e.g. in 17. c. Saugus).  Moreover, most people, including
the good Rabbi, had never been admitted to the mysteries of the
blacksmith shop.  The question of how to make tongs without prior
tongs from a lump of whatever might then have been the commercial form
of iron -- largish lumps? short fat billets?  little icicle-like
driblets as were produced in Africa?  -- was much like the
chicken-and-egg conundrum. And, in that era, "Because God made it so"
was a satisfactory explanation.


If you're keen on the history of technology, you might enjoy Neal
Stephenson's _The Baroque Cycle_, which fictionalizes very elegantly
the era of Hooke, Leibniz, Newton and Newcomen and the messy process
by which objectivity in "natural philosophy" was gradually disentangled
from theology.


- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^