Hello, and welcome to Western Sieve Episode two hundred and sixty. The Scientific
Revolution begins, as they once said in Monty Python, now for something completely
different, though not really, as we're going to see, the Age of
Exploration and the Scientific Revolution are inexorably linked. The Scientific Revolution would not have
been possible without the Age of Discovery, since the latter shattered so many misconceptions
Europeans held about the world around them. Face with the reality that the world
was so much larger than they had believed, Europeans had to face facts the
way they were interpreting the world around them was wrong. Something had to change,
something had to change in a big, big way. There have been
a lot of revolutions in the history of the world. The French Revolution usually
gets top billing if you look up just revolutions. But if you're looking for
a series of events that forever shifted how humans viewed themselves and the world around
them, then the Scientific Revolution is the most important event in the history of
mankind, at least modern mankind. I was blown away by just how fundamentally
things changed after the Scientific Revolution and through the course of it. Sure we
all know Galileo and Copernicus But this is about so much more than just the
stars. This is about a fundamental shift in understanding. This is an earthquake
that alters literally everything around it. It's about changes in languages and thinking.
It is, in other words, nothing less than a total rewiring of the
human psyche in computer terms. But for the scientific Revolution, humans were running
basically doss for those of us who still know what that is. Afterwards,
we're up to at least Windows ninety five, which if you live through the
tech boom of the eighties and nineties you'll know it was a big, big
deal. So, without further ado, let's begin a scientific revolution. When
William Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar in fifteen ninety nine, he made a small anachronistic
error of referring to a clock striking. There were no mechanical clocks in a
Rome. In Corleones, there is a reference point to the compass, but
the Romans didn't have a nautical compass. These errors reflect the fact that when
Shakespeare and his contemporaries read Roman authors, they encountered constant reminders that the Romans
were Pagans, not Christians, but very few reminders of any technological gap between
Rome and the Renaissance. The Romans did not have the printing press, but
they had plenty of books and slaves to copy them. They did not have
gunpowder, but they had artillery in the form of the ballista. They did
not have mechanical clocks, but they had sundials and water clocks. They did
not have large sailing vessels that could sail into the wind, but in Shakespeare's
day, warfare in the Mediterranean was still conducted by galleys, which were road
and of course, in many practical ways, the Romans were much more advanced
than the Elizabethans, better roads, central heating, plumbing. Shakespeare perfectly sensibly
imagine ancient Romes just like contemporary London, but with sunshine and togas. He
and his contemporaries had no reason to believe in the idea of progress. The
scientific revolution was the thing that made the Enlightenment's chief conviction, namely that progress
was unstoppable possible. Without the scientific revolution, there is probably no Enlightenment.
Certainly without the scientific revolution, there's no industrial revolution. If you don't believe
change on that scale is good or even possible, then it will never happen.
In order to grasp the scale of this revolution. Let's take a moment
and consider a typical well educated European in the year sixteen hundred. I'm going
to use someone from England, but it really wouldn't make any difference what European
country you chose. Our gentleman believes in witchcraft, and perhaps has read the
Demonology written in fifteen ninety seven by King James the sixth of Scotland the future
James the First of England, which paints both an alarming and credulous picture of
the threat posed by the devil's agents. He believes witches can summon up storms
that sink ships at sea. King James, in fact, had almost lost
his life in such a storm. Our gentleman believes in werewolves, although there
happened not to be any in England, but he knows they're found in Belgium.
He believes the witch Arsa really did turn Odysseus's crew into pigs. He
believes mice are spontaneously generated in piles of straw. He believes in contemporary magicians.
He's heard of men like John Dean, perhaps Agrippa of Netashin whose black
dog Monseigneur was thought to have been a demon in disguise. If he lives
in London, he may know people who have consulted the medical practitioner and astrologer
Simon Foreman, who uses magic to help them recover stolen goods. He's seen
a unicorn's horn, but he has not seen a unicorn. He believes it's
possible to turn base metal into gold, although he doubts that anybody knows how
to do it. He believes that rainbows are a sign from God and that
comments portend evil. He believes that dreams protict the future if we know how
to interpret them. He believes, of course and without question, that the
Earth stands still, and that the sun and stars turn around the Earth once
every twenty four hours. He has heard of mention of Copernicus, but he
does not imagine that he intended his sun centered model of the cosmos to be
taken literally. He believes in astrology, but he doesn't know the exact date
and time of his own birth. He believes that Aristotle is the greatest philosopher
who ever lived, and that men like Pliny, Galen, and Ptolemy are
the best authorities on natural history, medicine, and astronomy. He owns let's
say a few dozen books. What our gentleman doesn't believe in is change.
