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.
b.80-70
– d. after 15 BC/BCE: Life of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, a Roman
military, civil, material, mechanical, and chemical engineer, architect, artilleryman,
construction expert, and acoustical engineer who designed theaters in which
whispers could be heard. In Roman times he was best known for standardizing the
sizes of pipes. He designed pulleys, cranes, hoists, water clocks, stucco, a
type of odometer, a steam engine, catapults, and a type of central heating.
ca
99-ca 55 BC/BCE:
The life of Lucretius, a Roman philosopher who was the first to describe
Brownian Movement, the random movements of particles which are suspended in a
gas or liquid. He speculated on what we would understand to be extraterrestrial
life: “Nothing in the universe is unique and alone and therefore, in other
regions there must be other earths inhabited by different tribes of men and
breeds of beasts.”
120
BC/BCE: Death of
the Greek scientist, Hipparchus. He was a mathematician and astronomer who
compiled trigonometry tables and calculated the length of the year to within
6.5 minutes of the modern measurement. He also discovered the procession of the
equinoxes. He also catalogued over 850 stars and prepared an accurate star map.
Ca 190
BC/BCE: 1. Birth
of the Greek scientist, Hipparchus, in Nicaea, Bithynia (modern Iznik, Turkiye)
He is a mathematician and astronomer who compiles trigonometry tables and
calculates the length of the year to within 6.5 minutes of the modern
measurement. He studied optics and geography, prepared star charts, and
described a nova in 134 BC/BCE.
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