Episode 260: The Scientific Revolution Begins - podcast episode cover

Episode 260: The Scientific Revolution Begins

Aug 11, 202342 minSeason 1Ep. 260
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Episode description

It is weird to think about, but when Columbus "discovered" the New World there was no word for "discover" in English. Or French. Or Latin for that matter. Discover, as a word, did not exist because it was not something one did. Today I talk about the origins of the Scientific Revolution which are inherently grounded in the Age of Discovery. I also answer the question: can there be a Scientific Revolution without discovery?

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Hello, and welcome to Western Sieve Episode two hundred and sixty. The Scientific Revolution begins, as they once said in Monty Python, now for something completely different, though not really, as we're going to see, the Age of Exploration and the Scientific Revolution are inexorably linked. The Scientific Revolution would not have been possible without the Age of Discovery, since the latter shattered so many misconceptions

Europeans held about the world around them. Face with the reality that the world was so much larger than they had believed, Europeans had to face facts the way they were interpreting the world around them was wrong. Something had to change, something had to change in a big, big way. There have been a lot of revolutions in the history of the world. The French Revolution usually

gets top billing if you look up just revolutions. But if you're looking for a series of events that forever shifted how humans viewed themselves and the world around them, then the Scientific Revolution is the most important event in the history of mankind, at least modern mankind. I was blown away by just how fundamentally things changed after the Scientific Revolution and through the course of it. Sure we all know Galileo and Copernicus But this is about so much more than just the

stars. This is about a fundamental shift in understanding. This is an earthquake that alters literally everything around it. It's about changes in languages and thinking. It is, in other words, nothing less than a total rewiring of the human psyche in computer terms. But for the scientific Revolution, humans were running

basically doss for those of us who still know what that is. Afterwards, we're up to at least Windows ninety five, which if you live through the tech boom of the eighties and nineties you'll know it was a big, big deal. So, without further ado, let's begin a scientific revolution. When William Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar in fifteen ninety nine, he made a small anachronistic error of referring to a clock striking. There were no mechanical clocks in a

Rome. In Corleones, there is a reference point to the compass, but the Romans didn't have a nautical compass. These errors reflect the fact that when Shakespeare and his contemporaries read Roman authors, they encountered constant reminders that the Romans were Pagans, not Christians, but very few reminders of any technological gap between Rome and the Renaissance. The Romans did not have the printing press, but they had plenty of books and slaves to copy them. They did not have

gunpowder, but they had artillery in the form of the ballista. They did not have mechanical clocks, but they had sundials and water clocks. They did not have large sailing vessels that could sail into the wind, but in Shakespeare's day, warfare in the Mediterranean was still conducted by galleys, which were road and of course, in many practical ways, the Romans were much more advanced than the Elizabethans, better roads, central heating, plumbing. Shakespeare perfectly sensibly

imagine ancient Romes just like contemporary London, but with sunshine and togas. He and his contemporaries had no reason to believe in the idea of progress. The scientific revolution was the thing that made the Enlightenment's chief conviction, namely that progress was unstoppable possible. Without the scientific revolution, there is probably no Enlightenment.

Certainly without the scientific revolution, there's no industrial revolution. If you don't believe change on that scale is good or even possible, then it will never happen. In order to grasp the scale of this revolution. Let's take a moment and consider a typical well educated European in the year sixteen hundred. I'm going to use someone from England, but it really wouldn't make any difference what European

country you chose. Our gentleman believes in witchcraft, and perhaps has read the Demonology written in fifteen ninety seven by King James the sixth of Scotland the future James the First of England, which paints both an alarming and credulous picture of the threat posed by the devil's agents. He believes witches can summon up storms that sink ships at sea. King James, in fact, had almost lost

his life in such a storm. Our gentleman believes in werewolves, although there happened not to be any in England, but he knows they're found in Belgium. He believes the witch Arsa really did turn Odysseus's crew into pigs. He believes mice are spontaneously generated in piles of straw. He believes in contemporary magicians. He's heard of men like John Dean, perhaps Agrippa of Netashin whose black

dog Monseigneur was thought to have been a demon in disguise. If he lives in London, he may know people who have consulted the medical practitioner and astrologer Simon Foreman, who uses magic to help them recover stolen goods. He's seen a unicorn's horn, but he has not seen a unicorn. He believes it's possible to turn base metal into gold, although he doubts that anybody knows how to do it. He believes that rainbows are a sign from God and that

