Ancient Greece as almost there. (Antikythera mechanism)

[Gooders1002]

The Greeks invented the Antikythera mechanism. 100 years and there would have been were we are now. Thank you Christianity for fucking us over again.

[Anomalocaris]

The Greeks invented the Antikythera mechanism. 100 years and there would have been were we are now. Thank you Christianity for fucking us over again.

I mean this in the most complimentary kind of way: You are full of shit.

Find somthing like the greek quivalent of the Titanic (which sank 100 years ago) and we will talk.

[Shell B]

Yeah, I've read a lot about this thing. It is certainly not an ancient computer. I mean, look at it.

[Anomalocaris]

Indeed, the particular device may have been a parlor trick gadget of the sort that indeed didn't really die out in the middle ages, at least in the byzentine empire.

Several 100 years passed after Antikythera device went in for the drink before Christianity took over Europe. Yet despite being without christianity, the Greeks exhibited no evidence of having realized and utilized the potential of gearing of the type in Antikythera. A society has to be able to recognize and be prepared to utilize a technology to advance. The Greeks were not. So like the Arabs of 9th centuries who made similar mechanisms, the Greeks were not on the verge of modernity like the Europeans of 15th century were.

Also, recent studies suggest even in its limited scope in 1st century BC, Antikythera device was not a recent Greek advancement. It may have represent barbylonian technology and astronomical expertise that dated back many more centuries further.

So in all those centuries it didn't lead to modernity. Why would christinaity that came 4 centuries later be singled out as the barrier between Antikythera technology and modernity?

[Tobie]

There's a surprising amount of cases where the greeks had a potentially revolutionary piece of technology, yet failed to realise it's potential beyond a toy. For example, the aelophile ( or steam engine ) was known to the greeks at least as early as 50 C.E.

[downbeatplumb]

The story goes that Hero the inventor of the steam engine explained to the king what they could do. The king put his arm around Hero and said "yes but what would the slaves do?" so it went no further.

Strangley this king prefered his workforce over technology.

[Justtristo]

I would agree with Dr Richard Carrier along with other scholars, that the Classical civilization was almost at the cusp of a scientific revolution or already gotten to that stage and were progressing more slowly than the Western Europeans did in the 17th and 18th centuries. An industrial revolution would have followed naturally from a scientific revolution. Because for example; the Romans would have had a lot of uses for steam engines (mining for instance).

However a combination of both a 50 year civil war, followed by an economic depression and the rise of superstitions such as Christianity (although there were other forms) resulted in the decline of science in the Greco-Roman world. This decline along with the loss of so much scientific work written back then, which was helped by Early Christians disinterested in science.

Western Europeans in my opinion needed to wean themselves off the total dependence on the Bible and the Church for answers to questions they might have, in order for science to re-develop in Europe and for the scientific revolution to occur. People like Thomas Aquinas helped to do this process by advocating that reason overruled divine revelation (in fact the New Testament actually argues the former).

[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.