Earlier Development of Science

The premise is simple, what are some conceivable areas of science where development could happen a lot earlier. Obviously things such as quantum mechanics would have to wait for their pre-requisite knowledge and technology.

To start off I'd like to suggest genetics or at least hereditary studies; its amazing to me that no one published a systematic study of inheritance until Gregor Johann Mendel in 1866. This was something that could've easily been done within a few plant life cycles and would've had a massive impact on selective breeding in agriculture in contrast to OTL's poorly understood methods of selective breeding.

Marketing and psychology: both social sciences that in the right environment could've blossomed. I think it wouldn't be hard in any sufficiently large market with guilds/institutions that retained and taught both sciences.

Anyways, what's your opinion?
 
Oh. Can you elaborate?

I read Cosmos after watching the Neil deGrasse-Tyson miniseries couple of years ago, so I don’t remember all the details, but IIRC, Sagan basically argued that the philosophers of the Ionian city-states in what’s now Turkey, had a worldview that was a lot more conducive to technological development than the Aristotelian school, which was more internally oriented and dominated philosophical discourse on the Greek mainland. He basically suggested that if for some reason Aristotle had been suppressed and the Ionian Greeks had been allowed to continue with their exploration of technology uninterrupted, then the splitting of the atom probably would have occurred some time in the 15th or 16th Century.
 
The intellectual history in Sagan's Cosmos is pretty much all at least a bit rubbish, but the parts surrounding the pre-Socratics (‘Ionians’), Plato, and Aristotle are especially awful. It has no connection to history, instead having lazily shoe-horned some moralising pap that has no relevance to what it purports to talk about.

Learning history from Sagan is a bit like learning astronomy from a creationist, I suppose: not all of it may be wrong, but it's always distorted through an agenda-driven lens. In Sagan's case, there is always an over-arching narrative of a grand battle of science/empiricism, democracy, and freedom, against mysticism tyranny, oppression, etc. Because of this, there is no nuance, as the identification of scientific and social progress (as specifically conceived by Western democracies, naturally) is axiomatic, needs no justification, and cannot be challenged in any way.

Hence, Sagan simply lies about thinkers like Plato and Aristotle (as well as misrepresenting pretty much everyone else), because they don't at all fit into the clean dichotomy he's building. For example, Plato as an anti-empiricist, but in many ways he was an anti-traditionalist, completely contrary to Sagan's claims (his role model was executed for intellectually challenging the morality of the times, even). Aristotle's role as the arch-empiricist of the ancient world is not even acknowledged; instead, he's implied to have a soporific effect on the development of sciencedemocracyfreedom for centuries. The history reality is very inconvenient to this narrative. Scientifically, that Western science ‘woke up’ within a relatively short time of translating Aristotle's works, that Galileo was critically dependent on Aristotelian scholastics like the Oxford calculators, and key Newtonian concepts like momentum had direct precursors in scholastic commentaries on Aristotelian physics. Socially, values like universal human rights and equality before the law arose directly from the Western theological tradition, which itself was a direct lifting of Greek and especially Aristotelian conceptions of ethics, interpreted through a monotheistic lens, as a lot of early Christian theologians had Greek educations.

If one insists, as Sagan implicitly does, that there are only two buckets, sciencedemocracyfreedom and mysticismtyrannyoppression, and sorts every person and concept into those buckets, one inevitably gets a picture that's not even a crude caricature of historical realities. Then again, perhaps it's not so surprising of Sagan, since the production is firmly American Cold War-era.

Marketing and psychology: both social sciences that in the right environment could've blossomed. I think it wouldn't be hard in any sufficiently large market with guilds/institutions that retained and taught both sciences.
This needs a more capitalistic and debt-driven economic system to be plausible, because marketing science has no reason to exist without a consumerist culture. A lot of these things (including QM to some degree) are kind of obvious in hindsight, but can't plausibly develop on their own without either a lot of other pre-cursors or a blatant alien space bat/unicorn. ... BTW of an interesting note is that Heisenberg himself viewed Aristotelian scientific concepts are closer to QM than Newtonian ones.
 
You must wonder where the 'Alexandrian Tradition' would have led, if their library had not been burned by the Romans, then the Mullahs...
 
Advanced marketing requires both a technology level and level of prosperity suitable for it. It's no surprise that the science of modern marketing blossomed for the first time in the mid-late 19th century as a by-product of capitalism. It would be most interesting if cigarettes weren't among the first products which Victorian/post-Victorian marketing touched, considering that the market for cigarettes was so massively helped by late 19th century marketing, and in general, the tobacco industry helped influence later advertising in such a major way.

I'd be interested in finding how you could make an earlier consumer economy the way the late 19th century had developed.1
 

Deleted member 97083

I've wondered if germ theory could have been accepted decades before Louis Pasteur. Anyone have any ideas?
 
I've wondered if germ theory could have been accepted decades before Louis Pasteur. Anyone have any ideas?

The Roman scholar Varro once noted that swamps were full of miniature creatures which cause disease. He's a pretty useful link to Antiquity (which was essential in the European Renaissance) in case later people want to argue along similar lines. And once you have primitive microscopy, you can find that swamps are indeed full of nasty shit.
 

trurle

Banned
The premise is simple, what are some conceivable areas of science where development could happen a lot earlier. Obviously things such as quantum mechanics would have to wait for their pre-requisite knowledge and technology.

