Help me get some perspective, Veeky Forums...

>Leaps and bounds
>Leaps and bounds
>Leaps and bounds

>Lie and lie
>Lie and lie
>Lie and lie

Stop sperging out over nothing. The average modern engineer would be considered the brightest man alive back then. The quadratic formula was mystical knowledge from the Orient until the late medieval era. Hell, I believe you could count on one hand the number of people who could do linear equations at all in any city that wasn't a royal capital.

Once again, you're placing undue importance over theory rather than practice. There's no purpose in doing quadratic formulas outside of math cults and the such.

The reason technology usually progresses is due to war, or economic incentive. There was no reason to develop computers better than the abacus because you had operations that weren't spread over the globe, and if they were, it could easily suffice through writing something down and mailing it/delivering it.

Once again, I think you're one of those people who romanticize theory. The fact that people were doing complicated math in Greece was due to cults like the Pythagorians, who put religious weight on math. This is your brain on Aristotelian thought.

None of these "explanations" address the fact that the greeks invented the steam engine but never used it for anything.

You couldn't be more wrong.

Because of freedom, literally. Science blossomed in Europe because of the cultural climate of freedom which encouraged intelligent men to do their own thing.

Of course there's also the whole IQ thing, but I'm talking about Europe vs other high IQ places like China.

China had a "centralization of thought and information" and they barely evolved in 4000 years.

It may have just been a thought experiment. The aeolipile would be akin to something like Foucault's pendulum or the antikythera. Single to no use inventions which were either used to test a phenomenon that a thinker believe existed or to study all their own due to a phenomenon they witnessed.

I don't think I'm wrong. I think your "freedom" argument is a little childish, as I think that most large scale developments were done on a state-sponsored level in Europe by the time we saw this "blossom".

>I don't think I'm wrong.
No shit, you're another braindead leftist, who believes that everything good in the world is due to government spending.

Go back to leftypol you shill.

Okay, I think you're a little razzled because I said state.

I don't believe that, as placed by my last posts
I wholeheartedly believe that yes, individual agency plays a huge role in invention, but as anyone knows, if there is no incentive, there is no movement. There is no reason, in the 1600's, where food was yet to be as gracious and wide a commodity as it was past the industrial revolution, that anyone with an idea could make it. Still much time was devoted to actually making sure we could survive. I say this to cover the base of "but what about muh John Brownings/muh Wilbur and Orvelle Wright."

This being said, we had both a culture of free agency and the birth of nationalism in Europe, which did spur developments for purposes of creating cogent nations and their means to project their force and authority, and the best places for them to do this was in the universities which already existed within their respective nations. Much of the optics development and steam engine development done in Napoleon's time in France was done on a state-funded level. Much firearms development was done on state funded commission, e.g Bartholomäus Girardoni, inventor of the air rifle.

Come on, you're acting like a nigger.

The universities, that I may add, were a product of the Catholic monastic tradition*

Because they had slaves.

Nobody is going to invest in a machine when you literally own flesh and bone humans. Hell the humans will even bend over and take it when you want to.

Who will want to invent anything once sex dolls become commonplace?

We will be monsters of hedonism who leave the thinking to machines.

Because they as a civilization just didn't give a shit about that type of stuff, much like how you can be really interested by one subject in school and bored to tears by another, or how no one outside the british commonwealth gives a shit about cricket

...

an efficient steam engine is a whole world of difference from the aeolipile. the first steam engines were used in 18th century britain for mining coal. these first engines were very energy intensive, but since miners were extracting cheap coal in abundance they had no problem powering them. This is the context in which the steam engine evolved. Over the course of the 18th century, a series of mechanics steadily refined the engine through trial and error to make it more and more efficient. At a certain point, the engine became efficient enough that engineers started to see their value. Innovators started using them for textile mills. The other critical development was the miner's realization that steam engines can be used to power carts full of coal short distances over wooden (and soon enough metal) rolling stock. This built on earlier innovations in mining cart stock which had been in use since the middle ages in Germany and had been improved over the years. Again, since coal was very abundant and cheap, the original steam-powered cars could afford to be very inefficient. It also helped that Britain had an abundance of minerals so that metal rolling stock could soon be produced in abundance. This all culminated in Watt's steam engine, which made trains a lot more economically viable. By the 1830s you have a huge ass railway boom, which fuels industrialisation, which fuels more booms, scientific research etc. etc.
So, you see, OP, there were many critical factors that had to be there before you had an economically viable steam engine that could be produced en masse. You have the geographical coincidences of Britain, with its coal and its relatively short distances to the sea. You also have the fact that Britain was the best economy in Europe and had the most innovative agriculture, whose profits the landed classes eagerly invested in to commerce and industry.

