The Romans had science fields like engineering or math, but between 100 BC and 200 AD there was very little advancement for the world. By comparison the world has advanced alot between 1700 AD and 2000 AD. So when did humans first start taking science seriously to the point where the world would change drastically every generation or so? I am not sure if it was the scientific revolution or the first industrial revolution, but I would assume one or the other.
“Become” implies a current status. Assumes facts not in evidence.
You don’t think modern humans are serious about science?
For most of human history progress was slow. Now progress is rapid. What period gave birth to our rapid progress? Why did the world change so much from 1700-2000AD but not from 1000-1300AD or 500-200BC? What revolution gave birth to our starting to take science seriously.
As a historian of science, although not a specialist in early modern European science, my impression of current views in that field is that the significant acceleration in technological developments (which I think may be more descriptive than your phrase “getting serious about science”) involved the combination of a lot of factors, which brought the situation to a “tipping point”, so to speak.
For instance, in Europe there had been a number of recent developments in military science, esp. in the areas of fortification and firearms. Navigation and trade were also expanding. The establishment and growth of universities helped foster research, as did interest in recently rediscovered texts from antiquity. New mathematical developments, e.g., the calculus of infinitesimals, expanded the range of mathematically tractable problems. The number of people doing scientific and technical research may have reached some kind of critical point where it produced a sort of “multiplier effect” in productivity. These are just a few of the developments involved, off the top of my head.
It’s hard to point to any one key factor that somehow made the whole thing possible, but there’s a huge range of contributing factors.
And I agree with Ludovic that your statements about “humans” in general “taking science seriously” may be a little too sweeping. We may nowadays have a much larger proportion of humans involved in scientific and technological research than we did in the early second millennium, but there are still boatloads of people who can’t be described as being intelligently informed or “serious” about science, even in the most advanced and educated societies in the world.
I don’t agree. Modern scientific progress is extremely rapid compared to 1000 BC. For virtually all of human history scientific progress was either non-existant or extremely slow. Even if 90% of humans aren’t serious about science, we still are working hard on improving literacy and secondary education all over the world as well as having tens of millions of scientists & technicians come up with new innovations.
Sorry, but I don’t see how your remarks conflict in any way with what I said, so I don’t understand why you disagree.
Yes, we can have a lot of rapid scientific and technological progress even if the majority of the human population isn’t very knowledgeable about or interested in science. However, I think it’s fair to say that it might be too sweeping to call that “humans taking science seriously”. It might be more accurate to describe it as “the comparatively small percentage of the human population that’s interested in scientific and technological developments eventually attaining the raw numbers, the economic power, and the technical resources to introduce scientific and technological innovations in society much more rapidly than in earlier time periods”.
I’ll admit up front that I’m speaking somewhat anecdotally and out of ignorance (and possibly tangentially to the actual posted question), but I do want to say the following:
I remember seven or eight years ago the A&E channel had their list of the 100 (or was it 1000?..I don’t quite remember) most influential people of the last millenium. I got into a debate with a friend of mine, he thought #1 should be Einstein, I thought it should be Newton.
The points I made then are the same I make now:
Newton did not create the scientific method, but he was a huge factor in it’s development.
If there is any “father” of physics, it would have to be Newton. Relatively speaking, Einstein’s accomplishments were only tweaks to the already existing science of physics (I’ll again admit ignorance here, I’m certainly no expert on physics, but it’s certainly my impression that Newton’s accomplishments were far more fundamental than Einstein’s).
Anyway, I was somewhat gratified a few days later when A&E had Newton as the #2 most influential person. The reasons they gave were essentially the same as I had argued to my friend a few nights previous. (For the record Gutenberg was their #1 pick. Not who I would’ve picked (as I’ve already said), but not a pick I can really argue against, either).
To get to my point (and as I understand the question) my reaction is to say that, if we had to pick one individual as the “Father of Science” it would have to be Newton. And hence I would answer the question as “around the time of Newton”. But I’m certainly no authority on the history of science.
Emphasis added.
I would say about 1850. Prior to that, you’re kids would probably live pretty much as you did. The proliferation of things like steam power, telegraphy and even lilteracy and medicine would make each generation’s lives significantly different-- at least in what we think of today as the 1st world.
We had a ragin debate about this a year or so ago, but I still think the last few decades of the 19th century and the first few of the 20th were the time of greatest technolgoical and social change we’ve ever seen-- again, at least in the 1st world.
Something I have obviously not yet achieved!
Based on what I’ve read, I would propose that something remarkable happened in 16th century Europe: learned people realized that a lot of things they had believed were wrong. So many presumptions that had formed their entire philosophical understanding of the world were flatly contradicted by new discoveries. Just to name some:
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There was a “New World” on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The triad of Europe, Asia and Africa were not the entire abode of humanity after all.
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The moon, sun, and planets were not eternal perfect parts of “the heavens”. They were material bodies like the Earth itself.
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The microscope was invented and revealed something that no one had even conceived of before: that things could exist that were just too small to see.
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When people overcame the taboo against desecrating the dead and began actually looking at human anatomy, they saw that the ancient physician Galen was flatly wrong about many details.
And with the resurgence of nation-states and the beginning of the end of feudalism, the centuries-long hold of the Catholic Church on ideology was beginning to weaken as well. Combine this with the new discoveries and orthodoxy began to break down. People started questioning the age-old idea of “the wise people have everything figured out”.
Science began when even the learned were able to admit “We’ve been wrong before. We may still be wrong about many things. We certainly have to admit we don’t know everything. How can we try to find out what really is true?”
