Giving Credit

Interesting reading on Ars about invisibility cloaks as used by ancient Romans. I found this assessment by a modern physicist a bit arrogant

"I doubt that the builders of structures in that era intentionally designed their buildings to be earthquake resistant, or even that they were able to unconsciously evolve their designs over time to make them more secure—the time scales seem too short. I could imagine, however, that there might be a sort of 'natural selection' that occurred, where megastructures built with inadvertent earthquake cloaking might have survived longer than their counterparts, allowing us to see their remains now."

Recorded history is not complete, accurate or unbiased. Who is to say that the ancients did not have a good understanding of wave propagation, mechanics and material science. Maybe they had the opportunity to ponder long and hard about phenomenon in the natural world, arrive at logical conclusions that they could extrapolate in different ways. They were not living a digitized, always on, connected existence, they were not subject to information and sensory overload the way we are. So perhaps they used their time and intelligence in ways we cannot even comprehend. Maybe we should give credit where it is due.