Dwarkesh Patel

By 100 years later, there are translations into the vernacular.

There are footnotes that tell you the hard vocabulary.

Any med student can read Lucretius' discussions of materialist information.

When Poggio found it, there were two dozen people in the world who could read it.

100 years later, 30,000 people can read it.

in the 30 print editions that are printed before 1600.

When all different kinds of people read it, med students, law students, people in different countries, people in different places, they ask new questions.

They wonder whether they can test the hypotheses.

They do test the hypotheses.

They're the generation that discovers that the heart is a pump.

They're the generation that takes seriously the question, maybe there are atoms and maybe that's how diseases work and maybe we can develop the germ theory of disease.

That's the 1560s, 1580s.

180 years after, 160 years after Lucretius comes back.

Because it takes generations of work to build the libraries, to have the libraries, to use the libraries.

So when we get to 1600, which is almost exactly 200 years after this begins, a little bit more, we've had time to say, let's make the libraries.

have the libraries, use the libraries, realize we failed in how we use the libraries, use the libraries differently.

And that's the generation of Francis Bacon and Galileo who say, hey, let's use the information differently.

Let's use nature as a casebook of examples the way Machiavelli said we should use history.

Let's examine, let's doubt, let's rethink, let's do stuff in new ways.

Yeah, yeah.