I think I agree with John Mace. The rapid expansion of technology seems to me to be what got the great mass of the populace interested in science and with the public behind it the politicians soon followed and started supporting scientific endeavor.
However long before that, maybe starting pretty much with Galileo, there was a community of natural philosophers who corresponded and knew each other and the work that was going on. Galileo formulated the laws of motion in a uniform gravitational field by experimenting with balls rolling down inclines. Was there an earlier example of a general physical “law” than this? Galileo might also have been among the first to apply instrumentation, in the form of the telescope and microscope, in pursuing scientific studies.
OK I’ll write that next time the subject comes up.
However humanity is becoming more scientific because:
The percentage of economy devoted to research
the percentage of the population both global and domestic who work in science
the percentage of literate people
The average amount of education obtained
The knowledge about science average people have (I made a thread a year or so ago asking what all fields a modern college student could revolutionize a thousand years ago. A pedestrian today knows much more about epidemiology, geography, math, chemistry, etc than a farmer of 1000 years ago)
The hands on scientific knowledge people have for vocation and for leisure
All seem to be going up. So there is no black/white cutoff, but we are taking science much more seriously than say in 1600 when literacy rates were probably single digit globally and R&D must’ve made up less than 1% (compared to 3% today) of GDP.
I am not a student of the history of science, so I am just speculating. My contention is that science started snowballing and changing our perception of the world so rapidly when the middle class became literate. Prior to the 1700’s we had a series of brilliant people making significant advances (in the west, eastern science progressed along a different path but no less successfully) in science-usually one by one. Archimedes, Gallileo, Newton, Gauss, etc. But when the middle class, that is the group of people with enough income to have leisure time and money to spend during that time, learned to read and write they saw the practical value of science. Steam engines made life easier and more profitable. etc. Not that Mr. and Mrs. Middle Class read about Watt in the paper and said cool lets spend more money at the university. My point is that the middle class read ( and wrote about) about scientific advances and applied those advances to their daily lives. They found they liked what happened and wanted more. At that point resources (universities, publications, a scientific class) were focused on science and as an inevitable result, progress speeded up. Now it is in positive feedback. But until the middle class learned to read and write, my understanding that happened in the 1700s, science and government could not grow, there would always be brilliant people, but not brilliant groups. Not until the economic resources existed to support them.
I’ve long thought that Galileo should get more “credit” than Newton. Newton might have accomplished more, but Galileo (I think) overturned paradigms that got things rolling (pardon the pun). I bet if you look for examples of someone generating physical laws like Galileo did, those laws would turn out to be wrong. He and Newton and Einstein, though, all shared the ability to look at things differently. Most of what they discovered seems so simple-- once someone explains it to you. Same with Darwin’s theory of evolution. Of course it must be true! I don’t think we can ever really appreciate just how brilliant they were, in retrospect, because of that.
Isaac Asimov in his essay The Slow Burn wrote about another striking overturning of a paradigm by a single experiment.
Henry Cavendish set fire to a jet of hydrogen and expected to produce phlogisticated (or maybe it was dephlogisticated) air. Instead he produced water. When Antoine Lavoisier learned of the experiment he seized upon it and realized that water wasn’t an element but rather was a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. Subsequent work of Lavoissier and others overturned the old chemistry of combustion (the phlogistin theory). Lavoissier also started chemistry down the road of scientific procedures by insisisting on careful weighing and measuring in chemical experimentation.
I mean he really insisisisited on it. He was a fanananatic about it.
I think improved education for the general run of humanity could very well have had a lot to do with it. That means Johann Gutenberg also comes in as one of the prime movers in the broadening of scientific interest.
There’s no real answer to this question, partly because it’s based on a false premise. People often seem to have this view that “back then” people were different. “Back then” they were stupid/lazy/ignorant/resistant to change. Humans haven’t really intrinsically changed much in the last quarter of a million years. How we live has changed, but what we are has not.
Humans have pretty much always been serious about figuring out how things work and how to make them work better. There is evidence that people engaged in trade for better stones for knapping and sometimes systematically experimented with different knapping techniques in an effort to make better tools and weapons. If humans were doing this way back in Paleolithic times, what makes you think that we just suddenly decided to get off our collective butts and get serious about this technology stuff in the last few centuries?
The recent surge of technological progress is more the result of a confluence of factors than it is to any kind of societal “decision.” Sure, society can influence things – look at China for at least two big examples of throwing away knowledge in their Cultural Revolution, and much earlier in the 15th century – but social movements are almost always reactions to already extant technology. Technology, more often than not, drives society to make changes. The widespread use of gunpowder changed warfare in Europe in a very short time, but the ripples of the introduction of that one piece of new technology took decades, even centuries to to slowly subside. In the process, feudalism became obsolete and, indirectly, the roots of what would be a religious revolution were laid, among many other only slightly less sweeping changes.
The one constant of human societies is change. The pace may vary, but it is always ongoing.
I recall an theory from my college Classics courses that attributed the seeming lack of Roman technological development to the presence of slavery in their economic system. Didn’t actually prevent the study of science, but it inhibited the widespread adoption of new technology.
Why spend money on expensive technology when there are cheap slaves available? And that expensive equipment would probably just be damaged by careless slaves, anyway. In effect, there was no incentive for the wealthy Romans to invest in any new technology.
And it was pointed out that this seems to also have been true of America, prior to the Civil War. The non-slave states of the North had much more industrialized technology than the slave states of the South.