One Eliezer, a member of an obscure tribe in the Middle East, found himself dissatisfied with all religion, and especially that of his own people. He pondered deeply over the question of how to attain real knowledge of the world, and wandered through many countries observing how such things proceeded there. Eventually, having arrived at tried and tested conclusions about what methods systematically lead towards truth, he fetched up in ancient Greece in the time of the great philosophers. Here, it seemed, there might be some few people capable of understanding what he had discovered. He was successful in persuading them to take seriously the idea of working with their own hands to experiment and observe, to “entangle themselves with the world”, and got SCIENCE!! started two thousand years earlier.
According to Plutarch in “The Obsolescence of Oracles”, when Eliezer visited the oracle at Delphi it prophesied, “HE IS HERE. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN. HE IS HERE. HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD.” The oracle never spoke again.
Keep in mind that around the time of the enlightenment, these ideas had an application. They were paying rent. It meant better mathematics for sailing ships, later steam engines, better guns—critical advancements that were made from the basic practice of writing down your proposed procedure, doing it, and writing down the results, measured in an objective way. This leaked into the development of the things that mattered to the European powers, like ocean navigation and firepower.
If you go back 2k years and introduce the ideas, the people living then might not find a use for them because they didn’t have the supply chain yet. So they would be forgotten.
Sort of how now Baysian math is super useful now that we have these mammoth computer chips able to use them.
The ancient Greeks also had sailing ships, metallurgy, and even steam engines of a sort.
More generally, one can always look at the past and find reasons for how things were. That does not demonstrate that they could not have been otherwise. One can also look at the present and find reasons for how things are. But there have always been those who have seen how things might be different, and made them happen.
One Eliezer, a member of an obscure tribe in the Middle East, found himself dissatisfied with all religion, and especially that of his own people. He pondered deeply over the question of how to attain real knowledge of the world, and wandered through many countries observing how such things proceeded there. Eventually, having arrived at tried and tested conclusions about what methods systematically lead towards truth, he fetched up in ancient Greece in the time of the great philosophers. Here, it seemed, there might be some few people capable of understanding what he had discovered. He was successful in persuading them to take seriously the idea of working with their own hands to experiment and observe, to “entangle themselves with the world”, and got SCIENCE!! started two thousand years earlier.
According to Plutarch in “The Obsolescence of Oracles”, when Eliezer visited the oracle at Delphi it prophesied, “HE IS HERE. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN. HE IS HERE. HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD.” The oracle never spoke again.
Keep in mind that around the time of the enlightenment, these ideas had an application. They were paying rent. It meant better mathematics for sailing ships, later steam engines, better guns—critical advancements that were made from the basic practice of writing down your proposed procedure, doing it, and writing down the results, measured in an objective way. This leaked into the development of the things that mattered to the European powers, like ocean navigation and firepower.
If you go back 2k years and introduce the ideas, the people living then might not find a use for them because they didn’t have the supply chain yet. So they would be forgotten.
Sort of how now Baysian math is super useful now that we have these mammoth computer chips able to use them.
The ancient Greeks also had sailing ships, metallurgy, and even steam engines of a sort.
More generally, one can always look at the past and find reasons for how things were. That does not demonstrate that they could not have been otherwise. One can also look at the present and find reasons for how things are. But there have always been those who have seen how things might be different, and made them happen.