7 ms·

The "what would I try to invent?" question one is fascinating. If I found myself transported back to Roman times, I'd aim to make a lens. The Romans had glass s

The "what would I try to invent?" question one is fascinating. If I found myself transported back to Roman times, I'd aim to make a lens. The Romans had glass so the raw material is there. With a lens you can fairly quickly go a telescope, which has immediate military application, so would perhaps be widely adopted. Astronomy might then follow, heading off the whole "Earth is the centre of Universe" thing that held back modern thinking. You can also make a microscope, which fairly quickly leads to the discovery of microscopic organisms, and perhaps the germ theory of disease. For bonus points I'd give them the decimal number system.

ekianjo 10y ago
Greeks had no telescope yet some of them had already devised that the Earth was orbiting around the Sun and also calculated the diameter of the Earth with reasonable accuracy.
nine_k 10y ago
Telephone or at least telegraph are also easy, and may be even more valuable in a military setting.
- angersock 10y ago
  Maybe easy, but you'd need to create lots of long insulated wire--while not impossible, very expensive. Telescopes and semaphores would get you very far at a fraction of the cost.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    Telescopes reduce the number of relays, if terrain is conducive, but don't seem transformative if you have flags already?
    - Houshalter 10y ago
      As far as I know, the romans never used semaphore. Maybe for practical reasons like not having telescopes, but maybe the idea just didn't occur to them. It would be pretty low hanging fruit for time travelers to introduce.
      - njharman 10y ago
        I think it was more due to not solving any problem. Same way despite Greeks inventing steam power, no one made engine from it cause there was no need. Too many slaves provided needed labor. Runners, horses, ships moved communications fast enough. Even if you knew ceaser was coming to Rome, transport speed meant you couldnt do much with that. And yes we with hindsight cab cherry pick situations where it would help. But it was not worth cost to create, train and maintain such a system for hundreds if years for the fee.tumes it provided marginal benefit. In other words most technology is synergistic. It really isn't awesome unless bunch other tech is at sufficient level to exploitmkit
        Houshalter 10y ago
        Well sending a message that a remote province is being invaded, is useful. Especially if you can send that message days faster than runners can send messages. Its also very useful to coordinate ships. The difference between steam engines is that steam engines were very difficult to build. Semaphore is very simple and a trial system wouldn't be expensive to set up. The Romans did use crude fire signals, so I think that proves that they would find it useful.
        Someone 10y ago
        But building and maintaining a semaphore system in a world that has slavery and where wood is cheap and plentiful (Caesar could build a bridge over the Rhine in 10 days, and that includes going out to find and chop down trees that are large enough) isn't that expensive. The local HFT community would probably pay for a semaphore system. A lot of money could be made on knowing the outcome of events earlier than others. On the other hand, "trees are plentiful" probably meant that sight lines were awful. Maybe, a semaphore only becomes feasible after one has cut down most of the trees.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - tonmoy 10y ago
    Also, source of electricity may be non-trivial. Battery would need creating acids and non-metal container to store them. A simple DC generator would need a permanent magnet.
  - davidgay 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraphy#Optical_telegraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraphy#Optical_telegraph
pbhjpbhj 10y ago
>heading off the whole "Earth is the centre of Universe" thing that held back modern thinking // How do you think that held us back? Do you think heliocentrism, which is similarly wrong, has/is holding us back?
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  It was a fundamental break-through. We were no longer at the center of the conceptual Universe. Whether that something is the Sun, the center of the Milky Way, or doesn't actually exist in space, doesn't matter as much as the initial realization.
lkrubner 10y ago
The problem is with the assumption behind "which fairly quickly leads to the discovery of microscopic organisms". In your scenario, who learns about microscopic organisms, and when? As a point of comparison, who discovered the existence of North America? Was it Christopher Columbus in 1492? Or was it the Vikings in 900 AD? Or was it some mix of people who first melded together in Beringia, somewhere around 20,000 BC? Has a fact been discovered if one person learns of it? Or is it only discovered if the news spreads to all of society? If the latter, then science is a social process, not an individual one. The historian Fernand Braudel points out that an Italian engineer, wanting to show off his skills, built an automated saw mill in Italy, back during the 1200s. The logs were slotted automatically and run through the mill automatically. This engineer had created an important part of the Industrial Revolution, 500 years early!!! Did it matter? No. The project was merely a demonstration. The abundance of wood was never used. How could it be? There was no system of transportation for the abundance of wood, there was no finance to cover operating expenses, nor any finance to support a building boom that might use the wood, nor any modern labor market from which the mill owner could hire more workers to do the initial cutting of trees, nor was there the modern strictness regarding contracts, nor were commoners allowed to bring civil suits against the nobility (in case of default, supposing a nobleman contracted to have a manor built), nor was the judiciary independent, nor... In other words, the Industrial Revolution was a social process, involving the creation of dozens of important modern institutions, and the public's acceptance of the legitimacy of those institutions. No single engineer, however brilliant, could jump start the process.