comments portend evil. He believes that dreams protict the future if we know how to interpret them. He believes, of course and without question, that the Earth stands still, and that the sun and stars turn around the Earth once every twenty four hours. He has heard of mention of Copernicus, but he does not imagine that he intended his sun centered model of the cosmos to be taken literally. He believes in astrology, but he doesn't know the exact date

and time of his own birth. He believes that Aristotle is the greatest philosopher who ever lived, and that men like Pliny, Galen, and Ptolemy are the best authorities on natural history, medicine, and astronomy. He owns let's say a few dozen books. What our gentleman doesn't believe in is change. What he doesn't believe in is progress. But what's fascinating is within only a

few years change was in the air. In sixteen eleven, the English thinker John Dunne, when reflecting on Galileo's discoveries made the previous year, declared that quote new philosophy calls all into doubt end quote. Several decades earlier, Ticobrie had turned astronomy into the world's first truly modern science. Interestingly, it took some time for historians to recognize what was going on and that it was truly

a monumental change. The historian Herbert Butterfield first lectured on what would become known as the scientific Revolution at the University of Cambridge, but he didn't do that until nineteen forty eight. The first ever known lecture on the subject had been given by a different professor the year prior. Nineteen forty seven. This triggered a fight over precisely what was the scientific revolution. Was it Galileo and Sir

Isaac Newton or was it Rutherford Einstein and nuclear physics. The former won out, but just barely. In this respect, the Scientific Revolution is distinct from say, the American or French Revolutions, which were declared revolutions when they happened. This was a revolution constructed by historians looking back. Like the term Industrial revolution, there is an inherent dating problem when it comes to the Scientific Revolution. When did it start? When did it end? Is it still going?

In terms of our narrative, we're in kind of the middle of the sixteenth century. We've been here for a while now, But Galileo did not make his discovery until the early seventeenth century. So why am I bringing this up right now? Well, I'm not sure there is a perfect time in

this kind of narrative to bring up a movement that arguably spans centuries. That historian Butterfield at Cambridge declared the period in question to range from the year thirteen hundred to eighteen hundred, And if that is the case, I guess I'm quite tardy in introducing it now. So the short answer for me is Copernicus dies in fifteen forty three. He is the man with Columbus who I'm starting this journey with. But please know, I certainly could to move this around

and not felt the least bit negligent in doing so. Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Darwin and all the rest absolutely knew what they were doing. During this long and protracted revolution. These men were responsible for huge changes in the intellectual reconfigurations that accompanied all their discoveries, and they introduced them partly for that reason, specifically to break the existing machine. None of them worked together, mind you, and none of them had the same end goal in mind.

Bacon and Descartes were the other two scientific thinkers whose changes to your communal processing system remained a little bit more than castles in the air, Yet changes they were. The fact that the final outcome of the scientific revolution was not foreseen by any of its members or component parts doesn't make it any less of a revolution. I think it's important to frame our world in fourteen ninety one a bit before we begin. One cannot understand the revolution if one does not

know what has changed in terms of intellectual activity. The way people saw their world, You know, there was little to distinguish Western Europe from fourteen ninety one, twelve ninety one, or the year nine ninety one for that matter. Europeans firmly believed in their own intellectual inferiority to the past. Thinkers like ra Stotle and the early Church Fathers were considered to have made all the discoveries. If modern Europeans quote unquote discovered something a word I will delve into here

and more in a moment, they weren't really discovering something new. Rather, they were uncovering something which had already been known hundreds, if not thousands of years earlier. There was nothing new period Europeans believed the ancients had beaten them to it. All. This has an important side effect worth discussing. Because there wasn't anything new. There wasn't any point in empirical evidence. Empirical evidence

is objective and sensory. A person's test scores are empirical because I can see them and they stand for how well the person did on the examination. But the emphasis on empirical it was something that came out of the scientific revolution. Before the revolution, the emphasis was on discussion and logical reason. You didn't have to measure how quickly two objects fell when you dropped them. You reasoned it out. I know this sounds strange to us today, and it should,

but there was no scientific method yet. There was no concept of science the concept of testing an idea in the real world would have struct university educated Europeans as insane. In the mid fifteenth century, you used logic. If the logical solution didn't meet what you were seeing and experiencing, right, then well then your senses must be wrong. And that brings us to Columbus. Before Columbus discovered the New World in fourteen ninety two, there was no clear

cut idea of discovery. If there's no notion one can discover something, there can be no modern science period. Hence, to discover is a precondition for science. Now, as I mentioned in previous episodes, most Europeans accepted the proposition that the world was round. Columbus's voyage didn't break any models there, but there was a consensus that there could not be any antipodean land mass.

