Scientists, and those who know too well the vagaries of fate (the two are naturally not mutually exclusive), usually wince when they see the careless use of the word "never", or variations thereof. Somewhere there is a force, or an angel, or whatever you believe in, that grins with triumph every time some hapless human says: "Never!" and promptly lays plans to prove him/her wrong.

Remember the Titanic? The ship that even God could not sink? (and still engineers think they're invincible, but let's not get started on that).

Remember Lord Kelvin? Not for his temperature scale (the coldest possible temperature is zero kelvin, or -273 degrees Celsius). The world-famous scientist said: "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."... Uh oh, wrong again.

And then there's the most embarrassing one yet: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." That was Thomas Watson, who was chairman of IBM, in 1943.

So let us not make the same mistake, and rather err on the side of caution by saying that although it may be possible in future, and perhaps there are some occurrences in the past, but it sure does not seem at the moment as though history is objective.

Hmm. But we are discussing "objective" as in the opposite of "subjective" and surely only persons can be objective? History is not a person, so it can neither be objective nor subjective. At this point one should stop - the statement is proven - history can not be objective. However, we know what is implied: the history RECORD can never be objective.

Why is the probability so small that history records are objective? (You can tell I have been zapped by that angel listening for the pronouncement of "never".or maybe it's a crow). There is that old adage that the winners write the history books, meaning they will always claim that Right was on their side, they were doing it for God, or even just that it seemed like a good idea at the time. The losers will claim that they were oppressed, their God was holier than the other God, or, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

In all seriousness: in the case of ancient history there are simply too few facts remaining in any form to be sure that we see the whole picture.

Even in the case of more recent history, e.g. the Middle Ages, it is hard to find evidence of "what really happened" and very likely that unwanted or politically dangerous facts have been omitted from records, not to mention the twisting of records

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