The article is mainly a good reminder of how many things you can do yourself. The a posteriori reasoning without concrete proofs is faulty in the sense that the same reasoning can be applied to a lot of things beyond the romans: could the ancient greeks have discovered penicillin?
Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
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Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, from what I understood from listing to a TTC lecture series about this, the "decline and fall" of the roman empire is somewhat of a fiction, in that it wasn't a brutal event, more of a long slow disintegration over the span of a thousand years. To give some sense of perspective, that's 3 times longer than the US has existed, and people have been clamouring that the US is in decline for the last 50 years. Wh…
Kind of but not entirely true - I will defer to real historians but roughly it breaks down like this 100 - 180 AD : golden age of emperors, what we think of when we think Rome 200-350 : serious decline and infighting, split into four regions, during this period attempts to enforce price controls to stem inflation. Rome itself stopped being political centre 350-400 Constantine recovery (unites to one region again - on…
Well, that's the thing. Yes, the central control collapsed (though I still wouldn't underestimate the influence of the Church, which effectively controlled kings' actions through the threat of excommunication). However, on a local basis, there was no such great disaster, just a long slow change.
And it was not really a dark age. As I said in my previous post, the dark age narrative is largely an invention of the 17th-18th century. What actually happened in that period was the development of a whole lot of great stuff like city states, art, commerce, banking, kingdoms, navigation tools (compass), military inventions (crossbows, guns), hourglasses, farming technology (ploughing), metallurgy, optics (eyeglasses!), mechanical clocks, textile technology (spinning wheel), the printing press, windmills, glassmaking...
For the people living in those times, it probably didn't feel anything like a "dark age". Just a fairly smooth progression upwards, with the usual ups and downs of wars, plagues and other disasters that are hardly confined to the middle ages.
I know the narrative of "here's the awesome roman empire, and now the church takes over and you have the dark ages, and now reason comes back in the form of the renaissance" is very compelling, particularly if you don't like the church very much, but it is just a narrative, and is not very well supported with facts.
Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
#73The broader question is why the technology of classical civilizations was not far better than it actually was, given that they clearly knew many of the basic principles - eg steam power.
The traditional answer is "slavery": in societies where copious manpower, in the form of slaves, is so cheap (not free - you still have to feed 'em !), the incentive to productionise technology is vastly reduced.
Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
#74Yes, but it wouldn't have been able to run Ruby ; )
(smile, it's funny)
Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
#75They absolutely could have built a digital computer and much more. He's slightly underestimating Roman enginuity for delicate manufacturing. Consider for example the Cage cup[1]. It's an exquisite piece of art and creativity and, all things cosidered, engineering as well due to the very tight tolerences and detail. There's a lot more to progress than just the capacity for great leaps in engineering and sciences. Ofte…
> They absolutely could have built a digital computer and much more.
No, absolutely not. I think you are deluding yourself. There is a long way to go from building a fancy vase or discovering the existence of the zero quantity to developing the necessary mathematical, physical and chemical framework needed to produce even the most rudimentary piece of digital technology.
Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
#76What about electricity to use these things :) ? A schottky diode works on electricity...
"My main concern is powering the device, I still don’t know if that would work well enough." ;)
Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
#77Water power, someone else may have mentioned it, but water power was already used to power sawmills as possibly early as the 3rd century BC[1], I think a better question then isn’t why didn't they build a computer, as much as why didn't they use their water power to industrialise?
Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I think this is an interesting idea, but it sort of inverts causality in a way. Could we have gone to the moon without a computer? To what extent are our advances since the advent of computation a result of computation itself? Put another way, if the Romans had invented a computer, would they have had our level of technology maybe just 100-200 years later?
I think the cross-feeding between technologies cannot be underestimated You need metallurgy to get better at metallurgy (so you can build tools to build better tools, etc) At the same time, you need metallurgy to build delicate electronic circuits: tools, terminals, etc, be that a transistor or a relay or a tube
Slight tangent, but there is a marvelous series about this crossfeeding of technologies called 'Connections' by James Burke. Its old but still great to watch.
http://www.youtube.com/user/JamesBurkeConnection?feature=wat...
I can't recommend it highly enough, its worth taking the time to start at series one.
Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
#79A smarty pants answer would be, yes, but it took 2000 years....
The problem with this is that you end up with lots of additions to the premise. So, you ask the question: "Could Romans build a computer, if plans were magically given to them?. Then, you have to say, if they had plans they understood, then if they had plans using a certain technology, then if they had zero, and if they had an understanding of x, then y, then z, and on it goes. In then end, it becomes pretty clear the answer is no because of the sheer number of caveats we have to add to make the original premise work.
The whole thing seems to be a bit of an idolisation of an ancient civilisation. Its like we want them to have had mystical powers. Like how some people want to connect ancient Egyptians and Mayans to aliens. This is the fantasy of forgotten super knowledge.
Or, consider this: do we seriously that we could build something that we designed and built 2000 years from now? Something that could reasonably include or be based on alien technology and knowledge.
A connected tangent type thought, and I have no idea where it goes; but how come Romans were so clever, but current tribes around the world, sort of, aren't? How does that work? Is it a resource thing? Environment thing? Seems a bit odd to me that even now we have societies who are actually behind a society 2000 years old.
Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the cross-feeding between technologies cannot be underestimated You need metallurgy to get better at metallurgy (so you can build tools to build better tools, etc) At the same time, you need metallurgy to build delicate electronic circuits: tools, terminals, etc, be that a transistor or a relay or a tube
Slight tangent, but there is a marvelous series about this crossfeeding of technologies called 'Connections' by James Burke. Its old but still great to watch. http://www.youtube.com/user/JamesBurkeConnection?feature=wat... I can't recommend it highly enough, its worth taking the time to start at series one.
Oh, of course I remember it. It was also a column on SciAm
But yeah, I've watched a couple of episodes, and it's very good.