the Hot Karl

ummm, I hate to burst your bubble UT but astonomy has been around since WAY before the 1700s. The Egyptians and the Mayans had knowledge of astronomy, as did many other ancient peoples. Also, democracy, medicine, chemistry, physics and even certain kinds of artillery, like catapults and trebuchets. That game isn't very precise.

The game doesn't place them in time, I did. I think it refers to modern medicine and modern democracy and modern artillery.

I'm just saying... :p

i was thinking that the leaps we've made in manufacturing, genetics, medicine, transportation, and especially the dissemination of information have been more than exponentially. Whereas given the amount of progress made in the 30,000 years prior to 1750, it seems almost stagnant.

Wikipedia puts chemistry at 1773 due to the "chemical revolution", a "reformulation of chemistry based on the Law of Conservation of Matter and the oxygen theory of combustion"

where in time do you place the fulcrum to balance the scale?

OK. But chemistry did exist before that. Ancient civilizations had some knowledge of chemistry, but Muslims made it into a science back around the 9th century.

I think, Jim, we've gone through stages of growth, and stages of ignorance. It's true that we've progressed more exponentially since the 1700s, but I'm not exactly sure all that progress has been positive. maybe, in some cases, we've progressed too fast for our own good.

The discoveries of and in electricity, bacteria and subatomic physics pretty much blow everything before 1750 out of the water.

I need to think about this one, but I'm not ready to hand it to the post-1750 period.

I don't know about that... it's clear that we here typing on this board identify most heavily with post-industrial revolution developments for obvious reasons. That makes it hard for us to judge the accomplishments of past civilizations, to say nothing of European civilization pre-1750.


I a certain sense that's true. Would any of those discoveries have been made without Euclidean geometry? Trigonometry? Calculus? Again, it's hard for people who can whip out pocket calculators (or better yet phones with pocket calculators) to judge the historical impact of, say, logarithms.


I mean, let's look at Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). The man developed the first accurate descriptions of planetary orbits and their mathematical basis. He was basically working with data that involved holding up a ruler and measuring distances in the sky. But he was starting from practically nothing by comparison to today. Given that we now know Kepler's laws, and all the other stuff that's been discovered since, what would a corresponding leap forward in scientific knowledge be now? How many of our professional astronomers would do as well without the knowledge from their astronomy books and their computer-controlled space telescopes?

If I wanted to be a smartass (perish the thought) I would point out that the "dawn of time" would include the evolution of Homo sapiens . . . .

What's more important, logarithms or what people have done with them?

The answer isn't self-evident to me. If you asked me what was more important to me, a case of nails or my house, it'd be my house.

But the house couldn't have been built without nails.

On the other hand, would it be possible to build houses if nails had never been invented? Sure.


On the other hand, the question is "societal advances." We've been talking science and technology. I wouldn't want to exclude other issues (like in UT's list). So, you want to argue the Magna Carta vs. the United States Constitution? Bleah. No matter what example you pick, we got here by a specific route, in a specific sequence of developments. The oldest child will always feel ignored in favor of the youngest, and vice versa.

Maybe we could sum the good uses of logarithms, and then the bad uses of logarithms, to see if they were an asset or curse. ;)

Post-1750

advances in medicine

I might have missed it on UT 's list.