What he doesn't believe in is progress. But what's fascinating is within only a
few years change was in the air. In sixteen eleven, the English thinker
John Dunne, when reflecting on Galileo's discoveries made the previous year, declared that
quote new philosophy calls all into doubt end quote. Several decades earlier, Ticobrie
had turned astronomy into the world's first truly modern science. Interestingly, it took
some time for historians to recognize what was going on and that it was truly
a monumental change. The historian Herbert Butterfield first lectured on what would become known
as the scientific Revolution at the University of Cambridge, but he didn't do that
until nineteen forty eight. The first ever known lecture on the subject had been
given by a different professor the year prior. Nineteen forty seven. This triggered
a fight over precisely what was the scientific revolution. Was it Galileo and Sir
Isaac Newton or was it Rutherford Einstein and nuclear physics. The former won out,
but just barely. In this respect, the Scientific Revolution is distinct from
say, the American or French Revolutions, which were declared revolutions when they happened.
This was a revolution constructed by historians looking back. Like the term Industrial
revolution, there is an inherent dating problem when it comes to the Scientific Revolution.
When did it start? When did it end? Is it still going?
In terms of our narrative, we're in kind of the middle of the
sixteenth century. We've been here for a while now, But Galileo did not
make his discovery until the early seventeenth century. So why am I bringing this
up right now? Well, I'm not sure there is a perfect time in
this kind of narrative to bring up a movement that arguably spans centuries. That
historian Butterfield at Cambridge declared the period in question to range from the year thirteen
hundred to eighteen hundred, And if that is the case, I guess I'm
quite tardy in introducing it now. So the short answer for me is Copernicus
dies in fifteen forty three. He is the man with Columbus who I'm starting
this journey with. But please know, I certainly could to move this around
and not felt the least bit negligent in doing so. Copernicus, Galileo,
Newton, and Darwin and all the rest absolutely knew what they were doing.
During this long and protracted revolution. These men were responsible for huge changes in
the intellectual reconfigurations that accompanied all their discoveries, and they introduced them partly for
that reason, specifically to break the existing machine. None of them worked together,
mind you, and none of them had the same end goal in mind.
Bacon and Descartes were the other two scientific thinkers whose changes to your communal
processing system remained a little bit more than castles in the air, Yet changes
they were. The fact that the final outcome of the scientific revolution was not
foreseen by any of its members or component parts doesn't make it any less of
a revolution. I think it's important to frame our world in fourteen ninety one
a bit before we begin. One cannot understand the revolution if one does not
know what has changed in terms of intellectual activity. The way people saw their
world, You know, there was little to distinguish Western Europe from fourteen ninety
one, twelve ninety one, or the year nine ninety one for that matter.
Europeans firmly believed in their own intellectual inferiority to the past. Thinkers like
ra Stotle and the early Church Fathers were considered to have made all the discoveries.
If modern Europeans quote unquote discovered something a word I will delve into here
and more in a moment, they weren't really discovering something new. Rather,
they were uncovering something which had already been known hundreds, if not thousands of
years earlier. There was nothing new period Europeans believed the ancients had beaten them
to it. All. This has an important side effect worth discussing. Because
there wasn't anything new. There wasn't any point in empirical evidence. Empirical evidence
is objective and sensory. A person's test scores are empirical because I can see
them and they stand for how well the person did on the examination. But
the emphasis on empirical it was something that came out of the scientific revolution.
Before the revolution, the emphasis was on discussion and logical reason. You didn't
have to measure how quickly two objects fell when you dropped them. You reasoned
it out. I know this sounds strange to us today, and it should,
but there was no scientific method yet. There was no concept of science
the concept of testing an idea in the real world would have struct university educated
Europeans as insane. In the mid fifteenth century, you used logic. If
the logical solution didn't meet what you were seeing and experiencing, right, then
well then your senses must be wrong. And that brings us to Columbus.
Before Columbus discovered the New World in fourteen ninety two, there was no clear
cut idea of discovery. If there's no notion one can discover something, there
can be no modern science period. Hence, to discover is a precondition for
science. Now, as I mentioned in previous episodes, most Europeans accepted the
proposition that the world was round. Columbus's voyage didn't break any models there,
but there was a consensus that there could not be any antipodean land mass.
