This chart's bullshit, yes, but what would a more accurate chart(s?) look like?

This chart's bullshit, yes, but what would a more accurate chart(s?) look like?

The funny thing about the chart:
If christianity held us back so much, how comes the non-christian parts of the world weren't ahead of us?
Was it coincidence that the christian Europe was the one to give birth to Enlightenment and industrial revolution?

Well "science" didn't really exist before the 1700s. Technology advanced mostly by people just trying out random shit and going with what worked, there was no scientific method or organized research.

And until the mid 19th century science was the domain of rich guys with too much free time dicking around for the sake of prestige. Sometimes a ruler would patronize them, sometimes they financed themselves. It was in the 19th century that science became a field actively pursued by various states, because it was only then that it began actually contributing towards technology rather than discovering interesting but practically useless facts.

So I would say a basically flat line up until 1850, and large growth after. Of course if you're talking about TECHNOLOGICAL advancement it'd look very different.

>Europe in dark ages for a thousand years
>finally revive our old culture
>arrive in other parts of the world
>still in stone age
Why do we have to do everything?

>the romans were as advanced as rennaissance europe
shiggy m8
romans were backward retards who lived in clay huts and ate poo

99.9% of modern science can be traced back from the West, to the Scientific Revolution, the Renaissance, the Arabs, the Romans and right back to the Greeks. There's a direct line of teacher-student or influence-influenced from Plato down to any modern STEM college professor.

The key idea to understand is that "science", as the institutional framework we know it as today, did not exist before the late 19th century. Furthermore, "science" did not exist at all before the Scientific Revolution and the wide popularization of the scientific method.
So really, the line must be separated into two:
• A history of the development of various scientific fields (chemistry, astonomy, physics, mathematics, geology, biology, optics, etc. etc.) from around the 17th on.
• A history of the development of pre-scientific knowlege, which itself is broken up into two:
○ Various philosophical stances on the character of the natural world or parts of it, dating from the dawn of history (if we're being generous) or the ancient Greeks (if we are not). The only 'scientific' disciplines that can even be identified in this category are astronomy, mathematics.
○ Technical and practical skills such as metallurgy and engineering, and their rise and fall over the years.

FYI: From the time that Aristotle and Ptolemy's text were rediscovered by Europeans around the 11th-12th centuries, until right around the Black Death, European scholars struggled with these texts and had to use translations of Arabic simplifications and explanations (really, CliffsNotes) to begin to understand and utilize them.
There's a reason we call it the "Almagest".

Alright, but why did it happen in the west?
Especially since the Arabs had access to the texts for so long? Hell, India had contact with the Arabs too.

Who knows. It wasn't even the entire 'West', just very limited circles in England, and from there it spread very slowly and with high friction and resistance whenever it went. Many southern European scholars still believed in some variation of the Tychonic system well into the Napoleonic Wars, purely out of 'philosophical' considerations.
So why Europe? Really, it was a hodgepodge of different reasons, most will probably remain unknown to us forever. From the Greek philosophical tradition of rationalism and empiricism, the availability of the movable type, the existence of decent glass to make lenses out of, to the great wealth extracted from the newly-discovered New World, to the cultural idea there are things to even 'discover' in the first place...
The general level of world civilization has been fluctuating widely but basically remaining in place for millennia before the 1600's. It was waiting for a perfect storm, or a spark, or a critical mass of enough good reasons, to finally break away into the explosion of knowledge, growth and progress we still live in today.

Above all, it's important to remember that the "correctness" of the scientific method as we know it today wasn't nearly as obvious to the people at the time. Roger Bacon was floating similar ideas out there centuries before his Francis counterpart. There was even one Arab scholar (whose name I don't remember) who suggested what was basically the scientific method a good ~200 years before that. Why didn't their ideas catch on? Who knows. Not even Baconism or Galilean ideas caught on immediately at first, you know. It took a good two or three generations before their work was truly internalized by the intelligentsia.

If you really want to harp on the "superiority" of the West, try ancient Greece. Their leap was miles more interesting and profound than any Experimental Philosophy - they basically _invented_ Philosophy and deductive reasoning in the first place.

Holy crap. tl;dr

Perfidious Hagiography.

Also, simply having "access to the text" doesn't guarantee success. I could give you the entire works of Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Pliny the Elder, Galen and Ptolemy and have you read all of it, and I very much doubt YOU could come up with anything useful. That's not even a personal offense against you specifically, It's a simple rule of numbers: literally tens of thousands of people had access to these texts at some point, and the vast majority haven't achieved anything of note.

Yeah, only Europeans did.

Retard.

Why are you insulting me?

First you ignore the point.
Then you use your made version of things.
If nothing work, you use your final argue.

always the same way of proving west civilization is failed.

...

Damnedest Hyperwar!

When is Veeky Forums going to start throwing the reddit tier fags out?

Still shit desu. It sells the Centaurian Expansion short by ignoring everything not on Earth.

What the fuck is this made-up bullshit and why is it posted
It's not funny

Why is there a joke here, this is my serious safe space.

Yeah, Veeky Forums really has gone to shit.
Long winded, confusing, jumbled up bullshit about why things aren't the way they are because they hurt >muh feelings. And people taking everything too seriously. This thread is a perfect example of it.

Knowledge didn't decrease as much as it shows during the Dark ages, but it did decrease. Also renaissance should show an instant increase over the highest level of Romans due to contributions from Muslims, China, and India that accompanied Greek and roman texts following the fall of Constantinople.
The east (Byzantines, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Chinese) were all ahead of Catholic Europe during the dark ages (they were only dark for Europe).
So was renaissance Europe
Printing Press accelerating the process, funded by wealth of the New world, achieving critical mass. I would also add the black death causing social upheaval which allowed creativity to flourish, and geography (a la Jared Diamond).

