05-14-2008, 07:08 PM
Quote:But granted that that's the case, you still need theoretical science of some kind, to stand behind your inventions, even if it isn't in widely distributed form. As a result, we can gauge the measure of science by the measure of its presence in an advanced work of engineering. Every time we find some advanced work, the Antikythera mechanism, De Rebus Bellicis (a personal discovery for me), we can say that this indicates a high level of science, even if other markers are absent. No ancient writer recorded the invention of gears, yet we can see it, plain as day. No ancient writer recorded the principle of mechanically rowed ships, yet we see a guy putting it down into practice (using gears, I might add!), as plain as day.
As I said, I think most of those inventions tend to draw more on practical applications than scientific theory - Gutenberg is the perfect example, the goldsmith who, drawing on his practical metallurgical experience, invented the late medieaval/early modern worlds most important invention from the viewpoint of disseminating knowledge. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions. When we see the first building plans, from the early middle ages, there is little doubt that the engineers who drew them up had a solid grounding in mathematics - and while we lack building plans from antiquity, the same probably applied there.
There is also the matter of practicality, of course. Books like the DRB and the Texaurus regis Francie contain a lot of stuff that crosses the border into the fanciful. While the DRB's oxen-powered paddlewheels or Vigevano's wind-propelled automobile and armoured tank-chariot (or any of the other fun stuff you might find in, for example, al-Jazari) might look centuries ahead of their time, they were not always practical and many are pure flights of fancy. Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks is the best known examples of this - a great deal of his own inventions (Leo lifted a lot from earlier authors) were not useful - his helicopter and flying machine cannot fly, his giant crossbow and bridge over the golden horn would have overtaxed his contemporaries' metallurgy, et cetera.
The impression one gets is that a lot of interesting ideas that we often think of as modern have been floating around for millennia - the DRB is not the last manuscript to mention pontoon bridges before their realization.
The more one reads of ancient, medieval and early modern surviving technical books from Europe, North Africa and the Middle East ("mediterranean-atlantic civilization"), the more one gets the impression that these guys knew a lot more than we give them credit for, and one definitely sees accumulation over the centuries - ancient gadgets get reproduced during the middle ages, medieval gadgets gets reproduced during the early modern period alongside the ancient gadgets that the medieval people reproduced, et cetera. Some of their knowledge and ideas might have some basis in the natural philosophy of their time, more (I suspect) from their practical knowledge. Many important inventions or improvements upon inventions, like wind/tide/waterpowered mills, the moldboard plow and suchlike, were made entirely outside the halls of the learned (where Leonardo and the barber-surgeons got stuck due to their lack of "proper latin"). Many of these were more important, and had wider impacts, than a lot of the clever, but never utilized, inventions we see in the engineering notebooks.
