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Yes, you wouldn't be building a steam engine with the tools of Greek artisans in antiquity, not even the ones who built the Antikythera mechanism. But we do kn

• bee_rider 5y ago
  I bet most STEM related people could work out how to produce lot or trig tables with a little thinking. I wonder if the ancient Greeks would appreciate those. Edit: It turns out they could produce their own for trig functions and wouldn't have been all that impressed by the log table because they didn't have logs.
  • abecedarius 5y ago
    Slides rules, though. Although it'd be nontrivial to make them, and I'm not sure where the demand would come from. For some of the same practical engineering approximations they might use compass and straightedge instead.
    • bee_rider 5y ago
      I never had the chance to use a sliderule, unfortunately. In general (I'm sure someone's dug incredibly deep on this topic and can tell me exactly why I'm wrong), the pre-digital/electronic-computer era of engineering seems to have been really focused on doing log based calculations, which makes sense -- a good design has tolerances such that you only have to be right in the order of magnitude, right? This seems like it would much more appropriate to share with ancient civilizations. No need to waste precision when the implementation is going to be done with an hammer and chisel. I will only be useful if you can convince ancient Greek computers to go out to E-15, haha.
      • abecedarius 5y ago
        Yeah, a slide rule's supposed to be good to ~3 digits, and I was imagining maybe the crude ones you're hacking up are only good for 2. The one I picked up out of curiosity is a bit sticky in its action, alas, so I haven't been excited about getting into it. I'd suck at "inventing" anything impressive & practical -- so it'd be hard to get heard about germs, etc., etc., which I do know.
• bluGill 5y ago
  > Yes, you wouldn't be building a steam engine with the tools of Greek artisans in antiquity, not even the ones who built the Antikythera mechanism. Sure you could. The antikythera mechanism shows more than enough skill and precision to make a small one. It might only be a toy for the rich though. I'm not sure if you could afford enough metal to make one large enough to do useful work, and even if you could the fuel required might kill it (coal wasn't really available at the time, though knowing it is useful might be enough to find and use it). The metals of the time where not up to a modern high pressure (and thus efficient) steam engine, but a large low pressure steam engine is perfectly possible. That said, water or wind power would be a much better invention to focus your efforts on. I'm not sure how much of that they had though.
  • tenuousemphasis 5y ago
    Windmills date back to the 9th century, water wheels to the 1st or earlier.
  • KineticLensman 5y ago
    > but a large low pressure steam engine is perfectly possible. Irrespective of whether it was possible for the Greeks to make them, what would be the economic incentive for them to build large low pressure steam engines at scale? In our timeline, the only serious application of large low pressure steam engines was pumping water out of mines, from after 1720 or so. Even with the incentive of the industrial revolution, it took almost a century to get small high-powered engines, with the first public steam train in 1825.
    • xyzzyz 5y ago
      Milling grain, hammering wrought iron, crushing ore etc. There were plenty of uses of mechanized power even in antiquity, and the ancients realized that through use of water wheels.
      • mywittyname 5y ago
        I don't think the OP is saying that there wasn't a need for mechanized power, just that it wasn't profitable to get that power from steam. Water wheels have no fuel costs, and very little ongoing maintenance costs. A steam engine that could be built in antiquity would be incredibly expensive in both respects. So even if the technology existed, there would be little economic incentive to use it over a water wheels, since transportation is cheaper than fuel and maintenance. As recently as 1900, steam engines were so expensive that most farmers rented equipment by the day.
• robbomacrae 5y ago
  Why not build a printing press? All you really need to do is carve some wood. As expensive as tunics were, books were much more so. Copying the bible would have taken several months (if not years) of labour. And the ability and control to spread such knowledge faster than others would not only be very lucrative but a source of great power.
  • germinalphrase 5y ago
    There are political liabilities to the printing press.
  • gruez 5y ago
    >Why not build a printing press? All you really need to do is carve some wood The printing press seems to be far more complex than just "carve some wood". Otherwise I find it hard to believe that it took until 1400AD for people to figure out how to make large stamps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press#Gutenberg's_press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press#Gutenberg's_pre...
    • ghaff 5y ago
      There is a lot of basic scientific knowledge that many/most modern people have (germ theory of disease, how the body works at some level, astronomy 101, etc.) But ancient people weren't stupid. They just didn't have advanced technology. Recreating a whole chain of technology to bring about the iron age maybe 1000 years early probably isn't happening. The fact is that they're mostly doing pretty well with building things that the technology more or less exists for.
    • samatman 5y ago
      Woodblock printing was invented in the 7th century in Tang China. The prerequisite for economic printing is paper, and the tech tree for paper is reproducible from Roman conditions. The production of vellum is measured in years, scribes were barely the limiting factor on text production.
    • philipswood 5y ago
• wing-_-nuts 5y ago
  I love this whole premise, is there a name for this genre of fiction?
  • ftth_finland 5y ago
    Alternative history.
• samstave 5y ago
  Do you recall the famous 'fan-fiction' fable of Prufrock on Reddit that was asked what happened if a modern military [Platoon?] was transported to ancient rome, and how would they fare against roman legions... It was supoposed to have been opted for a movie... and then douchebagery ensues and it never made it to light...
  • yesbabyyes 5y ago
    This is reminiscent of the book series A Time Odyssey, by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke, where a UN helicopter crew and a couple of cosmonauts from 2037, a late 19th century British force, the Mongol horde under Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great's army and a couple of early hominids happen to meet each other. I remember it as a quite interesting parallel to A Space Odyssey. Highly recommended.
    • samstave 5y ago
      that sounds too weird to not be interesting. ordering...
