> The disruption and reintroduction of superstition caused by the protestant revolution (eg the burning of "witches") held back science by probably a century.

> The disruption and reintroduction of superstition caused by the protestant revolution (eg the burning of "witches") held back science by probably a century. Witchhunts were bad, but this is really not correct. For the specific case of the steam engine, Torricelli had made some of the most important basic discoveries in Italy[0], but these came to nothing in Catholic Europe because his discoveries disproved an unimportant minor point of Catholic dogma, so it was unsafe to continue work with them. (The existence of a vacuum was for some insane reason held to be heretical, so no actual research into devices that worked using vacuum, such as atmospheric steam engines, could be done.) There was plenty of insane fundamentalism in Protestant Europe, but crucially, it was fragmented. The part that doomed science under Catholicism was not that Catholics were less learned or more supersticious than Protestants (because they really weren't), it was that in Catholicism there was a single person who ultimately decided what it was okay to think, and this person was just as dumb and fallible as the rest of us. In contrast, in Northern, Protestant Europe the baseline of education and knowledge was much lower, but every King or Princeling managed the rules of thought and discourse for their own domain, so there was always some place somewhere that was willing to accommodate new ideas. [0]: Starting with one of the most important viewpoint shifts in science history: "We live submerged under an ocean of air."