Did Vikings navigate by polarized light?
nature.com
nature.com
http://www.classicreader.com/book/2886/7/
The Vikings may very well been similarly observant of their world, without resorting to sunstones.
If he was right, they lived and he got a pretty sweet saga out of the deal.
All evidence to the contrary is simply coincidental. For instance, the cathedrals and churches contemporary to the vikings: They were not planned even a little. They are simply the result of some guy saying "lets build a cathedral" and piling stones until one of the piles resulted in a cathedral that didn't fall over. Every last one is like this. And swords and armor? Those guys just put funny rocks in the fire sometimes, and hit them for the heck of it, and occasionally when things cooled off, there would be a sword there!
People who succeed through luck are more often than not credited with insight. They believe in their own skill and have no problem finding people who admire them, trust them, and follow them. If you can believe what you read, it happens on Wall Street all the time.
It is highly likely that you are guilty of the exact same sort of confirmation bias you are deriding with your diviner example. See you are going back and cherry picking a few (not at all commonplace after better alternatives existed) choice ideas, calling them good evidence, and ignoring the whole confirmation bias issue.
Edit: also intuition is also very frequently the result of lots of observation and experience on the intuiter's part. This may not be formally laid out, yet is still pretty valid. Do intuition launched ventures have a track record that is at all different (in a statistically meaningful way) than other ventures? If not, it is a valid methodology for venture creation.
Your comment seemed to say that it was implausible that success in a risky enterprise might have been entirely due to luck yet attributed by many observers to skill. All I pointed out was that it isn't just plausible, it happens all the time.
Doubly so considering the whole society built itself on the spoils of the raiders who went out on trips. Such things are not possible on just luck, there has to be an amount of repeatability there. Strongly suggested by the fact that viking raiders were so successful at returning that the ideas, treasures and people (slaves and whatnot) that they brought back fundamentally changed their society.
I said that it was likely that the saga was just a story and that the researchers were jumping to conclusions.
The article is extrapolating that the Vikings used polarizing crystals to navigate without providing archaeological evidence that the Vikings used such crystals.
Is it possible? Maybe. Is it interesting speculation? Yeah.
Does the fact that there were other contemporaneously advanced technologies like cathedrals and metal forging mean that Vikings independently discovered light polarization?
No, no matter how much you would like it. Maybe you need to chill a bit.
Instead of me chilling out, you should consider repeating the third grade and working on your basic reading comprehension skills.
2. They measured the polarization patterns under similar conditions to check whether there could be sufficient information there to do this better. They think there is.
3. they didn't yet ask subjects to estimate the position of the sun from the 'sky through a polarization filter'.
Guessing at the results of #3: I think that humans will do slightly better looking through sunglasses, and expert users could use that in navigation.
In the end, I expect that the Vikings used as many cues as they could find to navigate, just like carrier pigeons do (for carrier pigeons, the tricks mentioned in the literature include detecting the magnetic North, using polarization cues to detect the location of the clouded sun, and olfactory cues. They also have a good map of their surroundings that helps them home in on the last 30 miles or so. Because of that, a flight from say 100 miles away need not be dead-accurate in direction to hit that 30-mile radius circle where they know how to get home.
I actually do this, not the sunglasses bit (must try!), the other bit.
I'm not very good at navigating in the car. I look at a map of a city before I set out but can't remember road numbers and things. I'll see some landmarks and know from a semi-pictorial memorisation the relative location; I'll look for the sun and use that to navigate. It [mostly] works but only just - I grew up in the country where this sort of thing works better (crossing large fields, navigating woodlands, etc.).
I do estimate the location of the sun based on apparent sky brightness when it is overcast. Obviously this doesn't always work (thick cloud, heavy rain, snow on the ground). Also I've never actually done this by the stars though I reckon I could in a pinch.
DAE (does anyone else) use sun location to establish compass direction and navigate across cities by dead reckoning??