Agent Foxtrot writes:
> I have a book called The Discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstein. I haven’t read it
> yet; it’s 713 pages long and I work 50 hours a week, including Saturdays.
Like a lot of posters, particularly relatively new ones, you ask a question that requires hours and hours of explanations to answer, including all the time it would take to show why your mistaken assumptions are wrong, and then you ask us to give you an answer that you can spend no more than ten minutes reading. Sorry, but we can’t do that. There’s no way to explain this in that amount of time.
Basically, your understanding of the history of science is mistaken. There was no point at which people suddenly went from a bad knowledge of how the world works to a good one. There was no sudden discovery of science, at which point all the bad ideas went away to be replaced with a correct understanding of how the world worked. The history of knowledge is a slow progression without any really huge jumps. The “facts” that people knew about the world in ancient times were generally the best guesses that they could make at the time. As they learned more about the world, they replaced these wrong guesses with better ones. As time went on, not only did the knowledge of the world get better, but the methods people had for learning more about the world got better, so the rate at which they could learn about the world got faster.
I know that there’s a common assumption that there was a sudden appearance of science which magically wiped out all the previous superstitions, but that’s just wrong. The progress of knowledge has actually been fairly steady. The notion that religion held back science is also at least exaggerated. The relationship between science and religion is fairly complex. The notion that science suddenly appeared at some point (around the 17th century, in most versions of this story) and swept away all previous superstitions is really just a modern myth that’s believed by a lot of people, including some educated ones, but it’s simply not true.
The Discoverers isn’t perhaps the best thing to read. I’ve just flipped through the table of contents, and, while it’s partly about the history of science, it’s also about the history of exploration. One thing I would suggest is some courses from The Teaching Company, which does courses on tape that you can listen to while driving, for instance. There are courses called The History of Science: Antiquity to 1700 and The History of Science: 1700 to 1900. There’s also one called Science in the 20th Century, but I haven’t listened to that yet. In about a month of drive-time you can learn enough about the history of science to answer most of your questions, I think. You can find The Teaching Company’s website by Googling for it.