Why didn't the ancient world discover science?

That's a gross oversimplification and you know it. Catholic Italy was where the Renaissance started, Iberia produced some beautiful pieces of literary work in the 16th century, France moved to absolutism and was known as one of the most influential and powerful countries in Europe under Louis XIV, and northern countries could be just as bigoted as southern ones: Descartes eventually had to leave the Netherlands after being accused of "doubting God."

Moreso even I'd say.
Puritans are not known for being the life of the party.
 

Keenir

Banned
Sure the Renaissance began in Italy and art, literature and architecture flourished. But the themes of the work were not incompatible with the Catholic church. When Galileo came along, his attempt to interject scientific thought was, to put it mildly, not well received.

yeah, that's because he quoted the Pope - and put those quotes in the mouth of a literary character named "Simpleton"
 
The Puritans may not have been the life of the party, but they left the legacy of increased literacy. Given the duration of their control, their impact a generation later could be considered "one step back, two steps forward." And many Puritans regarded religious artwork as symbols of the Catholic and Anglican churches, and thus almost sacrilegious. By the early 1700's, Puritanism would wane, and the stage was set for an the Age of Reason and an upcoming industrial revolution.
 
One problem is that individual advances in scientific thought in the so-called ancient world were just that -- individual. There wasn't the kind of cross-fertilization among proto-scientific thinkers that allowed them to build on each other's work in a real-time environment. Advances occurred in isolation, in both geography and time. For modern scientific methods to be discovered and disseminated would require better communication — an early postal system, for example — and the much earlier discovery of printing that would encourage the manufacture of books, journals, and monographs that would have the effefct of making scientific thinkers known to each other and create new scientists. Plus, of course, a social system that encouraged, or at least allowed, the freedom of inquiry required.
 
What makes you think it's Rome that's the problem?

Apart from their terminal effect on Archimedes, I noted that people like Archimedes were normally employed by Hellenistic states, often to work on military technology (Archimedes on catapults etc.). The expansion of Rome removed these states and also the need for such research.

One problem is that individual advances in scientific thought in the so-called ancient world were just that -- individual. There wasn't the kind of cross-fertilization among proto-scientific thinkers that allowed them to build on each other's work in a real-time environment. Advances occurred in isolation, in both geography and time.

However, two of Archimedes surviving works, the Cattle Problem and the Method of Mechanical Theorems, were written in the form of letters to Eratosthenes at Alexandria. Clearly, printing would have helped but scholars were exchanging their ideas.
 

Keenir

Banned
Apart from their terminal effect on Archimedes,

so you're going to blame Rome for an apocryphal event that may or may not have ever happened, and if it did happen was entirely the fault of Archimedes and two random soldiers??

I noted that people like Archimedes were normally employed by Hellenistic states, often to work on military technology (Archimedes on catapults etc.). The expansion of Rome removed these states and also the need for such research.

the military expansion of Rome removed the need to work on military technology??
 
the military expansion of Rome removed the need to work on military technology??

Apparently! I think that the Romans had standard size catapults. Thus you do not need to solve cubic equations etc. when changing the size. Do you know of anyone employed by Rome as a mathematician or physicist?
 
Apparently! I think that the Romans had standard size catapults. Thus you do not need to solve cubic equations etc. when changing the size. Do you know of anyone employed by Rome as a mathematician or physicist?

Do you know about anyone employed by any Hellenistic state employed in these jobs?

The Romans employed experts in their military and after the first century AD, they trained their own. In a way, that may have killed the link bertween science and the military which drove a lot of Hellenistic progress - they had pushed the catapult design envelope as far as they could, and that was that. Roman soldiers for centuries built machines that got better in terms of user-friendliness and simplicity, but performance did not change. Look at the onager, for example - everyone calls it a regression, but it does exactly what a ballista does with none of the maintenance and tuning problems.