All right, what is that? So? In geography, the antipode of
any spot on Earth is the point on the Earth's surface diametrically opposed to it.
So the exact opposite. A pair of points antipodal to each other are
situated such that a straight line connecting the two would pass through the Earth's center.
So, according to European logic, there couldn't be a North, South,
or Central America. And that's because there can't be a land mass directly
opposite from Europe, Asia or Africa. The world was just too small.
It couldn't be. Hence, the consequence of Columbus's discovery was a radical transformation
in understanding how the world was constructed. More importantly, it was unequivocal proof
that the ancients had been wrong. And if they were wrong about that,
well, for the rest of this first episode on the scientific Revolution, I
want to dig into the idea of discovery. On the night of October eleventh,
twelve, fourteen ninety two, Columbus discovered America, but of course he
had no idea what he had just found. It would not be until fifteen
oh seven that the first European cartographer showed the Americas as a vast land mass,
not quite continents. But more to the point, having discovered a new
world, Columbus had no word to describe what he had done. Literally.
Columbus wasn't a formally educated man, but he spoke Italian, Portuguese, Castilian,
Spanish, and Latin, and of those, only Portuguese had a word
for to discover, which was disco brier, and even that word had only
entered the lexicon twelve years prior, in fourteen eighty five. In all other
major European languages, the word for uncover was soon adopted to describe the voyages
of discovery, and again uncover has a very different meaning. It suggests that
it was always there, Perhaps that the ancient Romans knew about North America and
they were just uncovering this. The new word discover began to spread through Europe
with the publication in fifteen oh four of the second of two letters written by
a Minigo of Vespucci, the man for whom the Americas ultimately get their name.
The new words spread almost as fast as news of the New World itself.
In fifteen fifty one, Fernalo Lopez de Castahda published The History of the
Discovery and Conquest of the New World. The book was translated into French,
Italian and Spanish, and shortly thereafter into English and German, and this book
sealed the deal. Discovery was now a thing one might do. Of course,
the highlights the reality that the scientific revolution was also This will not be
the only time I say this. Driven by the dramatic rise in printing.
In fourteen fifty five the Gutenberg Bible came off the press. And I don't
think it's any coincidence at all that the scientific Revolution came so hot on the
heels of the printing revolution. Just consider some of these figures in the thousands
for production of individual copies of printed books. Now, some of these are
estimates, of course, but the printing revolution was a very large scale but
at the same time drawn out process, which definitely coincides the Scientific Revolution in
fifteen hundred was only starting to pick up speed. So again, these numbers
are in the thousands, so between fourteen fifty and fifteen hundred. Best estimates
are around twelve thousand, five hundred, fifteen hundred to fifteen fifty. That
number balloons about eighty thousand, fifteen fifty to sixteen hundred. Now we're over
the one hundred thousand mark, one hundred thousand, thirty eight, sixteen hundred
to sixteen fifty, two hundred, sixteen fifty to seventeen hundred. Now we're
at three hundred thirty one thousand. These are books in the thousands. Finally,
seventeen hundred to seventeen fifty, three hundred fifty five thousand, seventy three
in the thousands of books printed, So what you can really see is between
fourteen fifty and fifteen hundred. The numbers remarkably small, but that number quadruples
by fifteen fifty, so the ability of printing to sort of keep up with
the demand is increasing exponentially. Now. The core meaning of the word discovery
continued to change for some time, but certainly after Columbus it did acquire one
of its most central to discover meant to get something or somewhere. First,
you could not discover something that had already been found. This idea then further
eight away at the hold of the wisdom of the ancients, the hold that
that wisdom still held over European thinking like a golden cage. Now. Interestingly,
there were discoveries, of course, before fourteen eighty six, when the
word first comes into Portuguese. European sailors first discovered the Azores sometime around thirteen
fifty one. The differences no one Cared the Azores were rediscovered in fourteen twenty
seven, and interestingly, it still seems like no one cared sorry Azores.
Although there were different ways in Latin of saying something had been found for the
first time. Prior to fourteen ninety two, the reality was nobody used phrases
like that. That was because of the ongoing assumption that there was nothing new
under the sun. That's why this linguistic change is so crucial. Usually,
a linguistic change is an indicator that people are changing the way they think.
Thus, a linguistic change both facilitates the change and makes it easier for us
to recognize it. So, although there were discoveries and inventions before fourteen eighty
six, the invention of the word discovery marks a decisive moment in Western history
because it makes discovery an actor's concept. What I mean is suddenly, to
discover is something you can do. You can set out to discover now.