- rwmj 10y ago
  So maybe the thing to invent is banking?
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    Christians prohibited loans and banking. Jews were able to practice it though.
    - jeff_petersen 10y ago
Houshalter 10y ago
I love this game. I think I would send the idea of plant breeding. They had this idea to some extent, but I don't think there was big public, long term effort to breed new crops or get much higher yields. If you get modern crops faster, you have larger populations, which leads to industrialization sooner. This isn't just limited to food crops, it's possible ancients could have bred plants and animals for many useful purposes. Slightly relevant, what information would you send to the past if you had a phone that could communicate backwards in time? But there's a catch, any idea you send is converted to the closest analogue in ancient times. So if you tell them about the scientific method, they will just think about religion. http://lesswrong.com/lw/h5/archimedess_chronophone/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/h5/archimedess_chronophone/
- dTal 10y ago
  Regarding Archimedes' chronophone, I am not sure that the premise is well-formed. I find I cannot predict what the chronophone will do because the notion of "closest analogue" is inherently ambiguous. In the worst case we cannot send any information back at all by definition. All that being said, assuming the chronophone will let me, I'd bring their attention to the idea of the printing press. It's easily made, the benefit is obvious, and the effect is dramatic. Kind of amazing it wasn't invented earlier.
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    The link explains it further. The point of the chronophone is that you can't just send ideas you already have back. If you want to send the scientific method back in time, you have to actually do science. If you want to send the printing press, you actually have to think about better ways your present civilization could transmit information.
  - lmm 10y ago
    I think it's a self-defeating idea, but a useful thought experiment. It makes you think about the abstract principles behind things that are good ideas, and then the more-abstract principles behind those.
knz 10y ago
Was glass and the tools needed to make a lens readily available to people then? Or would you nedd to time travel with substantial wealth?
- dTal 10y ago
  "By the mid-1st century AD this meant that glass vessels had moved from a valuable, high-status commodity, to a material commonly available: “a [glass] drinking cup could be bought for a copper coin” (Strabo, Geographica XVI.2)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_glass As for manufacturing lenses, you can get by without many tools with cunning techniques. Molten glass naturally forms curved shapes and can be polished by fire. Leeuwenhoek made tiny lenses in the 1600s, although no one knows for sure exactly how (he made a point of not sharing) - one technique that's known to work is drawing the glass into a fine thread, snapping the thread, and heating the end so it forms a tiny ball.
noamyoungerm 10y ago
> the whole "Earth is the centre of Universe" thing that held back modern thinking This says much more about how we dismiss ancient civilizations as inferior than it does about ancient civilizations themselves. The fact is, the geocentric model was an excellent one, able to explain all observations at the time in a sensible and straightforward way. Admittedly, more data helped to develop the heliocentric model, but there were valid scientific criticisms against that model at the time. In particular, it took Kepler to provide truly sensible and strong arguments in favor of heliocentrism. The geocentric model is so good that even today it is often the sensible model to use when thinking about some astronomical problems. I hate to hear it being dismissed as 'wrong' - because from a physical perspective the two are simply geometrical transformations of one another, they are both 'right'. It's simply that one of them is simpler than the other for most problems. But most of all, I hate hearing people say it 'held back thinking', because I assure you that the people doing the thinking back then were just as capable of doing good, logical, rational thinking as we are today, and didn't need anyone to claim they were too stupid to think critically for themselves about the scientific understanding of the time.
- inlineint 10y ago
  > because from a physical perspective the two are simply geometrical transformations of one another Not really, at least if you want to keep simplicity of Newton's laws which are formulated for inertial reference frames. The reference frame in the heliocentric model is inertial, while in the geocentric one it is not.
njharman 10y ago
Bicycles. Food preservation. Sanitation / boiling water. Roman legions mounted in bikes could be everywhere. Their roads already were a force multiplier. Combined with being able to feed them and have them not die of disease simple wounds. We'd all be speaking Latin. We all know, Rome is center of the universe. :)
- adrianN 10y ago
  Bicycles would be pretty hard with the metallurgy of ancient rome, I think. Introducing soap is very easy in comparison.
  - eveningcoffee 10y ago
    Bicycle actually needs very few metal parts, if any.
    - pja 10y ago
      But the parts they do need are quite high up the tech stack: decent quality bearings being the most obvious.
      - Houshalter 10y ago
        Do they absolutely require it though? Looking at images of the first bicycles, they seem quite crude: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Draisine_or_Laufmaschine%2C_around_1820._Archetype_of_the_Bicycle._Pic_01.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Draisine... The earliest ones don't even have pedals. The Romans had wheels and carts that seemed to work. It doesn't seem like a huge leap to put a human on them.
WalterBright 10y ago
Paper, followed by a printing press. Look what happened in the century after Gutenberg.