cont.
(roads and canals in the beginning, which further helped to create the conditions for a mass market and cheap coal for which the railway boom would be built off of)

retarded post is retarded
>they barely evolved in 4000 years.
>what is the medieval economic revolution
>during which printing, water clocks, gun powder, the astrolabe, paper making, paper money, firearms/artillery, huge canal building, proto-industrial production all got invented

No. Universities were a product of Medieval corporatism, of which sometimes included student unions attending cathedral schools, but not always.

The Arab world's intellectual environment was not centralized. Almost no major thinker in that period stayed in one place all his educational life, with many traveling thousands of miles when switching teachers and disciplines, and some even making a living out of being itinerant merchant-students. That was the real secret to both the Islamic Golden Age and the European Renaissance/Enlightenment that followed after: universal academia. It didn't matter where or to whom you were born. A 12th century Berber from the mountains of Algeria can go study in Cordoba, then Cairo, then Damascus, then Merv, and then find work as a private scholar in India. Likewise a Pole can go study in Krakow, then Bologna, then Paris, and end up working in Scandinavia as a teacher.

The modern world has globalized this phenomenon now, as well as found ways to draw unprecedented amounts of funding from the richest, most efficient economies ever known in human history, all the while spreading education to a larger percentage of the planet than ever before.

and by "mining coal" i mean pumping water out of mines. before this the only way to pump mines was using the archimedes screw

>Cordoba, then Cairo, then Damascus, then Merv,

Wouldn't these be centralized areas, though?

Daniel 12:4 “But you, Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book until the time of the end; many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.”

It's clearly the time of the end.

Not even. Each city would have several mosques and private homes out of which a variety of teacher-student circles congregated. There was rarely just one school, if you could call them that, and there was little to no centralized oversight of them. They operated more or less the same way Medieval European universities did.

Perhaps I misused centralized then. Perhaps a better word would be concentrated?

knowledge has always been increasing. only exception is when a civilization collapses and its people enter a dark age

That works better, but then there's no difference to Europe in that regard either.

If anything history shows us the opposite. When power in a large area is centralized to a single individual or a small group of individuals they often feel threatened by scientific progress and hamper it or outright destroy it. China had invented mechanical clocks 3000 years ago, for example, but the emperor had them all destroyed.

In Europe post-Rome, however, there wasn't a single leader you had to gain the favor of to get started on your research. If Portugal's king didn't want to find your expedition then Spain might have been up for it, and if England's king didn't want to fund your research you could always try and take your business to France.

one word: enlightenment

>China had invented mechanical clocks 3000 years ago, for example, but the emperor had them all destroyed.
If they were all destroyed you have no proof that they ever existed, sounds like China was first bullshit to me.

>Specifically I'm asking because lots of times when I was in high school I'd do math and I'd say to the teacher 'Hey, that's pretty hard' and she'd reply 'You're still learning things that they knew in Ancient Greece' and now I that I have some understanding of calculus (I'm not doing a math major, I just read up on stuff in my spare time)... it doesn't seem like such a huge leap of logic. So why did it take so long?
Archimedes actually figured out the basics of Precalculus in ancient Greece but nobody at the time really understood its potential so it wasn't developed further. Newton and others developed calculus to explain and assist their discoveries in physics. Also they had two things the ancient Greeks didn't have and are surprisingly big leaps for a society that doesn't have them: symbolic algebra, which makes everything in math a million times easier,, and an belief that everything in physics can/should be expressed through math.

And that guy Newton who invented how natural forces work

If you bothered to study the passage, the inference is that knowledge is increasing at an ever increasing rate; i.e. exponentially.

Which is what is happening now.

Which means we are in the end days.

But knowledge has always been increasing exponentially. Look at how long it took people just to develop civilization compared to getting from there to the Roman Empire and from there to the scientific revolution.

No, no it has not.

We've forgotten more than Pythagoras knew.

>barely evolved in 4000 years
"China" was a bunch of bronze-age clans wearing tiger skins 4000 years ago.

