Zozoom

During the ancient era, what determined how productive a nation would be in terms of scientific research? For example, nowadays, it's a combination of funding, infrastructure and scientific tradition. In antiquity, why did civilizations research technological advancements at different rates?

HackneyedScribe

There wasn't much science in the ancient world. They had technology. The Greeks may be the closest in terms of developing proto-science, but to my knowledge that's as close as the ancient world got.

Zozoom

Ok, so what determined the rate of technological advancement? Why were some civilizations more advanced in terms of engineering, metal working, military weapons, etc, than others in the same time period?

HackneyedScribe

That's a broad topic, and there's not going to be an easy agreement. You can see for yourself here:

http://www.historum.com/ancient-hist...antiquity.html

http://www.historum.com/ancient-hist...-industry.html

Jake10

To try to summarize this, it comes down to culture and civilization. What determines how culturally advanced a civilization is are basically 4 things.

1. Language and writing
2. Law and order
3. art and history
4. technology

The first two form the foundation for which the next two build on, but all this depends on resources available. In any event, a society with more language and writing available to its people results in better education, which leads to more law and order. Once the society isn't busy trying to stop crime, people can dedicate themselves to art and history or exploring technology.

Guaporense

The only example of laboratory experiments involved in the development of technology in the ancient era that I know refers to the development of catapults in the Hellenistic period. Here the hellenistic monarchs and cities really made scientific R&D.

See: Ancient Catapults

However, besides these isolated developments, there wasn't scientific R&D of technologies in ancient times.

dagul

The Native Americans were awesome because they see spirits while consuming their kind of substance using chemistry and religion.

Guaporense

Technology is the capability humans to control their environment.

Technology is dependent on society, division of labor and the transmission of technological knowledge to the new generations. The quantity of knowledge that a single individual can master is limited, as the cognitive capabilities of humans are limited. With the division of labor it becomes possible for several people to pool their cognitive capabilities, each individual specializing in a certain area, as result the tools and machines that each individual makes become more complex.

Technology can also be accumulated though time, that means that given a single society at two points of time, with the same degree of division of labor, at the second point of time the society would have accumulated more knowledge and thus would tend to have more advanced technology. Though, usually, societies increase in technological complexity though increased division of labor.

So, the greater the division of labor, the greater the complexity of technology one would expect.

Technology doesn't always advance, it also can regress. The Roman Empire by the 1st and 2nd centuries AD had a impressive array of technologies, many which we don't even know about. To enable the operation of such vast system of technologies, the Romans possessed a highly sophisticated division of labor. According to inscriptions and literary references, the classicist Keith Hopkins counted 265 different professions in Imperial Rome, while for 18th century London, probably the most advanced city in the world at the time, there were 350 different professions, not much more and the inventory of known professions in ancient Rome is incomplete. With the decline and fall of the Roman Empire the massive networks of division of labor that had formed all over the Mediterranean world started to vanish and production returned to self sufficiency, as result the level of technology that society could maintain was greatly reduced.

Guaporense

Actually, he doesn't ask "which" was the most technologically advanced civilization, he asked "why" technology develops. These threads don't address his question.

cladking

We think of progress as a linear thing but in the real world it is very very different. The computer is transforming life on earth and the biological niche in which humans operate. While the tremendous productivity gains engendered by this change are presently being wasted by fiat the process has hardly even really begun. But the computer is hardly a single invention. An abacus or slide rule is a computer but mechanical computers are exceedingly slow and limited in their applications. Programming is normally impossible. It wasn't until the invention of the telephone relay that someone thought of building an electronic computer that would be faster and then vacuum tube that is faster yet. The transistor sped it much more and the integrated circuit overcame the tyranny of numbers also known as the limitation in the real world for wires to occupy the same space at the same time. The invention of programming made the computer more flexible and usable to the average man.

Obviously one invention is always dependent on previous inventions and the knowledge necessary for that previous invention. Just as real estate is about location, location, location, knowledge or science is dependent on observation, observation, observation. Early scientists didn't lack the genius to make important discoveries as they lacked oscilloscopes, telescopes, or means to acquire samples from the ocean floor. Everything they knew flowed from observation and the simple instruments they could make from nature. I believe all this knowledge was lost when the language changed around 2000 BC to a more fluid or symbolic language. This was the mother of all changes and since then progress has been far more punctuated. Rather than science being straightline progress it has waxed and waned as peoples' beliefs accepted or rejected this type of knowledge. Where science had been encoded right in the language it was now expressed in language and people had become much more superstitious. Math and philosophy generally progressed but not technology. Math and philosophy are much more easily divorced from the real world of attitudes and beliefs.

It was the printing press that started the modern age of straight line progress. It allowed one teacher to have innumerable students and made the acquisition of knowledge available to the common man. The invention of formalized science has assured that as new materials, knowledge, ideas arise they are quickly adapted to existing knowledge and adopted everywhere. Inventions now arise at the same time all over the world. The computer not only fascilitates the spread of ideas but also technology and knowledge.

But the forces determining the rate of progress haven't varied much in 4000 years. So long as people don't rebel against the technology or the civilization that made it collapse it goes forward at its natural speed determined by the number of people working on it and the stage it exists.

I suppose it is probably legitimate to compare it to the economy. The economy is the sum total of all the buying and selling. Demand will almost always eventually manifest in a sale. it is faster than the speed of light since merchants attempt to anticipate denmand and have the product available when it materializes. And it has always been so. Scientific progress is the manifested vector sum total of a society's beliefs and knowledge as it applies to the real world.