More generally, I suspect the problem is part social and part cultural. Rome had a thriving culture of engineering, but it decoupled from science, and it looks like that was largely the wish of the philosophers. in the second century BC, Alexandrian philosophers were highly respected for calculating the circumference of earth or building engines. By the third century AD, they were highly respected for speculating on the relationship of the spheres and the limits of human wisdom, while other people built even bigger engines and went to India and China. They just weren't respected as philosophers any more. That meant that, because their writings weren't intellectually respectable, a lot of it got lost while earlier philosophers, who were upper class, were lovingly maintained. It's the same bias that makes librarians try to push Shakespeare plays over modern Hollywood scripts.
 
More generally, I suspect the problem is part social and part cultural. Rome had a thriving culture of engineering, but it decoupled from science, and it looks like that was largely the wish of the philosophers. in the second century BC, Alexandrian philosophers were highly respected for calculating the circumference of earth or building engines. By the third century AD, they were highly respected for speculating on the relationship of the spheres and the limits of human wisdom, while other people built even bigger engines and went to India and China. They just weren't respected as philosophers any more. That meant that, because their writings weren't intellectually respectable, a lot of it got lost while earlier philosophers, who were upper class, were lovingly maintained. It's the same bias that makes librarians try to push Shakespeare plays over modern Hollywood scripts.

Agreed!! My initial question was whether that was a natural progression of Greek culture or whether it arose from the rise of Rome. The issue is not just catapults. We know that Hellenistic states built large experimental warships (but unfortunately we don't know exactly what they looked like). Archimedes is said to have designed at least one and much of his "theoretical" works could be relevant to this (i.e. volumes are important for floating bodies). He may also have developed the first block and tackle system.
 
To the above several posts. Yep, those are the big questions. Hellenistic civilization needed so little at times to move into Renascence.

Killing a lot of Aristotelian ideas would be necessary. The simple "heavy and light objects fall with same speed" didn't really have to wait for Galileo and 1500'es. If someone seriously pushed that argument before Rome (lets say enough time before the fall of Sicily), it would have questioned Aristotle. And someone would get the silly idea of going to balcony and testing the damn thing to disprove this madman who questions Aristotle. A basics for classical mechanics could have been developed anytime in ancient world. It would imho be of immense importance. It would prove the significance of experiment, and create a reason to start developing mathematics.

Edit. I'm starting to agree with some thoughts above. Maybe weakening and slowing Rome would have been all that's needed to give Hellenistic scholars a additional century or more, and maybe that century or more would have been sufficient...
 
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To the above several posts. Yep, those are the big questions. Hellenistic civilization needed so little at times to move into Renascence.

Killing a lot of Aristotelian ideas would be necessary. The simple "heavy and light objects fall with same speed" didn't really have to wait for Galileo and 1500'es. If someone seriously pushed that argument before Rome (lets say enough time before the fall of Sicily), it would have questioned Aristotle. And someone would get the silly idea of going to balcony and testing the damn thing to disprove this madman who questions Aristotle. A basics for classical mechanics could have been developed anytime in ancient world. It would imho be of immense importance. It would prove the significance of experiment, and create a reason to start developing mathematics.

Edit. I'm starting to agree with some thoughts above. Maybe weakening and slowing Rome would have been all that's needed to give Hellenistic scholars a additional century or more, and maybe that century or more would have been sufficient...

I think the best person to question Aristotle would have been one of his successors at the Lyceum. Strato's emphasis on direct research seems to make him a good candidate.
 
Killing a lot of Aristotelian ideas would be necessary.

Probably a good idea but is there any evidence that Aristotle's ideas were influential between shortly after his death and the publication of his works by Andronicus of Rhodes around 60 BC? After posting, I thought that I should try to find out about Greek thought (do some of you read first?) and I found in Kenny's Ancient Philosophy (page 93) the story that Aristotle's writings were kept hidden because the owners feared that someone would steal them for a library (which does illustrate why printing presses might have helped).
 
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