CAN science advance in a world that has magic and active Gods???
I posit that after the events of S8E3 that the Red God is dunnnnn. And his followers are done.
Note that almost immediately, Euron revolutionizes naval warfare, Sam posits democracy and perhaps discovers germ theory.
Edit: Inspired by whoever asked in another thread, “Is Sam bringing in a new Age of Reason?” I mean how can you develop the Scientific Method in a world with literal magic??
It’s implied by Sam’s discovery of a cure for greyscale that there might be a trove of information in the Citadel which could revolutionize what we consider to be scientific fields.
But it seems to me that if such information is controlled by people who want to keep it hidden so that they can control its use and enhance their own importance, there will be no such revolution. So it’s not so much the literal magic as it is the fraudster magicians who are the problem. Cf. the monopoly certain religions claim over things like the forgiveness of sins and even access to the afterlife.
Most of the Maesters seemed to know about the cure for greyscale, the problem was that it was very likely to a) kill the patient and b) give you greyscale. Sam didn’t discover some secret knowledge, he just took a massive chance nobody else would.
I’m personally not sure why the patient had to be conscious for the procedure, too. Get him drunk or doped up or something, geez.
Granted, but that’s really beside my point.
Scientific advancement has, historically, been rather slow. Humans rode horses for millennia before the stirrup occurred to people. Civilizations have gone significantly backward. We now assume science and technology forever advance because we happen to live in a time when they do, but that’s not always true.
And there is some advancement in GOT. It is canonically the case that Westeros did not always have ironworking; that was introduced to the continent by the Andals, enabling them to largely defeat the First Men, circa 6000 years before Aegon’s conquest. Their structures are amazing - the Red Keep is a more remarkable edifice than anything built in Earth medieval times. The interiors of their dwellings are more advanced than ours were in the medieval age.
I would expect that most scientific advancement results from economic incentives. What do we know about the economy of Worldoros? There’s clearly trade, and there are clearly traders, but Westeros is mostly feudal. What’s the incentive of improving crop yields if a minor lord is just going to take it anyway?
Wait.
Does the average person in Westeros ever experience magic?
If he has a need, does he just go to the local wizard and they take care of it? Thus obviating the need to be innovative?
I mean, that’s the only way I’d think that’d work.
We’ve seen people “invent” things in the show (e.g. Tyrion’s horse thing for Bran). I think the reason for it is they just want to have that setting.
Probably not.
What magic was there? There are the things the Undying Ones did, but those might be explained away as illusions. There are the flaming swords and resurrections, of course. ‘Warging’ isn’t so much ‘magic’ in my opinion, but something more akin to ESP. The White Walkers were magical, and the Night King could bring the dead back to an undead status. But for the average schmoes in Westeros, I doubt they ever encountered any wizard-type magic.
Magic stiffing scientific progress is not really a wacky theory, its a pretty standard trope in a lot of fantasy. In the case of GoT most people never experience magic and have no idea it exists, apart from the long winters which i guess are magic and probably do set back progress a fair bit.
Ravens aside, they didn’t seem to have super reliable communication between population centers. Certainly nothing like a newspaper or esoteric specialty magazines. You have a problem, maybe it occurs to you to make a device to address the situation, and when the situation ends you scrap the parts and forget about the solution to that once in a lifetime problem. Bran’s wheelchair had been done before, but only he seems to have known that. Common and universal problems get widespread solutions: common metal working, stirrups, farming, poking holes in your enemies to get them to stop messing with you. But all the money in the world says The Scorpion is forgotten within a generation. Ain’t no dragons to fight and it’s overkill for using on people, and only a couple living souls have seen it used as an anti-ship weapon.
It must have been here that someone was speculating about how their solar system was set up to achieve the sorts of seasons and day/night patterns on that world. One side effect could have been a funky magnetic field that submarined even basic electrical circuits such that that whole line of tech was impossible to develop. Sort of like how octopuses could be intelligent enough to eventually create cities, but since they can’t access fire…
There also needs to be enough people who have time on their hands to devote to innovation and communication. A lot of early science in our world was done by courtiers and clerics, and later by physicians.
This–the issue of incentives–plus the general lack of education and free time for working on problems in agriculture, medicine, engineering, chemistry, etc., ensure that feudal societies don’t change much over the decades (or even centuries).
Massive inequality means that only a relative handful of people have the education and leisure required for working on problems in the sciences (including medicine). The fewer people working on problems, the less likely they are to be solved. You don’t get the “standing on the shoulders of giants” effect that makes innovation likely.
I still like the idea that Sam is a modern day DaVinci…but too shy to make real effect. Maybe if the realm has enough peace they can pay attention to him.