Evaluation of Roman Science

[SigniferOne]

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.

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.