While it sucks the original work was erased to be overwritten by prayers, I wonder if the book only survived this long on account of being an heirloom prayer book rather than a dusty old math tome.
I'll say what's probably on everyone else's mind: if this had not been lost and/or had been taken seriously, we'd probably be in space by now. At the very least, we'd be nearer to a theory of everything, figured out fusion, etc...
Maybe, but probably not. I don't think math alone get you all the way there. Think about some of the non or less mathy things that are required for large technological leaps. First, I would argue that prolonged periods of political stability are required in order for resources to be put towards something other than conflict. That took Westphalian sovereignty, not a treatise on fluid dynamics or even a theory of economics.
Consider also trade, a necessary framework accumulating the necessary ingredients to build new technology. Sure, Archimedes or his successors could have likely worked out optics mathematically, but could they have come by the necessary raw materials and put together a large enough cohort of glass workers to develop sufficient lenses to build telescopes? Probably not. The idea that trade is not zero sum, and should be open didn't come about until the 1700s. Once this ideas was in place, prices fell and it became cheaper to develop new types of goods.
I could go on, but my point is that it's far too tempting as a technologist to assume that people in the past were more backwards than us, and if only they had been enlightened enough to follow (insert name of really smart dead person) society today would be so much more advanced. It is easy to forget about all of the social, political, and cultural constructs that allow us to go to the Moon, build power plants, and microwave frozen burritos.
> Maybe, but probably not. I don't think math alone get you all the way there.
Hm, I'm not so sure. When I was studying anti-coagulants, I came across a wikipedia excerpt. Apparently until 1700 AD the most advanced information about blood circulation came from Egyptian texts written in 200 BC. This knowledge came from mummification techniques. Egyptians knew the difference between veins, arteries, amongst other things.
So for nearly 2000 years no advancement has been made on the topic, because religion. Indeed, if I'm not mistaken the period is called "the dark ages" and "the middle ages" to signify the lack of any advancement in science - or at least that's how I've always perceived that period.
Aristotle had described a sort of scientific method but we had to wait for the Royal Society and Newton to establish what the actual scientific method is. It would have taken only one step between the two in my mind, 100 years should/could suffice.
I think parent comment has a valid point. Of course I reckon that all this is pure speculation.
> Indeed, if I'm not mistaken the period is called "the dark ages" and "the middle ages" to signify the lack of any advancement in science - or at least that's how I've always perceived that period.
and that is how most people perceive it, but it's a lie :)
Basically, they are called the dark ages, because the people who came just after them (i.e. renaissance) wanted to show themselves as "better than the old guys".
The middle ages in europe saw the adoption of spectacles, arabic numbers, mechanical clocks, universities, paper and a bunch of other stuff.
The muslim word, arguably more religious, had it's golden age during this period too and vast advancements in a ton of scientific fields.
Actually, in the field of medicine, in the Western world, really nothing good happened at the times between the Christians came to the power and until the Italian Renaissance, check any good history of medicine. And it was really only because of the dogmatic approach that Christians had.
Also, for professional historians, "dark ages" don't mean something "bad" but is a term used to refer to some historical period of some observed area where there's significantly less information on which history can rely to. It's not judgemental, it reflects the facts. And yes, there were periods when the most cities or the infrastructure of some region broke completely.
Here's one look at the fact that for almost 200 years there were no coins in England:
And of course it's a local effect, the Eastern Roman Empire at the same time functioned as a real state and produced new money. And some periods can "go dark" for us not because of something occurring during some time but because something later destroyed most of the evidence.
"Paracelsus grew up during a period of Renaissance humanism"
"He is also a famous revolutionary for utilizing observations of nature, rather than referring to ancient texts, something of radical defiance during his time."
Is that a myth? And still:
"Much of his theoretical work does not withstand modern scientific thought, but his insights laid the foundation for a more dynamic approach in the medical sciences."
Had the medicine been good before him, it would be even better afterwards, but we can actually evaluate the quality of his achievements and therefore we get the idea how it was before.
We can even use much more recent example, Semmelweis, died 1865:
"Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis' observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings. Semmelweis' practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory."
Well, yes. The second article I linked to quotes several physicians explaining the importance of observation hundreds of years before Paracelsus lived. And the fact that people were performing dissections hundreds of years before the Renaissance is a clear demonstration that they knew the value of observation.
>We can even use much more recent example, Semmelweis, died 1865
This example only goes to show that there was nothing special about the medievals. New advances in science are often initially rejected by the scientific community.
