New Archimedes writings discovered. Calculus existed in antiquity. (page 3)

BurnTheShips

They had all the knowledge and tools, yet .........

These tools were confined to a minority. And for the most part, they were purely academic rather than commercialized.

SacrificialLoon

Oh they were commercialized, they made the temples money, and the priests kept the technology secret lest the populus think the miracles weren't from the gods.

In areas where slave labor wasn't as abundant the Romans did have some mass production facilities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal

SacrificialLoon

There was a show on The History Channel about it a while back. I think it was on their Ancient Discoveries series.

But yeah the problem was that the knowledge was concentrated with very few, and when the mobs came to burn down the library at alexandria there wasn't anyone to stop them. Like Carl Sagan said in his Cosmos series it was as if Western Civilization gave itself a lobotomy. It only took about a thousand years or so to recover from.

VM44

The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book Is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist
Publisher: Da Capo Press (January 8, 2009) | ISBN-10: 0306817373 | 336 pages | PDF | 1.5 MB

In 1998, the auction house Christie's sold a medieval prayer book for more than $2 million. The price owed to a startling discovery: the prayers had been written over the earliest surviving manuscript of Archimedes (287–212 B.C.), the ancient world's greatest mathematician. In a delightful and fast-paced archeological and scientific detective story, Netz, a Stanford classicist, and Noel, director of the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, make palpable the excitement this discovery evoked. After the auction, they were given access to study the palimpsest; after frustrating days of trying to read the writings beneath the prayer manuscript, Netz, Noel and a team of scientists and conservators turned to a variety of imaging techniques to reconstruct the hidden Archimedes manuscript, which turned out to be heretofore undiscovered works, Balancing Planes, On Floating Bodies, The Method of Mechanical Theorems and the Stomachion, in which Archimedes wrote about topics ranging from gravity to infinity. The manuscript also revealed some lost speeches by Hyperides, one of the 10 canonical orators of antiquity. Netz and Noel's book chronicles the often difficult and demanding work surrounding the preservation of antiquities as they uncover one of the most exciting documents of ancient history. 16 pages of color photos.

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http://uploading.com/files/7GA0T0I6/0306817373.zip.html

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New Archimedes writings discovered. Calculus existed in antiquity.

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