All right, what is that? So? In geography, the antipode of any spot on Earth is the point on the Earth's surface diametrically opposed to it. So the exact opposite. A pair of points antipodal to each other are situated such that a straight line connecting the two would pass through the Earth's center. So, according to European logic, there couldn't be a North, South, or Central America. And that's because there can't be a land mass directly

opposite from Europe, Asia or Africa. The world was just too small. It couldn't be. Hence, the consequence of Columbus's discovery was a radical transformation in understanding how the world was constructed. More importantly, it was unequivocal proof that the ancients had been wrong. And if they were wrong about that, well, for the rest of this first episode on the scientific Revolution, I

want to dig into the idea of discovery. On the night of October eleventh, twelve, fourteen ninety two, Columbus discovered America, but of course he had no idea what he had just found. It would not be until fifteen oh seven that the first European cartographer showed the Americas as a vast land mass, not quite continents. But more to the point, having discovered a new world, Columbus had no word to describe what he had done. Literally.

Columbus wasn't a formally educated man, but he spoke Italian, Portuguese, Castilian, Spanish, and Latin, and of those, only Portuguese had a word for to discover, which was disco brier, and even that word had only entered the lexicon twelve years prior, in fourteen eighty five. In all other major European languages, the word for uncover was soon adopted to describe the voyages

of discovery, and again uncover has a very different meaning. It suggests that it was always there, Perhaps that the ancient Romans knew about North America and they were just uncovering this. The new word discover began to spread through Europe with the publication in fifteen oh four of the second of two letters written by a Minigo of Vespucci, the man for whom the Americas ultimately get their name. The new words spread almost as fast as news of the New World itself.

In fifteen fifty one, Fernalo Lopez de Castahda published The History of the Discovery and Conquest of the New World. The book was translated into French, Italian and Spanish, and shortly thereafter into English and German, and this book sealed the deal. Discovery was now a thing one might do. Of course, the highlights the reality that the scientific revolution was also This will not be the only time I say this. Driven by the dramatic rise in printing.

In fourteen fifty five the Gutenberg Bible came off the press. And I don't think it's any coincidence at all that the scientific Revolution came so hot on the heels of the printing revolution. Just consider some of these figures in the thousands for production of individual copies of printed books. Now, some of these are estimates, of course, but the printing revolution was a very large scale but at the same time drawn out process, which definitely coincides the Scientific Revolution in

fifteen hundred was only starting to pick up speed. So again, these numbers are in the thousands, so between fourteen fifty and fifteen hundred. Best estimates are around twelve thousand, five hundred, fifteen hundred to fifteen fifty. That number balloons about eighty thousand, fifteen fifty to sixteen hundred. Now we're over the one hundred thousand mark, one hundred thousand, thirty eight, sixteen hundred to sixteen fifty, two hundred, sixteen fifty to seventeen hundred. Now we're

at three hundred thirty one thousand. These are books in the thousands. Finally, seventeen hundred to seventeen fifty, three hundred fifty five thousand, seventy three in the thousands of books printed, So what you can really see is between fourteen fifty and fifteen hundred. The numbers remarkably small, but that number quadruples by fifteen fifty, so the ability of printing to sort of keep up with

the demand is increasing exponentially. Now. The core meaning of the word discovery continued to change for some time, but certainly after Columbus it did acquire one of its most central to discover meant to get something or somewhere. First, you could not discover something that had already been found. This idea then further eight away at the hold of the wisdom of the ancients, the hold that

that wisdom still held over European thinking like a golden cage. Now. Interestingly, there were discoveries, of course, before fourteen eighty six, when the word first comes into Portuguese. European sailors first discovered the Azores sometime around thirteen fifty one. The differences no one Cared the Azores were rediscovered in fourteen twenty seven, and interestingly, it still seems like no one cared sorry Azores.

Although there were different ways in Latin of saying something had been found for the first time. Prior to fourteen ninety two, the reality was nobody used phrases like that. That was because of the ongoing assumption that there was nothing new under the sun. That's why this linguistic change is so crucial. Usually, a linguistic change is an indicator that people are changing the way they think. Thus, a linguistic change both facilitates the change and makes it easier for us

to recognize it. So, although there were discoveries and inventions before fourteen eighty six, the invention of the word discovery marks a decisive moment in Western history because it makes discovery an actor's concept. What I mean is suddenly, to discover is something you can do. You can set out to discover now. Prior to Columbus, the primary objective, even of Renaissance intellectuals was to recover the lost culture of the past, not to establish new knowledge of their own.