Prior to Columbus, the primary objective, even of Renaissance intellectuals was to recover
the lost culture of the past, not to establish new knowledge of their own.
Until Columbus demonstrated that classical geography was hopelessly misconceived, the assumption was that
the arguments of the ancients needed to be interpreted never challenged. But even after
Columbus, the old attitudes lingered. The big problem was the three main pillars
of medieval European thinking, religion, Latin literature, and Aristotelian philosophy all agreed
on one thing. There was no such thing as new knowledge. Even history
was assumed to go in circles. Even Plato considered the ying to Aristotle's yang
was no good. Here. Plato insisted there never was anything new because the
soul knew the truth. It always knew the truth. Your soul knew the
truth before you existed in your physical form, and thus there could be nothing
new. The idea of discovery is tied up with ideas like exploration, progress,
originality, authenticity, and novelty. These, though are all ideas of
the Late Renaissance, they did not exist before the mid fifteenth century. Of
course, it's natural for us to think that there was much that was new
before fourteen ninety two. But what looks new to us generally did not look
so new, or I guess, at least not so incontrovertibly new to contemporaries.
An interesting test case is provided by revolutionary developments in art that took place
in Florence in the early fifteenth century, so before Columbus's voyage. Leon Battista
Alberti returning there in fourteen thirty four after long years in Eggs, was astonished
at the change that he saw. The new dome of Florence's Cathedral, designed
by Bruna Skelli, was quote vast enough to cover the entire Tuscan population with
its shadow end quote. It towered over the city, and a group of
brilliant artists Bruna Skelli, Donatello Masaccio Guiberti, Lucio de Robia were producing work
which seemed unlike anything that had ever gone before. Again, Alberti writes,
quote, I used both to marvel and to regret that so many excellent and
divine arts and sciences, which were possessed in great abundance by the talented man
of antiquity, have now disappeared and are all entirely lost. He wrote that
in fourteen thirty six. But now, gazing upon the achievement of the Florentine
artists, he thought very differently, writing quote, our fame should be all
the greater, if without preceptors, and without any model to imitate what we
invent in arts and sciences, hitherto unheard and unseen end quote. Brunus Kelly's
dome was quote surely a feat of engineering, if I am not mistaken,
that people did not believe possible these days, and was probably equally unknown and
unimaginable among the ancients. End quote. Faced with achievements that seemed to have
no classical parallel, Alberti nevertheless felt obliged to express himself with great caution,
used words like surely, if I am not mistaken, and probably. Alberti
in fact stuck to his guns, claiming that the idea of perspective paintings was
probably, which is what he wrote, unknown to the ancients, even though
he was one of the four runters in discovering it. By fourteen sixty one,
though people had changed their mind on perspective painting. Another artist, Ferraretti,
in fourteen sixty one, insisted that perspective painting was completely unknown to the
ancients. But if we're looking for another example of continuity to take even Machiavelli,
thought to be the father of modern political theory, even he believed that
the Romans had gunpowder, and hence the military innovations of the fifteenth century weren't
new at all. The crucial distinction here is not between old knowledge and new
knowledge. I think It's between what we might call common knowledge, things generally
known by most people, and what was known only by a privileged few.
These were the people who had access to secret wisdom, knowledge, it was
assumed, was never really lost. That's why the discovery of America was so
crude. Perhaps not initially, but within forty years certainly, no one could
argue or dispute that it was an unprecedented event that could not be ignored.
This was new, and Aristotle did not know about it period. What was
remarkable about the knowledge produced by the voyages of discovery was not just that it
was undisputably new, or that it was public. Geography had been transformed,
not by philosophers teaching in universities, not by learned scholars reading books in their
studies, not by mathematicians. The nord had been deduced by recognized truths as
recommended by Aristotle, or even found in the pages of ancient manuscripts. It
was found instead by half educated seamen prepared to stand on the deck of a
ship in all weather. And this brings us to the idea of experience.
What is important, rather the idea that experience isn't simply useful because it can
teach you things people already know. Experience can actually teach you things that what
people believed to be true is frankly false. Of course, geographical discoveries were
only the beginning. From the New World came a flood of indisputably new plants,
tomatoes, potatoes, tobacco, and new animals and eaters turkeys. This
provoked a long process of trying to document and describe this previously unknown flora and
fauna of the New World, but also by reaction a shocked recognition that there
were all sorts of European plants and animals that had never been properly observed or
recorded. Once the process of discovery had begun, it turned out that what
was possible was to make discoveries anywhere, if only one knew where to look.
