Edit. To everyone. I'm talking about scientific method, and its consequences.
The cornerstone for wildest and greatest What Ifs. We have pre Hellenistic Greek states, Hellenistic Egypt and Persia, China and India with their ~5,000 year old civilizations.
And not a single of them went on the road of science and technology that would lead to scientific method and modernism. Hellenistic age is most notorious, they almost had steam engine, we know they were capable of creating intricate clockwork mechanisms, and any of a not so small number of schools of phylosophy might have stumbled upon science.
If we are talking about non destructive PODs, I can number a larger number of AHs where first STL interstellar ships are launched before 1,000 AD, than those in which the world is worse than in OTL.
How come in the history of humanity only West Europian capitalist-feudal Catholic civilization discovered science and technology? (Please no semantics, its very easly to see what I want to say.)
Ideas, speculations, links and book reccomendations...