Lack of technological progress in late Roman Empire

[Goffredo]

The issue of whether Romans were not open to technological progress is interesting. Similar closure to technological progress was not a prerogative of the Romans. The Chinese were closed, and the Islamics too. For different and maybe similar reasons. The discussion is potentially interesting.

The roman world had many elements in it. The greek alexandrine "scientific" tradition was still in place and I do not think it was systematically suppressed or ignored by the Romans. Probably it was just sterile and exhausted what not much could be done with the technology and "science" of those days without major conceptual and technological breakthroughs. Those simply could not occur. The Heron "engine" is an example that kind of shows my point. The Heron "engine" IS completely useless! It is very VERY inefficient and has no power. If you read about the story of the invention of the steam engine (or any other other invention) you will learn that it is not at all obvious how to make an engine (or an invention). You just don't wake up one morning and say to yourself: "today I am going to invent something that does this and that".

You must not let yourself be fooled by how much we know now. It took many centuries of erratic observations and odd inventions to allow the piecing together of a working steam engine. A lot of technology and science had to be learned and many dead-end paths were taken. There was NOT a tradition of hopeful engine builders trying to invent the damn thing. Instead the invention was a non-obvious creative convergence of many pieces taken opportunistically from a variety of odd sources. It could occur only when certain basic things could be mastered, and even then it still was not obvious. You still needed someone with a problem to solve, the right know-how, the resources, and a very creative mind.

So I wouldn't blame the Romans for not developing Heron's toy. The Islamics did nothing with it too. But I am not blaming them either. In fact nobody did anything with heron's toy! The working steam engine of the English industrial revolution is very VERY much more than a toy and very VERY little, if nothing, comes from Heron.

From my point of view the moral is: Sociology explains much, such as why a society does or does not allow or encourage certain types of "research". The Chinese around 1450, with the most powerful fleets of all times, decided to cut off further sea exploration simply because they were not interested! They were self sufficient and the external world was not interesting. But not everything is social. Nature has objective laws that are not social constructs. (There are extremist sociologists that would challenge this, but I think they are idiots!). An invention does not occur not only because there is a state or a culture that does not encourage "research", but also because the necessary aspects of nature have not been mastered or are completely unfounded (i.e. "nature does not work the way it should to make this damn invention work"). Humans castrate themselves with all kinds of weird conventions (its "human nature"), but the physical world, nature, has real rules that we can't avoid.