It's not so much that the "dark ages" intervened in some linear progression of scientific discovery. Rather, it seems to require a precise and finicky set of co

It's not so much that the "dark ages" intervened in some linear progression of scientific discovery. Rather, it seems to require a precise and finicky set of conditions to get a real scientific & industrial revolution going. The hard part isn't really the basic scientific discoveries. It's the society-wide political and economic conditions that let capital accumulation go exponential. The ancient Greeks had working toy steam engines. They could have started the industrial revolution right there. Why didn't they? There are lots of theories. Maybe they hadn't invented good enough ideas about banking and property. Maybe their reliance on slave labor blinded them to the value of mechanization. Maybe their class system kept people with scientific knowledge too far away from people with practical working knowledge. The bottom line is that scientific knowledge is probably not the limiting factor.