I found this article hilarious. The idea that the genuinely valuable truth about how the world really works could be found in lost tomes of arcane lore has crossed my mind at times.
The historical reason why we are not ruled by a scientific priesthood, though, is easy to see. Until fairly recently, science did not produce the power to perform seeming miracles. Only by operating in the open could scientists prove they weren’t dabbling in witchcraft, because that crisis took place long before the atomic bomb or the Gatling gun.
“Wings Over the World” from H. G. Wells’ Things to Come, of course, is the classic literary example of how this could come to pass after a collapse of civilization.
Knowledge in lost tomes isn’t completely unheard of. For example, the Riemann-Siegel formula (an important formula about the Riemann zeta function) was found by Siegel in the 1930s when Siegel was going through old papers of Riemann’s from the 1850s. This sort of thing was more common in the Middle Ages where Greek mathematical works helped jump-start our understanding. Sometimes also today in sociology and economics, useful data sources are found in unexpected places (Fink and Stark’s work on early religion in America in part relied on discovering that the old US census data contained a lot more about religion than anyone had previously realized). But that’s not really the same thing since it is just data, not theory. I think the RS formula is probably the best modern example of this sort of event.
I found this article hilarious. The idea that the genuinely valuable truth about how the world really works could be found in lost tomes of arcane lore has crossed my mind at times.
The historical reason why we are not ruled by a scientific priesthood, though, is easy to see. Until fairly recently, science did not produce the power to perform seeming miracles. Only by operating in the open could scientists prove they weren’t dabbling in witchcraft, because that crisis took place long before the atomic bomb or the Gatling gun.
“Wings Over the World” from H. G. Wells’ Things to Come, of course, is the classic literary example of how this could come to pass after a collapse of civilization.
Knowledge in lost tomes isn’t completely unheard of. For example, the Riemann-Siegel formula (an important formula about the Riemann zeta function) was found by Siegel in the 1930s when Siegel was going through old papers of Riemann’s from the 1850s. This sort of thing was more common in the Middle Ages where Greek mathematical works helped jump-start our understanding. Sometimes also today in sociology and economics, useful data sources are found in unexpected places (Fink and Stark’s work on early religion in America in part relied on discovering that the old US census data contained a lot more about religion than anyone had previously realized). But that’s not really the same thing since it is just data, not theory. I think the RS formula is probably the best modern example of this sort of event.