ekianjo 10y ago

Greeks had no telescope yet some of them had already devised that the Earth was orbiting around the Sun and also calculated the diameter of the Earth with reasonable accuracy.

nine_k 10y ago

Telephone or at least telegraph are also easy, and may be even more valuable in a military setting.

angersock 10y ago
Maybe easy, but you'd need to create lots of long insulated wire--while not impossible, very expensive. Telescopes and semaphores would get you very far at a fraction of the cost.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  Telescopes reduce the number of relays, if terrain is conducive, but don't seem transformative if you have flags already?
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    As far as I know, the romans never used semaphore. Maybe for practical reasons like not having telescopes, but maybe the idea just didn't occur to them. It would be pretty low hanging fruit for time travelers to introduce.
    - njharman 10y ago
      I think it was more due to not solving any problem. Same way despite Greeks inventing steam power, no one made engine from it cause there was no need. Too many slaves provided needed labor. Runners, horses, ships moved communications fast enough. Even if you knew ceaser was coming to Rome, transport speed meant you couldnt do much with that. And yes we with hindsight cab cherry pick situations where it would help. But it was not worth cost to create, train and maintain such a system for hundreds if years for the fee.tumes it provided marginal benefit. In other words most technology is synergistic. It really isn't awesome unless bunch other tech is at sufficient level to exploitmkit
      - Houshalter 10y ago
        Well sending a message that a remote province is being invaded, is useful. Especially if you can send that message days faster than runners can send messages. Its also very useful to coordinate ships. The difference between steam engines is that steam engines were very difficult to build. Semaphore is very simple and a trial system wouldn't be expensive to set up. The Romans did use crude fire signals, so I think that proves that they would find it useful.
      - Someone 10y ago
        But building and maintaining a semaphore system in a world that has slavery and where wood is cheap and plentiful (Caesar could build a bridge over the Rhine in 10 days, and that includes going out to find and chop down trees that are large enough) isn't that expensive. The local HFT community would probably pay for a semaphore system. A lot of money could be made on knowing the outcome of events earlier than others. On the other hand, "trees are plentiful" probably meant that sight lines were awful. Maybe, a semaphore only becomes feasible after one has cut down most of the trees.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- tonmoy 10y ago
  Also, source of electricity may be non-trivial. Battery would need creating acids and non-metal container to store them. A simple DC generator would need a permanent magnet.
- davidgay 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraphy#Optical_telegraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraphy#Optical_telegraph

pbhjpbhj 10y ago

>heading off the whole "Earth is the centre of Universe" thing that held back modern thinking // How do you think that held us back? Do you think heliocentrism, which is similarly wrong, has/is holding us back?

pavel_lishin 10y ago
It was a fundamental break-through. We were no longer at the center of the conceptual Universe. Whether that something is the Sun, the center of the Milky Way, or doesn't actually exist in space, doesn't matter as much as the initial realization.

lkrubner 10y ago

The problem is with the assumption behind "which fairly quickly leads to the discovery of microscopic organisms". In your scenario, who learns about microscopic organisms, and when? As a point of comparison, who discovered the existence of North America? Was it Christopher Columbus in 1492? Or was it the Vikings in 900 AD? Or was it some mix of people who first melded together in Beringia, somewhere around 20,000 BC? Has a fact been discovered if one person learns of it? Or is it only discovered if the news spreads to all of society? If the latter, then science is a social process, not an individual one. The historian Fernand Braudel points out that an Italian engineer, wanting to show off his skills, built an automated saw mill in Italy, back during the 1200s. The logs were slotted automatically and run through the mill automatically. This engineer had created an important part of the Industrial Revolution, 500 years early!!! Did it matter? No. The project was merely a demonstration. The abundance of wood was never used. How could it be? There was no system of transportation for the abundance of wood, there was no finance to cover operating expenses, nor any finance to support a building boom that might use the wood, nor any modern labor market from which the mill owner could hire more workers to do the initial cutting of trees, nor was there the modern strictness regarding contracts, nor were commoners allowed to bring civil suits against the nobility (in case of default, supposing a nobleman contracted to have a manor built), nor was the judiciary independent, nor... In other words, the Industrial Revolution was a social process, involving the creation of dozens of important modern institutions, and the public's acceptance of the legitimacy of those institutions. No single engineer, however brilliant, could jump start the process.