• Telemakhos 5y ago
  > I can multiply numbers, of arbitrary size. And I can do it in a few seconds using just a stylus and tablet. So could a Roman or Greek. He'd just need a counting board and some stones. He could probably do it faster than you, as well. Anyone using an abacus today could perform almost exactly the same algorithms, with the added convenience of having beads on rods in a frame instead of an unwieldy counting board and stones. The algorithms are the same, and you can also do division and square roots with a counting board or abacus. When done deftly moving stones around on the counting board (and Aristotle makes clear that this goes so quickly that it's possible for the person calculating to cheat an onlooker, like in a con-man's shell game), one might choose to write the result down on a tablet, and he might just finish writing before you do.
  • jacobolus 5y ago
    > goes so quickly that it's possible for the person calculating to cheat an onlooker Indeed, the biggest advantage of paper arithmetic is that it leaves a written record: each step in the algorithm can be checked for mistakes afterward. It is otherwise significantly slower and not inherently more accurate than a counting board. The other advantage that paper arithmetic has is that it can be easily reproduced in printed books, making learning more advanced techniques more accessible / easier to spread to anyone literate, without requiring an expert teacher. (And finally, paper arithmetic [eventually] has the advantage that it can be more conveniently extended and generalized to include more kinds of operations and structures, in a way that is easier to explain and teach than adding new kinds of counting board rules. Paper arithmetic is a more natural precursor for symbolic algebra than counting-board calculation.) The big disadvantage of paper arithmetic is that it depends on widespread literacy and cheap access to paper (or similar material). In a context where paper is expensive or unavailable, written arithmetic is not very compelling.
    • dredmorbius 5y ago
      Chalk (or charcoal) and slate (or other rewritable surfaces) were common before paper was cheap. Greek and Roman students typically used wax-coated boards and scratched them with styli. The surface could be heated or rubbed to restore its unmarked form.
• thrown_22 5y ago
  >Yes, you wouldn't be building a steam engine with the tools of Greek artisans in antiquity, not even the ones who built the Antikythera mechanism. The Greeks had steam engines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile It's just that slaves were vastly cheaper. In Britain early steam engines were price competitive with horses only at the coal mine for the first century of their operation.
  • tynpeddler 5y ago
    An aeolipile is massively inefficient and it would have been almost impossible for ancient societies to extract useful work from it. By constantly releasing steam, an enormous amount of energy and matter is released from the engine that could otherwise be recycled. It's like trying to power a car with a rocket engine. The first steam engines that were used for practical work were low powered and very unreliable, but they did close the the steam cycle which allowed them to exploit the liquid -> gas phase transition while keeping (some or) the hot water around to reheat.
    • thrown_22 5y ago
      >An aeolipile is massively inefficient and it would have been almost impossible for ancient societies to extract useful work from it. By constantly releasing steam, an enormous amount of energy and matter is released from the engine that could otherwise be recycled. It's like trying to power a car with a rocket engine. The first steam engines that were used for practical work were low powered and very unreliable, but they did close the the steam cycle which allowed them to exploit the liquid -> gas phase transition while keeping (some or) the hot water around to reheat. The first engines were atmospheric pressure, e.g. they used a vacuum to work. They were not closed cycle and they did not care about wasting water seeing as their purpose was to be a water pump. They didn't care about wasting coal as they worked at a coal mine. For the first century of their development they were stuck in the one niche where both the things they required were free. https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/77500/77524/77524_newcm_stmeng.htm https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/77500/77524/77524_newcm_stmeng.h... An illustration that shows how they removed waste water from the piston. It was a century before high pressure engines were used, which were also open cycle and why steam trains released great plumes of steam when they moved. The Aeolipile is exceedingly easy to reduce the steam outflow by having smaller nozzles. Given that they are basically a solid sphere made with four pipes sticking out they would have been the easiest form of high pressure engine to keep from exploding if there was a demand for mechanical work. They would however still explode, unlike the atmospheric engines.
• ftth_finland 5y ago
  If you are into alternative history, Eric Flint does an optimistic, entertaining and lighthearted take on both Ancient Rome and the 17th century. The first book from the 17th century series, 1632, is downloadable for free from Baen books.
• bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  Yeah Lest Darkness Fall the optimistic, knowledge from the future makes you powerful view of things - which really the hero was an academic who knew a lot about Rome of the period but also had lots of practical knowledge that he managed to make use of to improve his initial position of actually being made a slave. The less optimistic version would be this https://grapevine.is/mag/articles/2014/10/08/the-american-soldier-who-travelled-to-the-year-900-in-iceland/ https://grapevine.is/mag/articles/2014/10/08/the-american-so... on edit: removed a not that should not have been there
• lumost 5y ago
  An Ancient greek or Roman would have lacked paper. Using the available paper on arithmetic would have been seen as an inordinate waste of dies and paper.
  • retrac 5y ago
    For temporary purposes, they usually wrote on wax tablets with styluses, which could be easily melted and re-molded for reuse. They came in little boxes with a protective cover and were used for temporary records and drafts and personal letters: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Table_with_was_and_stylus_Roman_times.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Table_wi... And there's always sand! It's probably apocryphal but the legend is that Archimedes was slain by a Roman soldier during the taking of Syracuse when he objected -- "Don't disturb my circles!" -- to how the soldier marched through his trigonometry problems.
• damontal 5y ago
  Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is about this as well. I thought it would be a silly story about a guy who get sent to the past but it is incredibly dark and pessimistic. The Yankee’s knowledge wows everyone, he’s put in charge of a war machine and creates an industrialized hell hole.
• kazazes 5y ago
  Enticed by the wiki, I went to buy of off eBay and ended up finding the author's personal library copy with his bookplate. Will find a friend when I'm finished, as well. https://www.ebay.com/itm/304333942417 https://www.ebay.com/itm/304333942417