>science
>incredible

>Science
>intelligence

I'll try.

Attaching a kettle to a cart and boiling water in it is not enough to make a steam engine.

It requires knowledge of energy, thermodynamics, machines, and the mathematics of calculus, all of which the ancient Greeks and Romans hadn't yet developed. They still believed in the theory of the four elements in physics. Which is not to say that, if they knew what they were looking for, and really put effort into it, they wouldn't discover it. The ancient Greeks were geniuses.

You also require capital, entrepreneurship and extensive trade to even need trains and locomotives. The ancients distrusted the merchant and above all, the money lender. Aristotle wrote that agriculture and conquest were more dignified means of acquiring wealth than commerce and money lending. If the Greeks thought like that, then imagine the Romans then... Why trade with another civilization when you can make war with them and steal their stuff?

Another thing. Their productivity wasn't nearly as high as it was in the modern era. In the modern era, mining and industry could produce enough to fill a train with goods. In the Greek and Roman eras? I guess in the harvest season, but then the train would remain stationed the rest of the year. Animals and slaves were enough to transport all their production. Necessity is the mother of invention.

>Why trade with another civilization when you can make war with them and steal their stuff?
I'm not implying that they didn't trade btw. Just that it wasn't the primary means of aquiring wealth, and to be a merchant was considered ignoble by the ruling class.

t. butthurt and unemployed English major

I'm not an English major.

>How come the last two centuries have been so incredible in terms of scientific advancement?

The advancements in communications and global transportation sped up the rate of scientific exchange exponentially, so advancements that used to be made over the course of several generations could be made within one. But what really set things off was the idea of innovation in of itself being profitable for the economy and the nation. Before, innovation was mostly appreciated within academia and had little application for most people in their daily lives. The Greek steam machine was little more than a toy to others in its time, and even in the 18th century foreign visitors observing the work of chemists and physicists in Europe just considered their discoveries as mere amusements.

That all changed with the Industrial Revolution, when advancements suddenly had great monetary value or offered a military power some decisive edge, and all of a sudden everyone was in a race to discover and invent the next best thing.

>ctrl+f
>church
>0 results
>ctrl + f
>religion
>0 results

Wew. I'll go ahead and tip my fedora, but come on... Stifling critical thinking was a top priority of basically every religion on the planet. Critical thinking was key to scientific advancement.

Also, transportation and the speed of information play a huge roll.

...

So you are unemployed and butthurt?

Doesn't useful steam engines also require far better metallurgy than the ancients had access to?

It requires a lot of different technologies to put together any kind of modern invention. You can't simply go back in time with an instruction manual to build a machine and expect that they would be able to produce the parts, let alone assemble them.

>Before, innovation was mostly appreciated within academia and had little application for most people in their daily lives...18th century foreign visitors observing the work of chemists and physicists in Europe just considered their discoveries as mere amusements.
don't underestimate the role that aristocratic and royal patronage had on the advancement of science. A lot of early modern science had funding from enthusiastic noble and amateur scientists. This whole scientific culture is why academic science eventually took root in Europe.

>That all changed with the Industrial Revolution, when advancements suddenly had great monetary value or offered a military power some decisive edge, and all of a sudden everyone was in a race to discover and invent the next best thing.
Partially true. The first industrial revolution owed a lot more to incremental changes in technology and mechanics who thought up ways to improve production. It also needed an endless stream of entrepreneurs willing build businesses from the new technology. In the beginning, it wasn't a given that a technology was useful to a business. Tons of entrepreneurs failed because of erratic economic cycles or miscalculations, potentially discrediting a innovation. It's only until the mid-century and, most importantly, during the second industrial revolution that academic and commercial science started to be used consciously (the German system, heavily subsidized by the state, excelled in the second industrial revolution and that's why they overtook all of europe before WWI).
Overall great post, though.
is also great

The enlightenment followed by progress snowballing onwards

I'm not him, but no we haven't.

You will find the answer in war.

Metallurgy is about war
Carbon is about war, wood carbine, coal carbine, liquid oil carbine.
When metallurgy and carbine came to together, you could make pressure tanks to hold steam. Steam pressure could then turn a turbine. And then all hell broke lose. Stop masterbaiting.

Digital is war.
Quantum is war
Inter dimensional transition gates is war.

That's only your ignorance of what was lost speaking.