rwmj 10y ago
So maybe the thing to invent is banking?
- Houshalter 10y ago
  Christians prohibited loans and banking. Jews were able to practice it though.
  - jeff_petersen 10y ago

Houshalter 10y ago

I love this game. I think I would send the idea of plant breeding. They had this idea to some extent, but I don't think there was big public, long term effort to breed new crops or get much higher yields. If you get modern crops faster, you have larger populations, which leads to industrialization sooner. This isn't just limited to food crops, it's possible ancients could have bred plants and animals for many useful purposes. Slightly relevant, what information would you send to the past if you had a phone that could communicate backwards in time? But there's a catch, any idea you send is converted to the closest analogue in ancient times. So if you tell them about the scientific method, they will just think about religion. http://lesswrong.com/lw/h5/archimedess_chronophone/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/h5/archimedess_chronophone/

dTal 10y ago
Regarding Archimedes' chronophone, I am not sure that the premise is well-formed. I find I cannot predict what the chronophone will do because the notion of "closest analogue" is inherently ambiguous. In the worst case we cannot send any information back at all by definition. All that being said, assuming the chronophone will let me, I'd bring their attention to the idea of the printing press. It's easily made, the benefit is obvious, and the effect is dramatic. Kind of amazing it wasn't invented earlier.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  The link explains it further. The point of the chronophone is that you can't just send ideas you already have back. If you want to send the scientific method back in time, you have to actually do science. If you want to send the printing press, you actually have to think about better ways your present civilization could transmit information.
- lmm 10y ago
  I think it's a self-defeating idea, but a useful thought experiment. It makes you think about the abstract principles behind things that are good ideas, and then the more-abstract principles behind those.

knz 10y ago

Was glass and the tools needed to make a lens readily available to people then? Or would you nedd to time travel with substantial wealth?

dTal 10y ago
"By the mid-1st century AD this meant that glass vessels had moved from a valuable, high-status commodity, to a material commonly available: “a [glass] drinking cup could be bought for a copper coin” (Strabo, Geographica XVI.2)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_glass As for manufacturing lenses, you can get by without many tools with cunning techniques. Molten glass naturally forms curved shapes and can be polished by fire. Leeuwenhoek made tiny lenses in the 1600s, although no one knows for sure exactly how (he made a point of not sharing) - one technique that's known to work is drawing the glass into a fine thread, snapping the thread, and heating the end so it forms a tiny ball.

noamyoungerm 10y ago

> the whole "Earth is the centre of Universe" thing that held back modern thinking This says much more about how we dismiss ancient civilizations as inferior than it does about ancient civilizations themselves. The fact is, the geocentric model was an excellent one, able to explain all observations at the time in a sensible and straightforward way. Admittedly, more data helped to develop the heliocentric model, but there were valid scientific criticisms against that model at the time. In particular, it took Kepler to provide truly sensible and strong arguments in favor of heliocentrism. The geocentric model is so good that even today it is often the sensible model to use when thinking about some astronomical problems. I hate to hear it being dismissed as 'wrong' - because from a physical perspective the two are simply geometrical transformations of one another, they are both 'right'. It's simply that one of them is simpler than the other for most problems. But most of all, I hate hearing people say it 'held back thinking', because I assure you that the people doing the thinking back then were just as capable of doing good, logical, rational thinking as we are today, and didn't need anyone to claim they were too stupid to think critically for themselves about the scientific understanding of the time.

inlineint 10y ago
> because from a physical perspective the two are simply geometrical transformations of one another Not really, at least if you want to keep simplicity of Newton's laws which are formulated for inertial reference frames. The reference frame in the heliocentric model is inertial, while in the geocentric one it is not.

njharman 10y ago

Bicycles. Food preservation. Sanitation / boiling water. Roman legions mounted in bikes could be everywhere. Their roads already were a force multiplier. Combined with being able to feed them and have them not die of disease simple wounds. We'd all be speaking Latin. We all know, Rome is center of the universe. :)

adrianN 10y ago
Bicycles would be pretty hard with the metallurgy of ancient rome, I think. Introducing soap is very easy in comparison.
- eveningcoffee 10y ago
  Bicycle actually needs very few metal parts, if any.
  - pja 10y ago
    But the parts they do need are quite high up the tech stack: decent quality bearings being the most obvious.
    - Houshalter 10y ago
      Do they absolutely require it though? Looking at images of the first bicycles, they seem quite crude: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Draisine_or_Laufmaschine%2C_around_1820._Archetype_of_the_Bicycle._Pic_01.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Draisine... The earliest ones don't even have pedals. The Romans had wheels and carts that seemed to work. It doesn't seem like a huge leap to put a human on them.

WalterBright 10y ago

Paper, followed by a printing press. Look what happened in the century after Gutenberg.