The old world itself was finally being viewed through new eyes. The noun
discovery first appears in its new sense in English in fifteen fifty four, the
verb to discover in fifteen fifty three, while the phrase voyage of discovery was
being used by fifteen seventy four. Already in fifteen fifty nine, it was
possible in the first English application for a patent made by the Italian engineer Jacobus
Acontius to talk of discovering not a new continent, but a type of machine.
Nothing is more honest than those who, by searching have found out things
useful to the public, and should have some fruit of their rights and labors,
as meanwhile they abandon all other modes of gain, are much at expensive
experiments, and often sustained much loss, as has happened to me, I
have discovered the most useful things new kinds of wheel machines and of furnaces for
dyers and brewers, which when none will be used without my consent, except
there be a penalty, and I, poor with expense and labor, shall
have no return. Therefore a big a prohibition patent against using any wheel machines,
either for grinding or bruising any furnace ers like mine, without consent,
And his suit was eventually granted with the following statement, it is right that
inventors should be rewarded and protected against others making profit out of their discoveries.
This might seem like a shift, an extraordinary shift in meaning, for it's
easy to see how you might uncover something that is already there. Much harder
to see how you could uncover something that has never previously existed, but it
must have facilitated by the range of meanings in present Latin for the word invenio,
which covered both finding and inventing. In sixteen oh five, this new
idea of discovery was generalized by Francis Bacon. Indeed, Bacon, in his
work of the Proficiency and Advancement of Learning, claimed that he had discovered how
to make discoveries quote and like as the West Indies by the Americas had never
been discovered, if the use of the mariner's needle the compass had not been
first discovered, though the one be vast regions and the other a small motion,
so it cannot be found strange if sciences be no further discovered, if
the art of invention and discovery hath been passed over end quote. Aristotle's philosophy
was based on the idea that one ought to be able to deduce sciences from
generally accepted principles. In other words, he believed all the sciences could be
reduced to geometry. Bay can flip this. Where before interpretation meant the interpretation
of ideas or maybe books, now it meant the interpretation of nature may insisted
that effective knowledge would require cooperation between the learned gentlemen and the craftsman, between
the book learning and experience in the shop. Crucially, the difference between these
two sciences could not have been more different. Greek philosophy was about contemplative understanding.
For Bacon, the goal became new technology. The discovery of America,
for Bacon, brought a new commitment to what he called interchangeably advancement and or
progress. The discovery of the New World went hand in hand with the discovery
of progress. Bacon was the first person to attempt to systematize knowledge with the
goal of making progress. Bacon's ideas were much less important when he wrote them
in the seventeenth century than they are today. Today. We recognize the value
in Bacon's ideas. Back then, his books got very little traction, and
for one simple reason. Bacon himself never made any discovery. But the key
to discovery is finding something new, and that last word means a lot.
If someone got there first, then your efforts were in vain. Hence,
for the first time, we need rules to regulate discoveries. An early example
of someone confident in his understanding of how these new rules of discovery work was
the anatomist Gabrielli Faliopo. He recounted when he first went to teach at the
University of Pisa in fifteen forty eight, he told his students that he identified
a third bone in the air, other than the hammer and anvil, which
the great anatomist Andreas Velasius had not noticed. It is, after all,
the smallest bone in the human body. One of his students advised him that
Giovanni Philippio and Gracia, who was teaching in Naples, had already discovered this
bone and had named it the stapes or stirrup. Gracia had actually made the
discovery in fifteen forty six, but his work was published only posthumously in sixteen
oh three. When Falipo published in fifteen sixty one, he acknowledged Ingrassia's priority
and adopted the name that he had proposed for the new bone. Now some
argue that these claims are effectively pointless, because no one ever records their discovery
in the moment. Moreover, you might not recognize that you had made a
discovery until years or even decades later. There may not be such a thing
as even one discoverer, but that never stops historians from writing and selling books
on this subject, self deprecating dig their on purpose. So too, as
the category of discovery has developed over time, it has come to include many
radical different types of events. Some discoveries are observations sun spots, for example.
