To be sure, though I think that the no outside influence restriction is a bit contrary to the archeological record. Though I didn't make it clear, what concerns

To be sure, though I think that the no outside influence restriction is a bit contrary to the archeological record. Though I didn't make it clear, what concerns me are not the coarse technologies of life--wheels and pottery and what not--but more fine, non-obvious innovations. Consider concrete: with the dissolution of the Roman political structure the secrets of concrete were lost. It took 13 centuries, until the 1750s, to rediscover its formula. During that time, public works were greatly retarded. Indeed, the Anglo-Saxon (whose buildings rarely had windows for stability purposes) culture produced a rather famous poem we now call The Ruins in which Roman ruins are attributed to the works of giants. What concerns me is not the transmitting of basic machines across the simplification of a society, to use Joseph Tainter's jargon, but, rather, difficult, contextual knowledge. Our knowledge of Mathematics, for example, was preserved by luck: the Byzantine Empire harbored enough learned individuals and archivists until such a time as the Crusades swept through. All of my work simply assumes an industrial, technological civilization with advanced computational capacity. Any textbooks I might produce in the future will have the implicit assumption of contemporary operating systems, compilers and hardware. If, through sheer chance, any of my potential works survived across a collapse they would be useless without further context. I imagine that the same holds true for advanced works of physics, especially that which requires hugely complex experimental devices. Euclid held up well enough as his works were self-contained. What modern works can say the same?