Many modern people have a very limited view of history. They can only see or think about five or ten years into the past. They see history as boring and they think of the ancients as ignorant and backward. This was actually not true. What the ancients lacked was the modern accumulation of facts. An ancient Israelite would have been very puzzled and culture-shocked to have been dumped into the modern world, but he or she could have eventually learned to drive a car or to cook on a stove or to use a cellphone.
The
ancients were just as intelligent as we are but the accumulation of scientific
facts had not yet reached a critical point. Human knowledge took centuries to
double, fact by fact. As knowledge accumulated, the rate of accumulation began
to speed up. Every answer exposes a new question. Buckminster Fuller spoke of
the Knowledge Doubling Curve which was relatively flat for centuries, then
began a slow climb, and then went into an explosive upward thrust.
By the end
of the 19th Century, knowledge was doubling once per century. By
about 1945, the rate of doubling was about every 25 years. By 1982, the rate
was about every 12-13 months. By 2020, the doubling was occurring about every
12 hours. With at least 50,000,000,000 devices now operating and with the rise
of artificial intelligence, the rate may now be in minutes.
Ca 290
BC/BCE:
Aristarchus of Samos says that the Earth orbits the sun.
3rd
cent BC (300-201):
The Greek physician and anatomist, Erasistratus, specialized in the study of
the human circulatory and nervous systems. He differentiated between sensory
and motor nerves, distinguished between the cerebrum and the cerebellum, and
traced arteries and veins back to the heart. He was invented a type of
catheter.
Ca 300 BC: The Mayans develop advanced
mathematics and an accurate Calendar.
Ca 300
BC: Euclid, a Greek
mathematician, expounds his geometrical theories of plane geometry, solid
geometry, optics, optical perspective, and proportion.
Ca 340
BC/BCE: The
Macedonians utilize catapults as weapons.
Posts