To start off I'd like to suggest genetics or at least hereditary studies; its amazing to me that no one published a systematic study of inheritance until Gregor Johann Mendel in 1866. This was something that could've easily been done within a few plant life cycles and would've had a massive impact on selective breeding in agriculture in contrast to OTL's poorly understood methods of selective breeding.

Marketing and psychology: both social sciences that in the right environment could've blossomed. I think it wouldn't be hard in any sufficiently large market with guilds/institutions that retained and taught both sciences.

Anyways, what's your opinion?
Optics. To be more exact, the technology to make a transparent glass and spherical lenses - for eyeglasses inially. Too many would-be ancient researchers were handicapped in their most productive age by poor vision. Also, optics allows some critically important scientific tools to be made - magnification glass, telescope, microscope, solar furnace (good for alchemy). With some advances, theodolite and precision sextant are also possible. Roman Empire has produced glass beads transparent enough for lenses (it was luxury product yet far from exotic), but failed to develop an applied optics IOTL.
I suspect with magnifying glasses, the early development of microbiology is also guaranteed.
 
Optics. To be more exact, the technology to make a transparent glass and spherical lenses - for eyeglasses inially. Too many would-be ancient researchers were handicapped in their most productive age by poor vision. Also, optics allows some critically important scientific tools to be made - magnification glass, telescope, microscope, solar furnace (good for alchemy). With some advances, theodolite and precision sextant are also possible. Roman Empire has produced glass beads transparent enough for lenses (it was luxury product yet far from exotic), but failed to develop an applied optics IOTL.
I suspect with magnifying glasses, the early development of microbiology is also guaranteed.
And with earlier advanced optics astronomy could make great leaps forward as well, if the supporters of the aristarchian heliocentric world view among ancient astronomers would have been able to prove stellar parallaxes, their inability to do so was the main scientific argument against the heliocentric model, it might have been adopted before the geocentric model became doctrinally enshrined by the church to an extant that it was considered heresy to question it.
 
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And with earlier advanced optics astronomy could make great leaps forward as well, if the supporters of the aristarchian heliocentric world view among ancient astronomers would have been able to prove stellar parallaxes, their inability to do so was the main scientific argument against the heliocentric model, it might have been adopted before the geocentric model became doctrinally enshrined by the church to an extant that it was considered heresy to question it.
This latter narrative seems to be more prevalent among Protestant-dominated cultures, perhaps because Biblical literalism grew chiefly out of Protestantism, and hence even the atheists in those societies expect the past Christians to think in those terms. However, the historical interpretive focus of the Bible was symbolic and eschatological, and the literal meaning was always the least important, and the first to be eschewed if natural philosophy (i.e. science) disagrees. The literalist development was apparently a reaction to the empirical successes of scientific explanations, and so the Bible itself became to be seen as needing to compete with scientific objectivity.

Nothing like that existed before the scientific developments, probably because the kind of mental framework to focus on scientifically objective facts as the foremost value was not prevalent. The Church certainly had practice disposing of overly literal readings in light of accepted science (an obvious example being the apparent Biblical endorsement of a flat Earth).

The geocentric model was not ‘enshrined by the church’ to any relevant degree. Even by the time of Galileo's censure, there were cardinals that personally argued in favour of Galileo's models, such as Cardinal Orsini in regards to Galileo's (flawed) tidal proof of heliocentric. And his major opponent in the Inquisition, Cardinal Bellarmine, who wrote the famous ‘foolish and absurd in philosophy and formally heretical’, had a very clear meaning: your claims are not backed by science, so we're not going to change our interpretation of the Bible for you. And he was mostly right, both in the sense that the scientific community did not accept Galileo's arguments, and in the retrospective sense that modern science understands many of Galileo's arguments to just be wrong.

But both implicit in the quote, and pointed at more in-depth in Bellarmine's judgment, is that primacy of scientific argument—that the Church will not change its interpretation of the Bible based on bad science, and that's what makes it heretical. Very notably, not only did people like Cardinal Orsini exist, but there Copernicus was re-published within a few years, reworded only minutely to be clear that it is a hypothetical, with the approval of the Church. And arguing in hypothetical before the matter is settled scientifically is actually what the Church originally asked Galileo to do.

One can definitely argue that the Church treated unjustly—in the sense that modern Western societies are used to be able to publish satirical works that depict powerful political leaders as morons and not be censured. But that conflict is distinct from scientific merit per se.
 
"...would have been able to prove stellar parallaxes"

IMHO, that's a long, long way down the line, as the shift is really, really small. OTL's first *validated* parallax was in ~1838 using a custom instrument. Also, until photography, it was very difficult to spot 'proper motion' within an observational period of a decade or so.
 

trurle

Banned
"...would have been able to prove stellar parallaxes"

IMHO, that's a long, long way down the line, as the shift is really, really small. OTL's first *validated* parallax was in ~1838 using a custom instrument. Also, until photography, it was very difficult to spot 'proper motion' within an observational period of a decade or so.
I agree the parallaxes would be difficult to detect early. Proper motion was another beast - you can reduce required precision with longer observation arc. Initial detection of proper motion was with the observation arc of nearly 2000 years.
 
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