Until Columbus demonstrated that classical geography was hopelessly misconceived, the assumption was that the arguments of the ancients needed to be interpreted never challenged. But even after Columbus, the old attitudes lingered. The big problem was the three main pillars of medieval European thinking, religion, Latin literature, and Aristotelian philosophy all agreed on one thing. There was no such thing as new knowledge. Even history

was assumed to go in circles. Even Plato considered the ying to Aristotle's yang was no good. Here. Plato insisted there never was anything new because the soul knew the truth. It always knew the truth. Your soul knew the truth before you existed in your physical form, and thus there could be nothing new. The idea of discovery is tied up with ideas like exploration, progress, originality, authenticity, and novelty. These, though are all ideas of

the Late Renaissance, they did not exist before the mid fifteenth century. Of course, it's natural for us to think that there was much that was new before fourteen ninety two. But what looks new to us generally did not look so new, or I guess, at least not so incontrovertibly new to contemporaries. An interesting test case is provided by revolutionary developments in art that took place

in Florence in the early fifteenth century, so before Columbus's voyage. Leon Battista Alberti returning there in fourteen thirty four after long years in Eggs, was astonished at the change that he saw. The new dome of Florence's Cathedral, designed by Bruna Skelli, was quote vast enough to cover the entire Tuscan population with its shadow end quote. It towered over the city, and a group of brilliant artists Bruna Skelli, Donatello Masaccio Guiberti, Lucio de Robia were producing work

which seemed unlike anything that had ever gone before. Again, Alberti writes, quote, I used both to marvel and to regret that so many excellent and divine arts and sciences, which were possessed in great abundance by the talented man of antiquity, have now disappeared and are all entirely lost. He wrote that

in fourteen thirty six. But now, gazing upon the achievement of the Florentine artists, he thought very differently, writing quote, our fame should be all the greater, if without preceptors, and without any model to imitate what we invent in arts and sciences, hitherto unheard and unseen end quote. Brunus Kelly's dome was quote surely a feat of engineering, if I am not mistaken, that people did not believe possible these days, and was probably equally unknown and

unimaginable among the ancients. End quote. Faced with achievements that seemed to have no classical parallel, Alberti nevertheless felt obliged to express himself with great caution, used words like surely, if I am not mistaken, and probably. Alberti in fact stuck to his guns, claiming that the idea of perspective paintings was probably, which is what he wrote, unknown to the ancients, even though he was one of the four runters in discovering it. By fourteen sixty one,

though people had changed their mind on perspective painting. Another artist, Ferraretti, in fourteen sixty one, insisted that perspective painting was completely unknown to the ancients. But if we're looking for another example of continuity to take even Machiavelli, thought to be the father of modern political theory, even he believed that the Romans had gunpowder, and hence the military innovations of the fifteenth century weren't

new at all. The crucial distinction here is not between old knowledge and new knowledge. I think It's between what we might call common knowledge, things generally known by most people, and what was known only by a privileged few. These were the people who had access to secret wisdom, knowledge, it was assumed, was never really lost. That's why the discovery of America was so

crude. Perhaps not initially, but within forty years certainly, no one could argue or dispute that it was an unprecedented event that could not be ignored. This was new, and Aristotle did not know about it period. What was remarkable about the knowledge produced by the voyages of discovery was not just that it was undisputably new, or that it was public. Geography had been transformed, not by philosophers teaching in universities, not by learned scholars reading books in their

studies, not by mathematicians. The nord had been deduced by recognized truths as recommended by Aristotle, or even found in the pages of ancient manuscripts. It was found instead by half educated seamen prepared to stand on the deck of a ship in all weather. And this brings us to the idea of experience. What is important, rather the idea that experience isn't simply useful because it can teach you things people already know. Experience can actually teach you things that what

people believed to be true is frankly false. Of course, geographical discoveries were only the beginning. From the New World came a flood of indisputably new plants, tomatoes, potatoes, tobacco, and new animals and eaters turkeys. This provoked a long process of trying to document and describe this previously unknown flora and fauna of the New World, but also by reaction a shocked recognition that there were all sorts of European plants and animals that had never been properly observed or

recorded. Once the process of discovery had begun, it turned out that what was possible was to make discoveries anywhere, if only one knew where to look. The old world itself was finally being viewed through new eyes. The noun discovery first appears in its new sense in English in fifteen fifty four, the verb to discover in fifteen fifty three, while the phrase voyage of discovery was

being used by fifteen seventy four. Already in fifteen fifty nine, it was possible in the first English application for a patent made by the Italian engineer Jacobus Acontius to talk of discovering not a new continent, but a type of machine.