The second article gives some quotes, but does their mere existence change anything, if the medical science remained where it was even in 1541, or much later? Apart from learning that some people wrote something clever, is there any evidence to some meaningful results? That's what counts. I don't see them still. Until then, I don't consider the poor state of medicine between Galen and Renaissance a myth.
The periods of the strong religious dogma de facto existed and they really significantly limited the advance of sciences. The opposition to science is strong even in the present times among the "fundamentally" religious. It surely wasn't better before.
> There was certainly progress in anatomical knowledge
Are there any preserved books with the anatomical drawings that can prove that or something equivalently indisputable? I've expected some link already.
EDIT, what follows is written after your post that mentions de Liuzzi: I don't see how he actually supports your claim of a visible progress before Renaissance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondino_de_Liuzzi -- an Italian who died 1326 (14th century) and the Renaissance is considered to originate in Italy in late 13th and to include 14th century. Moreover:
"He is often credited as the “restorer of anatomy” because he made seminal contributions to the field by reintroducing the practice of public dissection of human cadavers and writing the first modern anatomical text."
How come he had to "restore" anatomy at all?
EDIT2: And what were the reasons for the poor state of medicine between Galen and Renaissance when not the religious/dogmatic ones (as in "the Bible says how God made a man and the animals, separately")? We see these arguments even now.
EDIT3: Just like you admit "beginning of Renaissance" I admit I formulated somewhere my view of poor state of medicine as "between Galen and Renaissance" which even (probably wrongly) includes some years between Galen and the Christian dominance, and I still stay behind the point of my claim: there's an immense period of time where we don't have any good example of functioning scientific approach to the medicine, and the fundamentalist understanding of Bible was the very significant cause for that.
EDIT4: Your "printing press" excuse doesn't correlate with all the progress in antique and also at the start of the Renaissance (and before the printing press), the very example you gave, but my "religion" argument not only correlates with the "dark medicine ages" but also with many source texts that we can read. So I still see your arguments more as wishful thinking than anything else. You can't excuse the religion holding on to the "it's written in this fine book, and that's it."
EDIT5: You can disprove my claim of "poor medicine" for many centuries influenced by the Christian dogma if you can quote some text or drawings made between cca 300-something AD and 1200-something AD of any author actually correcting Galen who died 216 AD and who made very obvious errors in his own writings. His writings were dutifully copied through almost 1000 years but, to my knowledge, not corrected during all these centuries until the Italian times you link to. The times also known as Renaissance. We can nitpick the dates, but nobody can refute that Renaissance actually existed. How can I prove that it's religion that suppressed the science? Simply because the written (and other) material available to history shows people spending immense energy to the religious questions, but not to the science. That's the main period we can observe that in that amount. During these times the Church surely didn't have to explicitly forbid something that simply nobody did. They've spent the energy on "heresies" they were confronted to -- like was Jesus ever made or was he always his own father, are the icons allowed, stuff like that. You consider that "not fundamentalist," call it what you want, it was the religion-and-dogma-caused blindness for science.
Mondino de Luzzi's Anathomia corporis humani, written in 1316 and based on dissection of cadavers.
edit: The other links I gave indicate that dissection was practiced earlier. The reasons for it not being more widely practiced were not primarily religious. As the articles make clear, the church never banned dissection.
You are right of course that the early 14th century is technically the very beginning of the Renaissance by most definitions, but the standard myths have it that dissection was still banned by the church much later than that. The misinterpreted papal edict that supposedly banned dissection was issued in 1299, so if you're going to be pedantic about time periods, you'd have to say that it's the Renaissance that suffered from a ban on dissection and not the medieval period!
>And what were the reasons for the poor state of medicine between Galen and Renaissance when not religious?
Scientific progress ebbs and flows for all kinds of reasons. I should think the invention of the printing press played more of a role than religion. Note also that dissection was banned in many non-Christian societies:
>there's an immense period of time where we don't have any good example of functioning scientific approach to the medicine, and the fundamentalist understanding of Bible was the very significant cause for that.
You've provided no evidence in support of this claim. It seems to be something that you're just going to keep insisting on, so I'm not sure how to respond. The "fundamentalist" understanding of the Bible did not exist in the medieval period, when only highly educed people read the Bible. It has its origins in the 19th century as a consequence of mass literacy and the translation of the Bible into the vernacular hundreds of years previously.
