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Such great inventions ancient Greek made! I was impressed from an other invention of steam power that was rotating a ball around it self. I suppose that with so
by melenaos 8y ago
Such great inventions ancient Greek made! I was impressed from an other invention of steam power that was rotating a ball around it self. I suppose that with some more hundrent of years of peace they might have invented steam train or something.
- sn41 8y agoTrue. To say nothing of the philosophy. Reading Plutarch's essays now. I find it soothing and inspirational.
- elorant 8y agoIt's not wars that stopped Greece from further advancement. It was religion. Same happened to all of the Western world in the middle ages. Since Christianity took over they did everything in their power to fight science. And up to this day they still do.
- lainga 8y agoThat smacks of the infamous "gap left by the dark ages" chart, and doesn't really account for the drop in innovation across the Roman world in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, when large parts of the empire (indeed, notably excluding Greece) were not Christian or minority-Christian. Unless you are supposing some crucial difference between Hellenism and its Roman adaptation?
- AnaniasAnanas 8y agoJust wondering, what was the reason for this? I would assume that the peace brought by the Pax Romana alongside with the employment of military devices such as ballistae in the roman army would increase innovation instead.
- earthicus 8y agoThere was a discussion about this issue last month, where i wrote out a fairly detailed reply and gave a good reference to learn more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18644880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18644880
- sherr 8y agoWhere you mention the book : The Forgotten Revolution by Lucio Russo The Kindle version of this is being sold on Amazon UK for £52.24! Not much cheaper than the paperback.
- yesenadam 8y agopdf or djvu: http://libgen.io/search.php?req=the%20forgotten%20revolution%20russo http://libgen.io/search.php?req=the%20forgotten%20revolution...
- sctb 8y agoSuch claims require more support, lest we go another turn on the religious flamewar unmerry-go-round. > Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- damsdu78 8y agoEntirely false. It is Rome that absorbed Greece civilization. You need to study history instead of showing your hate for Christianity. Http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greece_in_the_Roman_era
- elorant 8y agoI have no hate for Christianity. I'm just stating the facts. It took the western world 1.500 years to go from the Antikythera mechanism to the first automatons. And those 1.500 years were when Christianity took reign over Europe.
- devereaux 8y agoThe world is not limited to Europe. Greek inventions could have been replicated in any other part of the world not subject to the middle ages and also having access to greek archives and knowledge (Middle East) My argument from good old Civ5: some invention require a network of other advancements to take hold, otherwise they are not good alternative to existing technology and the constraints it imposes (as in, what good would a modern computer have been in ancient Greece in measurement errors made the fine precision of the advanced calculations exihibit more variance than simpler method using rough estimations?)
- nkoren 8y agoThe Antikythera mechanism likely was likely built in Rhodes. Rhodes itself had, by that point, been famous for its automatons for several hundred years.