I am motivated to write this essay by a book through which I am now slogging: The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, by Richard Carrier. Now, Mr. Carrier is a philosopher, and philosophers suffer from a peculiar inability to express themselves concisely. You want to know the best way to silence a philosopher? Make him use Twitter. Mr. Carrier claims that, were it not for the interference of the Roman Catholic Church, Rome would have generated its own scientific revolution. He argues that the Church suppressed scientific inquiry on the grounds that the Bible was the only valid source of knowledge. This is true, and its opposition to scientific inquiry continued right up through about 1200 CE. However, Mr. Carrier’s claim that classical civilization was within a century or two of generating its own scientific revolution fails to take into account important factors in the genesis of the actual Scientific Revolution that took place a thousand years later.
The first of these factors is economic well-being. The number of scientists a society can afford is a function of its GDP per capita. The GDP per capita of the Roman Empire was about $570 per year, in 2019 dollars. The GDP per capita in Western Europe at the onset of the Scientific Revolution was about $900 per year. Another important factor is the total population; if you have more people, you have a larger pool from which to find scientists. The population of the Roman Empire in 164 CE was about 60 million; the population of Western Europe in 1600 CE was about 86 million. Thus, Western Europe had more people who were richer and better able to afford the occasional scientist.
Another important factor was scientific communication. During the Roman Empire, information moved slowly. Ptolomey’s master work, the Almagest, probably took years to spread through the Empire. His book had to be copied by hand, one at a time, and so could not have reached many people quickly. By contrast, Western Europe had thousands of printing presses in operation by the time the Scientific Revolution began.
Consider, for example, the book widely considered to be the first shot in the Scientific Revolution: Siderius Nuncius, the Starry Messenger, published by Galileo on March 13th, 1610. The news traveled so quickly that all of Europe knew about the book by summer. Kepler was able to confirm Galileo’s observations that August.
Moreover, communications in Europe were pretty fast by then; correspondence traveled across the region in a matter of weeks and was not overly expensive.
The reason for cheap communications brings us to another important factor differentiating ancient Rome from early modern Europe: commerce. Europe was rapidly developing a trading system that was generating huge amounts of wealth. The Roman Empire never placed much emphasis on trade, but Europe went wild over trade starting with the Italian trading cities of the Renaissance. As I explain elsewhere, all that commerce infused a greater sense of rationalism into European civilization, rationalism that fed science.
Another crucial factor in the genesis of the Scientific Revolution was the adoption of Hindu numerals. The Romans were stuck with a primitive numbering system that made arithmetic calculations onerous. The scientists of early modern Europe were equipped with a numerical system that permitted a much wider range of calculations to be carried out in less time.
Then there was the superior state of mathematics. Yes, the Romans inherited some powerful math from the Greeks, but Arabic mathematicians made many important contributions that expanded the utility of math. Our word ‘algebra’ comes from Arabic; it was invented by the Islamic mathematician al-Khwarizmi. By the way, the same man gave us the word ‘algorithm’—it’s a Westernization of his name.
Lastly, we must give due regard to the crucial contributions of scholars during the period 1200 - 1400 CE. These people are little known, but they broke down the final intellectual barriers that prevented science from developing. Roger Bacon was one of them, but there were also the Oxford Calculators: Thomas Bradwardine, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead and John Dumbleton. Another important contributor was Robert Grosseteste. These men groped through the messiness of Aristotelian philosophy to iron out the concepts of applying mathematics to the study of natural phenomenon. You probably think this to be intuitively obvious, but in fact, it was a stupendous discovery. Chinese scholars never figured it out; neither did any of the early Greek scholars. Some of the late Greek scholars, most notably Ptolemy, understood the concept in a narrow sense of carrying out geometric calculations, but they did not develop the general theoretical framework for applying math to the study of all natural phenomena.
The Christian scholars (all scholars during medieval times were ordained priests) paved the way for the Scientific Revolution. The Romans could not have triggered a scientific revolution, because they lacked factors that were crucial to the rise of the actual Scientific Revolution.
January 25th, 2020