>Your "printing press" excuse doesn't correlate with all the progress in antique and also at the start of the Renaissance (and before the printing press), the very example you gave, but my "religion" not only correlates with the "dark medicine ages" but also with many source texts that we can read.
I don't understand what you mean by "religion" here. Religion existed in Ancient Greece and it existed during and after the Renaissance. You'd need to show specific evidence that specific religious institutions in medieval Europe played a significant role in impeding the progress of medicine, in a way that they did not before or since.
> How can I prove that it's religion that suppressed the science? Simply because the written (and other) material available to history shows people spending immense energy to the religious questions, but not to the science.
I don't see how that proves anything. At most, if it is true, it proves that people were overall more interested in religion than science. That obviously doesn't show that religion was suppressing science. People are nowadays much more interested in reality TV and Facebook than they are in science, but we wouldn't take that to be evidence of "suppression".
>You can disprove my claim of "poor medicine" for many centuries influenced by the Christian dogma if you can quote some text or drawings made between cca 300-something AD and 1200-something AD of any author actually correcting Galen who died 216 AD and who made very obvious errors in his own writings
The second article I linked to already did that:
[...] the year 1200, when a famine broke out in Egypt. While thousands of people died, it was also an opportunity for ‘Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (d.1213) and other physicians to find out the answer to an anatomy problem. According to the writings of Galen the lower jaw bone was made up of two bones. Al-Baghdadi and the other medical experts disagreed, and with all these corpses around they thought of making a study of them. They arranged to see over two thousand skulls to observe their jaws before making their determination – all of them had a lower jaw made up of one bone, not two – and they then had a second group of physicians come in to verify their findings.
Ah yes, the parrot wasn't dead because after he was lying on the floor for almost a thousand years, once he had been prepared to be cleaned away we can view it as it was his own voluntary movement. And he was just resting. Good. I've understood the nature of your arguments, I have no more questions and don't expect anything more in this discussion.
They're called the dark ages because the historical records from that time are pretty scant. Both their predecessors and their descendants seem to have shown more awareness of history as it was happening, and kept a much more thorough record, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not. But for that period, we're largely in the dark, hence the name.
> So for nearly 2000 years no advancement has been made on the topic, because religion.
The sad thing about the dark ages is that we don't know what we don't know. How many "heretical" books about physiology or psychology have been destroyed? And what was in them?
> First, I would argue that prolonged periods of political stability are required in order for resources to be put towards something other than conflict. That took Westphalian sovereignty, not a treatise on fluid dynamics or even a theory of economics.
But one also needs conflict (or the threat of conflict) to spur innovation and prevent a lapse into stasis, as occurred with China. One shudders to think how if a few historical events had occurred differently, we might still be living a mediæval lifestyle.
I'm not sure I buy that. I think conflict clearly pushes some types of innovation, e.g. antibiotics, but you don't get things like telescopes because the duke of Milan needs to see onto the far hill top. You get those bigs leaps often because educated people are free to sit and wonder or tinker for long months and years with no pressure to produce anything.
However one interesting conflict that was quite useful was of a more philosophical nature. Trying to square Christian/Catholic dogma about the nature of the world with the observable world led to some interesting insights by Tycho, Newton, and so on.
The counterpoint to the conflict bit is that Archimedes was killed during the Roman invasion. We talk a lot about if this or that book hadn't been lost, but if you're gonna take that tack, why not ponder on what would have happened if the man himself had not literally been murdered? If it hadn't been for the Roman invasion, he'd have lived.
Sure, like Da Vinci, military applications was a driver of his patrons and thus his innovations. But war was also the very thing that cut his life -- and thus his innovations -- short.
Old farts like me will remember Carl Sagan's seminal TV series "Cosmos", wherein he waxes lyrical about how disastrous to human progress was the loss of the Library of Alexandria and the scientific and academic culture that it represented. And indeed there's an animated sequence showing a spacecraft with a dodecahedron emblem and Greek text, the idea being that had that culture survived and flourished it would have reached space centuries ago.
The methods of Archimedes were well known and being built upon up until around the renaissance. Around that time (early 17th century) the Jesuits stepped in and banned all use of "infinitesimals" because... well because no-one could make any sense of it and it threatened the seeming perfection of constructive geometry, which was held up to be the language of the gods. So anyway, if you want to blame someone blame the jesuits, they sent european mathematicians (especially italian) back to the stone age.
More here:
"Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World"
By Amir Alexander
I don't think the invention of calculus was hard. Yes of course it takes a "great person", but there always are some of those around at any one time.
