RE: Ancient Greece as almost there. (Antikythera mechanism)
June 8, 2012 at 3:03 pm
(This post was last modified: June 8, 2012 at 3:05 pm by Anomalocaris.)
Several things seems to contradict you:
1. Industrial revolution does not necessarily follow from scientific revolution. The key to the industrial revolution is a widespread separation of manufacturing process from the constraint of animal muscle power. This separation is both a social and a technological one. Neither the social nor the technological side appears to be in place in Greece or Rome. Romans may have seemed to be able to use steam engines. But they didn't have it. Furthermore, although they did have somewhat comparable labor saving technology in the form of sophisticated water wheels, the technology appears to have remained localized and did not spread across the empire. So we might think Romans were socially unprepared to embrace widespread application of labor saving technologies such as steam engine or advanced water wheels.
2. 50 years of civil war hardly seems like a good excuse when they had 200 years of largely christianity-free relative peace before that during which they appears to not have made much progress.
3. Romans and Greeks didn't have much in the way of algebra. Algebra would appear to be quite fundamental to any genuine scientific revolution. We had the Indians and the Arabs several centuries after the end of the classical world in the west to thank for this advancement.
1. Industrial revolution does not necessarily follow from scientific revolution. The key to the industrial revolution is a widespread separation of manufacturing process from the constraint of animal muscle power. This separation is both a social and a technological one. Neither the social nor the technological side appears to be in place in Greece or Rome. Romans may have seemed to be able to use steam engines. But they didn't have it. Furthermore, although they did have somewhat comparable labor saving technology in the form of sophisticated water wheels, the technology appears to have remained localized and did not spread across the empire. So we might think Romans were socially unprepared to embrace widespread application of labor saving technologies such as steam engine or advanced water wheels.
2. 50 years of civil war hardly seems like a good excuse when they had 200 years of largely christianity-free relative peace before that during which they appears to not have made much progress.
3. Romans and Greeks didn't have much in the way of algebra. Algebra would appear to be quite fundamental to any genuine scientific revolution. We had the Indians and the Arabs several centuries after the end of the classical world in the west to thank for this advancement.
