This article leaves out or does not stress enough some important information:
_How long was the experiment conducted for?
_How many people have been monitored after the experiment?
_Did the people go back to the previous diet, once the experiment was over?
To the first question, one can find hidden in the article: "Willett faulted the experiment because many of the patients were on the special diets for relatively brief periods - many were being released from the mental institutions. But about a quarter of the patients remained on the diet for a year or longer".
If people stayed on this diet for a year or so max of their 65+ years of life, this data seems utterly non-relevant to support either thesis. It is fundamental to know if the people (and how many) continued with the new diet for a sizable portion of their life. In any case the results should at least not include people that have been on the diet for just a couple of months.
It is hard to believe that a diet of low fat for just a random year in somebody's life (~1.5% of life span) would make a big difference against the remaining 98% of life spent eating fat. The question whether a low fat diet is better than a high fat one is very intriguing, but this data, as presented in the article, seem inconclusive.
Infinite is a big word :) . As explained above, the extra spacial dimensions would need to be compact, which implies them being finite in size. Perhaps the simplest example of compact manifold is the circle: you can imagine one extra dimension to be closed on itself. Going around the circular dimension one circumference length, you will find yourself where you started. The size of the dimension then refers to the characteristic size of the circle, i.e. the circumference.
Yes, I read that, and of course it is possible. Nevertheless the fact that the centralized government was unstable and news would not travel too fast makes me think that it is a bit strange nobody tried it in 150 years. The maps of France they present also shows that lots of territories would not recognize the French crown for long time. Those could have developed the technology and either take over the throne or give the crown one more reason to develop the technology themselves.
Maybe the line is thin, but given the long times it seems strange to me that there has not been at least an attempt to this (at least to my knowledge, but they don't cite any such event).
I see a possible problem with this theory: in few words, according to the authors the French and Scots did not adopt the longbow for fear of rebellion. Still the nobles participated to the very battles that saw them being defeated by the English and their longbow. If the longbow was cheap and relatively easy to adopt, a noble aspiring to the crown would have been able to develop the technology independently from the (unstable) central government and have an even easier road to glory against their own technologically inferior king.
I admittedly did not read carefully the whole paper, but this possibility does not seem to be addressed.
To the first question, one can find hidden in the article: "Willett faulted the experiment because many of the patients were on the special diets for relatively brief periods - many were being released from the mental institutions. But about a quarter of the patients remained on the diet for a year or longer".
If people stayed on this diet for a year or so max of their 65+ years of life, this data seems utterly non-relevant to support either thesis. It is fundamental to know if the people (and how many) continued with the new diet for a sizable portion of their life. In any case the results should at least not include people that have been on the diet for just a couple of months.
It is hard to believe that a diet of low fat for just a random year in somebody's life (~1.5% of life span) would make a big difference against the remaining 98% of life spent eating fat. The question whether a low fat diet is better than a high fat one is very intriguing, but this data, as presented in the article, seem inconclusive.