Others, such as those of gravity and natural selection, are commonly called
theories saw mar technologies, for instance, the steam engine. The idea of
discovery is no more coherent or defensible than the idea of a game, which
means that the idea presents philosophers and historians with all kinds of difficulties. That
doesn't mean we should stop using it in this respect. Indeed, it's typical
of the key concepts that make up modern science. It's interesting to think about
the evolution of modern science and the sort of discovery theory and how it passes
through so many different scientific fields. So, for example, Joss Bergei discovered
logarithms around fifteen eighty eight, but he didn't publish until after John Napier did
so in sixteen fourteen. Three different men, Galileo, Harriott and Beekman independently
discovered the law of the fall, but only Galileo published in sixteen o four.
Boil and Marriott, about ten years apart, independently discovered what's called Boyle's
law. Darwin and Wallace independently discovered evolution and published jointly in eighteen fifty eight.
Ultimately, here is what matters when we're talking about this. The existence
of competition among scientists is in itself evidence. Where there is no competition,
there is no concept of discovery. Once again, printing is a key ingredient
in all of this. Sure, it's not impossible to imagine priority disputes before
the printing press, but the reality is that we don't have evidence for any
prior to printing. Galen got into essentially debates in ancient Rome with other doctors,
but there was no mention of who came up with what first. What
printing made possible was to disseminate knowledge over a wide area, relatively quickly and
cheaply. In other words, printing made it possible for the various scholars throughout
Europe to read review and then declare a winner. It doesn't matter if you
discover something first if there's no way to tell anyone about it. Scholars argue
that there can be no science without public knowledge, which is what the printing
press allowed. Scientific knowledge has to be made available for others to question and
test. Private knowledge is not subject to this testing, and hence it could
never be scientific. Discoveries that are never made public aren't really discoveries at all.
Thus, what we have in the late fifteenth century is the perfect storm
of discoveries and technology that made the scientific revolution possible. There was an immediate
realization that there was something new about the geographic discoveries in what is a decision
in fifteen oh seven to call the lands explored by a medico Vespucci America.
Very quickly this became the name of the continent as a whole. Eponomy.
The naming of things after people had not been previously a common practice in the
West. Of course, it wasn't unknown. Christianity, after all, was
named after Christ, and on the same model, heresies tended to be named
after these originators Donatism and Arianism, for example, there were cities named after
founders Alexandria for Alexander, the Great Cesarea for Augustus Caesar, and Constantinople after
Constantine. But epontomy gets a huge boost from the practice of naming new Lands
after the monarchs that patronized their discovery. Example, Philippines after Philip the Secret
of Spain, Carolina after King Charles the First, and Virginia after Queen Elizabeth
the Virgin Queen. Like the idea of discovery, eponomy was soon carried over
into science. Galileo was quick to name new stars after patrons. Again,
that's worth pointing out there is simply no press for this in the ancient classical
world. The only real attempt was in the time of Augustus Caesar, who
tried to name Haley's comment after his dead uncle. This didn't work, of
course. Haley's common only comes close to the Earth to be visible every seventy
seven to seventy nine years. In fifteen sixty. Eponymy came to science,
but only became widespread after sixteen forty eight, when Torres Sally named a standard
tube vacuum experiment after himself. From there the race was on. Discovery itself
is not a scientific idea. Rather, it is foundational for science. It's
difficult to see how modern science could exist without the idea of progress, which
in and of itself could not exist without the acquisition of new information. Hellenistic
science that of Archimedes had no concept of discovery. No one got a gold
medal with the word eureka stamped on it, like we give out the Nobel
Prizes today. Another important ingredient for science is acceptance. For example, it
didn't matter whether you lived in England or Spain. When news of Columbus's first
voyage hate you, you believed it to a large extent. This explains why
Europe held such a monopoly on the scientific revolution for so long. Renaissance Europe
was willing to accept new ideas. In places like China and the Ottoman Empire,
new ideas met stiff resistance, and the scientific revolution took a lot longer
in coming. By then, both the Chinese and Ottomans were woefully behind,
which resulted in the period of dominance normally called imperialism. We'll get there someday,
I promise. The discovery of American fourteen ninety two created a new enterprise
that intellectuals could engage in the discovery of new knowledge. This enterprise required that
certain social and technical preconditions to be met. The existence of reliable methods of
communication, critic press, a common body of expert knowledge, and an acknowledge
group of experts able to adjudicate disputes. First cartographers, then mathematicians, then
anatomists, and then astronomers began to play the game, which was inherently competitive
and immediately gave rise to priority disputes and more slowly economic naming inseparable from the
idea of discovery with the ideas of progress and intellectual property. Next time,
we're going to go beyond this and think about from a European perspective, as
the news of a new world came in, what exactly is Earth? Anyway?
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