NavList:

Guus Decker, you wrote:
"The article tells for the first time in history they find a Sunstone on the plotting desk from a ship wreck from 1592."

As you can imagine, identifying the "plotting desk" in a 400-year-old shipwreck may be a tricky matter! But CALLING some location the "plotting desk" is an easy way to create belief through the power of suggestion.

This was an English wreck. The fact that there are exactly ZERO written sources in English describing this interesting phenomenon from that period or even a mere century later when early modern English science was flourishing (Newton and all that) is a little disturbing.

The biggest problem with this discovery in my opinion is that that there are as many centuries between the year 2013 and the date of this wreck as there are between the date of the wreck and the period when the Norse supposedly used sunstones. A gap of FOUR HUNDRED YEARS is not exactly contemporary evidence. It would be a bit like someone 300 years from now finding a book on lunars in the library of a 19th century navigator and then concluding that Columbus could have used lunars to cross the Atlantic in 1492.

That crystal would have been an attractive stone 400 years ago. I think they have found an early paperweight.

-FER

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