Nothing is more honest than those who, by searching have found out things useful to the public, and should have some fruit of their rights and labors, as meanwhile they abandon all other modes of gain, are much at expensive experiments, and often sustained much loss, as has happened to me, I have discovered the most useful things new kinds of wheel machines and of furnaces for dyers and brewers, which when none will be used without my consent, except

there be a penalty, and I, poor with expense and labor, shall have no return. Therefore a big a prohibition patent against using any wheel machines, either for grinding or bruising any furnace ers like mine, without consent, And his suit was eventually granted with the following statement, it is right that inventors should be rewarded and protected against others making profit out of their discoveries. This might seem like a shift, an extraordinary shift in meaning, for it's

easy to see how you might uncover something that is already there. Much harder to see how you could uncover something that has never previously existed, but it must have facilitated by the range of meanings in present Latin for the word invenio, which covered both finding and inventing. In sixteen oh five, this new

idea of discovery was generalized by Francis Bacon. Indeed, Bacon, in his work of the Proficiency and Advancement of Learning, claimed that he had discovered how to make discoveries quote and like as the West Indies by the Americas had never been discovered, if the use of the mariner's needle the compass had not been first discovered, though the one be vast regions and the other a small motion, so it cannot be found strange if sciences be no further discovered, if

the art of invention and discovery hath been passed over end quote. Aristotle's philosophy was based on the idea that one ought to be able to deduce sciences from generally accepted principles. In other words, he believed all the sciences could be

reduced to geometry. Bay can flip this. Where before interpretation meant the interpretation of ideas or maybe books, now it meant the interpretation of nature may insisted that effective knowledge would require cooperation between the learned gentlemen and the craftsman, between the book learning and experience in the shop. Crucially, the difference between these two sciences could not have been more different. Greek philosophy was about contemplative understanding.

For Bacon, the goal became new technology. The discovery of America, for Bacon, brought a new commitment to what he called interchangeably advancement and or progress. The discovery of the New World went hand in hand with the discovery of progress. Bacon was the first person to attempt to systematize knowledge with the goal of making progress. Bacon's ideas were much less important when he wrote them in the seventeenth century than they are today. Today. We recognize the value

in Bacon's ideas. Back then, his books got very little traction, and for one simple reason. Bacon himself never made any discovery. But the key to discovery is finding something new, and that last word means a lot. If someone got there first, then your efforts were in vain. Hence, for the first time, we need rules to regulate discoveries. An early example of someone confident in his understanding of how these new rules of discovery work was

the anatomist Gabrielli Faliopo. He recounted when he first went to teach at the University of Pisa in fifteen forty eight, he told his students that he identified a third bone in the air, other than the hammer and anvil, which the great anatomist Andreas Velasius had not noticed. It is, after all, the smallest bone in the human body. One of his students advised him that Giovanni Philippio and Gracia, who was teaching in Naples, had already discovered this

bone and had named it the stapes or stirrup. Gracia had actually made the discovery in fifteen forty six, but his work was published only posthumously in sixteen oh three. When Falipo published in fifteen sixty one, he acknowledged Ingrassia's priority and adopted the name that he had proposed for the new bone. Now some argue that these claims are effectively pointless, because no one ever records their discovery in the moment. Moreover, you might not recognize that you had made a

discovery until years or even decades later. There may not be such a thing as even one discoverer, but that never stops historians from writing and selling books on this subject, self deprecating dig their on purpose. So too, as the category of discovery has developed over time, it has come to include many radical different types of events. Some discoveries are observations sun spots, for example. Others, such as those of gravity and natural selection, are commonly called

theories saw mar technologies, for instance, the steam engine. The idea of discovery is no more coherent or defensible than the idea of a game, which means that the idea presents philosophers and historians with all kinds of difficulties. That doesn't mean we should stop using it in this respect. Indeed, it's typical of the key concepts that make up modern science. It's interesting to think about the evolution of modern science and the sort of discovery theory and how it passes

