Jason Crawford

Can't imagine antibiotics without understanding microbiology.

And indeed, if we look historically, the scientific revolution came a couple hundred years before the Industrial Revolution.

Here's a couple of key figures from those to just sort of represent some of the early or starting points.

Bacon lived from the 16th to the 17th century.

Watt was mostly an 18th century, lived into the 19th century.

In fact, Bacon himself told us in his Novum Organum, or New Method, published in 1620,

That knowledge and human power are synonymous.

For where the cause is not known, the effect cannot be produced.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

This is where we get the aphorism, knowledge is power.

It's condensed from that passage.

So, all right, Bacon has told us where the cause is not known, the effect cannot be produced.

Obviously, we need science to create technology.

except for that pesky problem of the historical record of invention.

It turns out that there are plenty of inventions that came good ways before the science that explains them.

Sometimes decades before, or even they're in different centuries.

So the steam engine, very famously, was invented in the 1700s.

The science of thermodynamics didn't come along until the early 1800s.

There are plenty of other examples.

The first vaccine for smallpox and the early efforts at sanitation reform, especially water treatment, came long before, decades before the germ theory.