What made calculus possible and the reason why it wasn't invented earlier was that it just wasn't needed. All inventions are part of a context. In support of my assertion: When it was needed it was promptly developed twice on the same continent and at the same time.
Which has implications for learning calculus: I guess it's especially hard to learn this, or anything, if you don't see a need for it (in your life).
I - now pretty old - found out that while I had always been good at school I had forgotten almost everything even slightly advanced in biology, chemistry, and other fields. When I had to learn it I learned only that particular knowledge and only for the exam since that was the only use I had for it. Recently, a few years ago, I suddenly became interested in medical topics - only to understand how the body works, the pathologies don't interest me. Anyway, I had to learn a lot of chemistry, org. chemistry, biochemistry (citric acid cycle is fun, but understanding how mitochondria create energy using that cycle is even more so), and it took me very little time, and this time I won't forget any of it. That's because it now is embedded into a big subject that I actually care about. If I had just to learn the citric acid cycle and only to pass some exam I would learn it - and afterwards promptly forget. Now it's part of a larger "story" that interests me and I actually think about it occasionally while walking around town because it matters to me, and I explain to my inner self whole physiological processes just because I find it so interesting.
Same with calculus, if you are an engineer and care about e.g. building a chemical plant to produce XYZ you will care about calculus so much you will learn it in no time. Simply because it helps you. You don't care about the calculus - you care about what it can do for you.
Did you ever wonder what language the wizards in the fantasies movies speak to invoke magic? It must be math. It is the language of miracles. You can move mountains, you can put stuff into orbit, you can hit the moon circling around a planet hundreds or even thousands of millions of miles away. Or you can simulate ecosystems on earth. Or pretty much any somewhat advanced simulation of anything, like the weather, or airflow, etc.
So the best way to learn calculus is to not care about calculus - but to care very much about a subject where calculus is the magic language to get stuff done.
By the way, the wizard/fantasy analogy can be taken further. The "magical items" that they have are actually pretty much exactly how we use technology: Somebody else made it and the person using it has no idea how. Basically, the knowledge of many, in our time often millions of people working together in both space and time, is poured into "magical items". That can be electronics, but even a piece of concrete or steel is a high-tech "magical" product these days. So next time you watch a fantasy movie remember it is actually real, they only got the language and the symbolism wrong. We do live in a world of exactly such magic, but the language is math and we don't wave wands around, wear different clothing than in the movies, and use labs, computers, robots and industrial processes. And boring team meetings to coordinate everybody :)
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And a few words about the religion of Europe at the time - from an atheist. I recommend reading up on European history. It seems to me from the things I did read, although I'm definitely nobody who would be allowed to post in /r/AskHistorians, that Europeans owe a lot to Christianity. It seems to me it was what kept Europe at least somewhat together, a unifying force spanning all peoples and kingdoms. Also, the tension between worldly and religious leaders seemed to have been advantageous because it didn't allow one party to get all the power. Since it was a somewhat "orthogonal" force and not directly competing like other kings it could exist in parallel. Also, from what I read it does seem to be true that the monks were chiefly responsible from getting knowledge saved for when it was again needed centuries later, from old Greece and Rome. As for the example of Galileo, I remember that it was in /r/AskHistorians, the actual story is far more complicated and the simple story "church evil, Galileo good" not even close to true. [Here is one thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/42bbfx/what_...), it was not the only one.
The only thing I would like to add to the end is to point out another thing that set organized religion positively apart: No inheritance. Today we perceive the "no family" rule for priests as backwards, but it served an IMHO good purpose. Even today we have the problem of wealth and power being concentrated in families. That aspect of the Catholic Roman church was incredibly advanced IMHO.
>> I don't think the invention of calculus was hard.
If you look at it with ~2k years of hindsight and mathematical knowledge, sure, it wasn't hard. Neither was it "hard" to think of using zero or infinity, or even the unit.
>> When it was needed it was promptly developed twice on the same continent and at the same time.
Most probably the right way to see this is completely the opposite: calculus was needed countless times before and it was only developed twice.
Blaming religion for setting back science is lazy. It's a nuanced topic - for each instance of antiscientific pressure you can find instances of e.g. the Catholic Church supporting scientific advances.
I would say no. The book had been around for 1700 years without anyone picking up on its ideas. For a book full of ideas nobody seems to have cared about or understood, that's a long time.
Had it not been erased chances, Newton would probably still have invented calculus.
