Why didn’t the Romans have one?
Before I read it, the first thing I thought was this: “How are engineers to do experiments and calculations without any concept of the experimental method, and without anything close to the mathematical tools that are available today to any fifth-grader?”
As he notes, they didn’t have Arabic numerals, they didn’t have zero, they didn’t have negative numbers, or complex numbers. They had no higher math, and no way to get to it with their numbering system. One of the foundations of the industrial revolution was the invention of calculus, and understanding of physics, including thermodynamics. That was all happening in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The other thing that was happening was the invention of capitalism in the coffee houses of London and Amsterdam (which wouldn’t have happened had coffee not become a thing in the wake of opening the New World). It’s not clear how, even had Rome not fallen, how they would have ever had those foundations.
[Update a while later]
Link is fixed now, sorry.
The link is to “bumper bowling”.
And it’s not so much a matter of Arabic numerals as it is of positional notation. For which, yes, you really do need a way to represent each number from 1 to 9 (or whatever) by a single character. And zero.
Rand: Vinculum provisum non logice sequitur thema originalium.
But even without reading the story, I’m reminded of Gibson & Sterling’s The Difference Engine. Which starts from the premise that Charles Babbage was able not only to complete his difference engine but went on to finish his more general analytical engine which operated on steam power. Bringing the digital computer revolution forward by 100 years and how that might have effected the world.
I am reminded of Donald E. Westlake’s novel God Save the Mark. In it, an incidental character, a retired Air Force colonel, tries to get the protagonist to read the manuscript of the book he has been writing. It’s a novel, based on the history of Rome’s wars throughout the centuries. All of the weapons and tactics used were historically accurate, with one exception: in his novel, the Romans also have crude airplanes. A lively discussion ensues between the protagonist and the colonel about what other things they would have to have in order to have airplanes. The colonel is so proud of his work, but the best punchline is the title: Veni, Vidi, Vici – Through Air Power..
The theories expressed are largely wrong. For example, after 500BC the Greeks started using Babylonian positional base-10 mathematics for doing scientific calculation, then translated back to Greek numerals for inclusion in their texts, which conveyed the idea they didn’t know about zero. They used the letter omicron (which is a little circle symbol) for zero. They didn’t have mechanical clocks because they didn’t need them. Instead they had the technology of the Antikithera Device, a sophisticated mechanical navigation computer, which is hypothesized to have been ancestral to mechanical clocks invented by Muslims, who had religious reasons for knowing the exact time. There’s a lot more to all of this.
My personal thought supports the universal slavery theory. They didn’t invent steam engines because they didn’t need them. A big chain pump with a bunch of pitiful guys cranking would drain any flooded mine you happened to have.
PS: It’s been hypothesized that the accidental survival and rediscovery of a single copy of De Rerum Natura triggered the Rennaissance and laid the ground work for the IR. Only a tiny fraction of a percentage of the literary heritage of Greece and Rome survived to the present day, part of why we view them the way we do. Ancient Rome had a flourishing publishing industry (base on slave labor copyists). Of the non-highbrow literature, only 6 novels have survived (out of a probable many thousands). It’s why we didn’t know about the Antikithera Device until we found one in a shipwreck. They were too prosaic to mention in, for example, Periplus Erythraeum.
Part of the IR may have been the realization that the world could be “knowable “ and that there were fixed rules about how everything worked instead of capricious gods bestowing favors or punishments.
That was the essense of Taoism and Epicurian Atomism, so probably not it.
I’m not convinced that a lack of math is relevant. It wasn’t until well into the 19th century that math started to be applied to strength of materials, mechanics and thermodynamics after the Industrial Revolution had been underway for a few centuries using rough guesses, rules of thumb and other assorted folk wisdom that was as often as not more wrong than right.
Not that a modern understanding would have done much good. It’s not much use to calculate when any one batch of iron was likely to vary wildly from another in quality and strength. On that note, the bronze metallurgy of the Romans would have been probably more reliable than the very spotty iron metallurgy available to Newcomen and Watt.
Coal wasn’t exploited until most of Europe and especially England was deforested to provide fire wood for smelting. That wood would have been available to the Romans.
I’m not sure what your point is here, but by the time the Romans became a historical force, the Iron Age had been under way for a thousand years and bronze technology had receeded into the background. Theorizing is helped by a detailed knowledge of the history of technology. The Greeks and Romans were kind of backward in those terms, but not isolated like the later Europeans. Crucible steels were developed in Ceylon, India, and Central Asia before 500 BC. Damascene was developed in Roman Syria by 300 AD, but the source material was imported Indian crucible steel. The Chinese had the steel puddling process as long ago as 1200 BC, but blooming furnace wrought iron is cheaper than mild steel, so it was not adopted further west. The Bessemer process allowed mass produced mild steel to replace wrought iron only in the 19th century.
The real question is not, why didn’t the Romans or Chinese have an IR, but why DID we? And I think the reason is because we had to reverse engineer the advanced science and technology of the Ming Empire (destroyed by Confucian bureaucracy and then the Manchurian conquest in 1644). It took us a lot time to figure out how to make porcelain, for example, even with examples right in front of us.