I'm pretty sure the Christians destroyed the biggest library in the world at the time in Alexandria during the 4th century, so it's not so bullshit. Thankfully Muslims scholars from the 9th century decided it was the correct thing to do to collect and translate works from the egyptians, romans and greeks and make their own library of works called the house of wisdom in Baghdad, till that was destroyed by the mongols in the 13th century. What the fuck is with humans and book burning?

>renaissance
was a propaganda initiative by an Italian prince...

>Why is there an unfunny joke repeatedly posted here as if it has some merit to it*

But no, keep on attacking that strawman my dude

>I'm pretty sure the Christians destroyed the biggest library in the world at the time in Alexandria during the 4th century

You mean that library which was supposedly burned down around the time of Julius Caesar? Yeah no, no one actually knows when the library was torched.

Everybody destroyed that Library supposedly.

The worst destruction was caused by the Pagans apparently, and I'm pretty sure even the Mongols had a go at the ruins

...

Good posts, unfortunately people like will ignore these posts because thinking makes their head hurt.

>The east (Byzantines, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Chinese) were all ahead of Catholic Europe during the dark ages (they were only dark for Europe).
and yet when they got out of it they quickly past them

Continentals stealing credit for England's industrial achievement.

they would probably quantify "scientific advancement" and use a basic unit of measurement.

They would also qualify "Egyptian", "Greek", "Roman", "Christian Dark Ages", and "Modern Science".

u trying 2 turn me on, m9. ;))))

If Song didn't have a meme military, the industrial revolution would have occurred in China

Somebody have the Protestant version?

>the byzantines are not christian yurop

>scientific advancement is a singular line of magical "progress"

Will the Whig History meme ever die?

...

>Veeky Forums gatekeeping

Wow this is sad.

>If christianity held us back so much, how comes the non-christian parts of the world weren't ahead of us?

They were, though, for centuries.
Also stop saying "we" or "us", you were born yesterday and don't matter.

So why didn't Chinese or Indian come up with enlightenment and industrial revolution?
Why did it happen in "backward" Europe

I thought you Christfags think Enlightenment was a disaster?

You keep saying that shit on Veeky Forums.

you must be confusing me with somebody else
i rarely post on Veeky Forums

If you are in disagreement with him, then you're obviously affiliated with every group he thinks antagonistic, m8.

You could try something like number of scientific papers written over the course of centuries.
It's at least a parameter that can be measured to an extent.
Of course this comes with many problems, like what really qualifies as a scientific paper, especially when you go earlier than the 18th century.
Many discoveries weren't reported in a "paper", and many things were described in non-scientific sources full of inaccuracies.

Also the number itself may be misleading.
Sure in current year 2017 there's 10 gorrilion papers on carbon nanotube materials for biosensors, but most of it is Chinese groups changing the same recipe and adding just one compound and publishing it as something complete new to fill a quota of published articles.
That one original paper with CNT from the early 2000 was far more relevant.

The advanced early hominids still gets me.

I'm not a mathematician but I can believe this. It's pretty cool.

here you go OP

Flat until the mid to late 19th century when science was invented as a social method, and then flat after Feyerabend disproved science.

Wanting high-quality discussion is ironically much more of a """""""""gated"""""""""" (shitty contrived word made by some journalist to be parroted by his dupes) demand than wanting to have some casual memey fun

Which part of "they were, for centuries" don't you understand?
For centuries they were. Then they weren't.

Where's Atlantis

>the dark ages happened

But that's wrong.

in the atlantic ocean

This is objectively the correct graph

if you really want high quality discussion you're probably better off going to reddit

>what are the high middle ages?
>what are the late middle ages?

Are you guys this retarded because of american education or something?

how about you make a better version then faggit

>Plato is perpetually getting into trouble through not understanding relative terms. He thinks that if A is greater than B and less than C, then A is at once great and small, which seems to him a contradiction. Such troubles are among the infantile diseases of philosophy.

The belief in the good as the key to the scientific understanding of the world was useful, at a certain stage, in astronomy, but at every later stage it was harmful. The ethical and aesthetic bias of Plato, and still more of Aristotle, did much to kill Greek science.

Bertrand Russell

catholic church was the worst thing to happen to spain when it comes to social and scientific advancements.
nobody expects the spanish inquisition... and nobody really wants it. Gestapo/KGB of medieval times.

Got destroyed by the dolphin empire

*keeekeekeeekeee*

That's a really fucking retarded statement.

though I no longer blame Christianity for the fall of Rome and Middle ages. I do blame the pope from keeping western Rome fallen.

fucker just kept Rome to themselves and prevented any emperor from getting it back, Holy See didn't even allow it to becomes a republic again. Like most of Veeky Forums argues the legitimacy of the HRE and Byzantine empire because they didn't have Rome, but everytime they attempted it the pope would get butthurt and send his catholic monkeys to fuck with them.

it took until 19th century for Rome to be Rome again and by then it was already passed its prime.

Probably a chart based on GDP. Per capita is tempting but idk how to account for population booms and falls as they don't necessary affect the pinnacle of technology.

>t. Hannibal Barca

What's "rigorless calculus", and how the fuck is calculus not one of mathematic's greatest achievements ?

They're divided

> right back to the Greeks
Greeks studied works of Egyptians and Mesopotamian authors, presumably. They weren't first to come up with shit for sure.