through so many different scientific fields. So, for example, Joss Bergei discovered logarithms around fifteen eighty eight, but he didn't publish until after John Napier did so in sixteen fourteen. Three different men, Galileo, Harriott and Beekman independently discovered the law of the fall, but only Galileo published in sixteen o four. Boil and Marriott, about ten years apart, independently discovered what's called Boyle's

law. Darwin and Wallace independently discovered evolution and published jointly in eighteen fifty eight. Ultimately, here is what matters when we're talking about this. The existence of competition among scientists is in itself evidence. Where there is no competition, there is no concept of discovery. Once again, printing is a key ingredient in all of this. Sure, it's not impossible to imagine priority disputes before the printing press, but the reality is that we don't have evidence for any

prior to printing. Galen got into essentially debates in ancient Rome with other doctors, but there was no mention of who came up with what first. What printing made possible was to disseminate knowledge over a wide area, relatively quickly and cheaply. In other words, printing made it possible for the various scholars throughout Europe to read review and then declare a winner. It doesn't matter if you

discover something first if there's no way to tell anyone about it. Scholars argue that there can be no science without public knowledge, which is what the printing press allowed. Scientific knowledge has to be made available for others to question and test. Private knowledge is not subject to this testing, and hence it could never be scientific. Discoveries that are never made public aren't really discoveries at all. Thus, what we have in the late fifteenth century is the perfect storm

of discoveries and technology that made the scientific revolution possible. There was an immediate realization that there was something new about the geographic discoveries in what is a decision in fifteen oh seven to call the lands explored by a medico Vespucci America. Very quickly this became the name of the continent as a whole. Eponomy. The naming of things after people had not been previously a common practice in the

West. Of course, it wasn't unknown. Christianity, after all, was named after Christ, and on the same model, heresies tended to be named after these originators Donatism and Arianism, for example, there were cities named after founders Alexandria for Alexander, the Great Cesarea for Augustus Caesar, and Constantinople after Constantine. But epontomy gets a huge boost from the practice of naming new Lands

after the monarchs that patronized their discovery. Example, Philippines after Philip the Secret of Spain, Carolina after King Charles the First, and Virginia after Queen Elizabeth the Virgin Queen. Like the idea of discovery, eponomy was soon carried over into science. Galileo was quick to name new stars after patrons. Again, that's worth pointing out there is simply no press for this in the ancient classical world. The only real attempt was in the time of Augustus Caesar, who

tried to name Haley's comment after his dead uncle. This didn't work, of course. Haley's common only comes close to the Earth to be visible every seventy seven to seventy nine years. In fifteen sixty. Eponymy came to science, but only became widespread after sixteen forty eight, when Torres Sally named a standard tube vacuum experiment after himself. From there the race was on. Discovery itself

is not a scientific idea. Rather, it is foundational for science. It's difficult to see how modern science could exist without the idea of progress, which in and of itself could not exist without the acquisition of new information. Hellenistic science that of Archimedes had no concept of discovery. No one got a gold medal with the word eureka stamped on it, like we give out the Nobel Prizes today. Another important ingredient for science is acceptance. For example, it

didn't matter whether you lived in England or Spain. When news of Columbus's first voyage hate you, you believed it to a large extent. This explains why Europe held such a monopoly on the scientific revolution for so long. Renaissance Europe was willing to accept new ideas. In places like China and the Ottoman Empire, new ideas met stiff resistance, and the scientific revolution took a lot longer in coming. By then, both the Chinese and Ottomans were woefully behind,

which resulted in the period of dominance normally called imperialism. We'll get there someday, I promise. The discovery of American fourteen ninety two created a new enterprise that intellectuals could engage in the discovery of new knowledge. This enterprise required that certain social and technical preconditions to be met. The existence of reliable methods of communication, critic press, a common body of expert knowledge, and an acknowledge

group of experts able to adjudicate disputes. First cartographers, then mathematicians, then anatomists, and then astronomers began to play the game, which was inherently competitive and immediately gave rise to priority disputes and more slowly economic naming inseparable from the idea of discovery with the ideas of progress and intellectual property. Next time, we're going to go beyond this and think about from a European perspective, as

the news of a new world came in, what exactly is Earth? Anyway? If you're interested in more content, check out all the links in the show notes. There's a seven day free trial if you want to become a patron now so you can see the bonus materials that we've got on there and see if that's something that interests you. Otherwise, there's always the website and Western SIP two point oh. We just keep hugging along into the wars of Alexander's successors. Also a seven day free trial. Check it out.

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