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Evaluation of Roman Science
#16
The DRB has been well known for ages, and extensively analysed - among other things, it is the book that contains the famed Thoracomachus description (if I recall correctly). It is also very much an engineering book - divided from theorethical science (as we have already discussed). It was widely reproduced in both the late classical, medieval and early modern worlds, and translated to English by Thompson in the 1950s.

Quote:Do you know of any other medieval inventions from Greek Christiendom? (You can count things like watermills and latteen sails which were known in the Iron Age but became common and important in the Middle Ages). I don't know enough about Byzantine technology to have a sense of how fast or slowlt it developed, and it sounds like you do know.

Offhand, I can think of the fire siphon as an invention and the stirrup, frame-first shipbuilding, and traction trebuchet as borrowings or shared inventions. All those are rather early, though, ...

I think the Byzantine guys on these forums know more. My general impression is that the eastern roman empire developed among similar lines to its neighbours, although it naturally enough was less productive itself during the period it was fighting for its existence or suffering internal crisis.
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#17
Quote:The DRB has been well known for ages, and extensively analysed - among other things, it is the book that contains the famed Thoracomachus description (if I recall correctly).
Yes also things like portable bridges. It's quite unique.

Quote: It is also very much an engineering book - divided from theorethical science

But so the Antikythera mechanism is just a piece of engineering work, with a fairly routine astronomical basis behind it, if we've indeed deciphered what it does. But that doesn't make it any less of a bafflingly remarkable achievement.

Remember that not having explicit scientific tracts is not the same as lacking science. I'm sure no one in antiquity wrote books on "the torsion characteristics, compared and contrasted". There simply wasn't interest in explicit writing like that. That doesn't mean people didn't think about those issues and make the appropriate decisions. Thus we can look at the engineering final step, and attempt to gauge the theoretical steps taken to get to that.

I'm sorry, I just have not seen such a wide exposure for DRB as you describe; in discussion of ancient science everyone gets stuck on Heron of Alexandria, who made little that was useful. And besides, Anonymous, DRB's author, doesn't exactly make for an easy bumper-sticker to pin a whole historical theory about. So in my experience he gets ignored. Vitruvius is taken as a one-off exception. And again, we go back and get stuck with Heron or the like.
Multi viri et feminae philosophiam antiquam conservant.

James S.
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#18
Even Finley treated the DRB, as I recall it. It might not necessarily be in the mainstream lane, but it sure has been extensively treated by historians of the late roman period and definitely by the historians of technology.

I think you misunderstand a bit the points about science and engineering. Science is what in antiquity and the middle ages was called Natural Philosophy; theorethical science, the attempts at understanding the basic mechanics of the universe. Engineering in our contemporary world draws extensively on theorethical and applied science. In the ancient, medieval, early modern and even into the modern period, the two were more or less divided - engineering was much more tied in to the craftsman's experience and tradition than the natural philosopher's theoretic world. There was contact, of course, and some sharing of ideas, but not in the systematic way we see today. Hence, my example about the doctors vs the barber-surgeons until the 19th century - barber-surgeons were for example used in anatomical lectures in the high middle ages' Universities and for conducting postmortems - but they often provided the wetwork whereas the medical doctors provided the interpretations (although many barber-surgeons sure did know a thing or two about anatomy).

The Antikythera mechanism is sort of an example of the merger there: it weds astronomical/astrological natural philosophy with engineering, and it seems likely that the person who built must have had a pretty good understanding of both gearing and astronomy/astrology. That seems to be quite common, though - astronomical automata (typically on a much larger scale) appear every now and then in both the western, asian and islamic worlds thorough history. As mentioned, there was some contact between the two fields, but not like we see after the 19th century.

The problem with the history of engineering is that they didn't write all that much about it until relatively recently. Heron, Vitruvis, the Anonymous of the DRB, Al-Jazari, de Honnecourt, da Vigevano - their corpus is literally dwarfed by the theorethical natural philosophy texts.

[Don't get me wrong, I am not saying you don't know what Natural Philosophy was. I am just saying that the link between theorethical science, as we know it today, and practical engineering, again as we know it today, wasn't really that strong before recent times]
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#19
You're all beginning to simplify the subject down to engineering. An engineer never lived in a social vacuum, and you're turning the thread towards the easy option and are beginning to ignore a wider picture.

Only IMHO.
TARBICvS/Jim Bowers
A A A DESEDO DESEDO!
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#20
We could always just dumb it down even more and blame it on religion. ;-) )

The industrial revolution started in England where really they didnt worship anything seriously except money.


Yes I am being 99% joking. Please dont flame me.
Timothy Hanna
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#21
Quote:You're all beginning to simplify the subject down to engineering. An engineer never lived in a social vacuum, and you're turning the thread towards the easy option and are beginning to ignore a wider picture.

Not my intention - I think I have pointed out many enough times that there were links between practical and theorethical knowledge. My main point is that there was not, until relatively recently, a great deal of systematic combination of the two.
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#22
Quote:Not my intention - I think I have pointed out many enough times that there were links between practical and theorethical knowledge. My main point is that there was not, until relatively recently, a great deal of systematic combination of the two.

Endre, I haven't had a chance to reply, but I completely agree with you on the division between "physics" (i.e. natural science in general) and practical application such as engineering. So what I'm saying is that we simply can't expect to find a natural science book, that attempts to have practical applications (e.g. "characteristics of torsion, compared and contrasted").

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.


Quote:You're all beginning to simplify the subject down to engineering. An engineer never lived in a social vacuum, and you're turning the thread towards the easy option and are beginning to ignore a wider picture.

Could you specify what you mean, and what we're simplifying towards?

Maybe you mean that we haven't discussed ancient abstract science yet, which is true -- Theophrastus and Apuleius writing treatises on plant life, etc.
Multi viri et feminae philosophiam antiquam conservant.

James S.
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#23
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.
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