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Anonymous
history of science & technology discussion 2017-07-10 01:11:14 Post No. 3062379
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history of science & technology discussion 2017-07-10 01:11:14 Post No. 3062379
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We've all heard the meme about how Christianity repressed one thousand years of technology.
But this got me wondering: what are some times when technology actually was repressed in a serious way that prevented it from growing for a long, long time? Whether it be a religious reason or a political one.
I have an additional question, but this is a little harder to convey. Do you think the overall development of science and technology progressed "logically"? Imagine if Newton never existed. Do you think someone in his place would have also come to the same ideas that created modern physics? Do you think Newton's laws of physics could have easily been discovered in the past if not for science being repressed ever?
Another example I can think of is this: one of the biggest anachronism I know about is the supposed steam engine that existed in ancient rome (called the aeolipile). Do you think that, logically, steam power should have been discovered by the time of the roman empire's height?
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>>3062379
>We've all heard the meme about how Christianity repressed one thousand years of technology.
A meme invented by Protestants to make Catholics look bad, which was co-opted by atheists to make all Christians look bad.
The truth is that the first country on Earth to systematically construct centers of mass-education and research was arguably the first truly western country: The Frankish Kingdom of Charlemagne.
Throughout the entire Roman Empire there was only a single educational institution: the Academy at Athens, where Aristocrats sent their sons to what was essentially a bickering cadre of ideologues with no rigorous, systematic process for quantifying knowledge. Getting ahead in Roman times meant having the right family, and one of Plato's principle critiques of Athenian democracy was that uneducated people are not fit to run a democracy.
During the middle ages, somebody who got his engineering or medical degree at a Catholic university in France could take that degree anywhere else in Europe and find work in that profession. The true knowledge revolution only gets under way well into the Christian era, as hermitages gradually mutate over time into monasteries, and then into universities.
Prior to this knowledge was the province of bickering, competitive pagan temples who jealously horded whatever knowledge they had, and transmitted it orally rather than wrote it down, which meant that it was completely impermanent, and when a society suffered a downswing, a potentially huge amount of knowledge could have been lost. This stopped happening in the Christian era when these new fangled inventions called "books" meant that if the vikings came and wiped out all the monks and took all the valuables, the next batch of monks sent by the church could just find the books (which the vikings ignored or disdained) and pick right up where the previous generation left off.
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>>3062379
Japan's era of isolation
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>>3062379
Why do we have to talk about fedora memes?
Why not talk about how iron smelting was discovered or innovations in ship building?
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>>3062552
The Muslims did this first though
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>>3065412
Yes, but once the Mongols steamrolled into town that line was cut, never to truly recover.
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>If only the ancient Greeks had discovered the concept of "0" we would have had nuclear power in the 1800s
This meme is bullshit, right?
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