Kyle Harper

I mean, this happens first in France and then Britain, but you get royal societies for science where you're doing really...

I would say there's like three things that are essential there.

One is like the promotion of what we would call basic or fundamental science.

So it doesn't all have to be like immediately practical or commercialized, that you're like promoting deep knowledge of nature.

Two, you're doing it in an empiricist way.

And this is something very important in the 17th century that the Romans, by contrast, don't have is you have like the spirit of Francis Bacon that we need to ground our knowledge in experiment and observation, not just believe whatever –

authorities or Aristotle said.

And it's very much the spirit of places like the Royal Society is we don't take things on anybody's word, especially like Aristotle's.

And so you need basic science, you need empiricism, like this rigorous and self-correcting.

And then third, you need a sense of useful knowledge.

And that's the other thing that really comes together in the 17th century is not just the

the basic and abstract science, but the application.

The 17th century language for that is useful knowledge.

That is something that doesn't ever get wired together in the Roman Empire.

There are tinkerers and engineers, but they're not talking to the mathematicians and the physicists.

If you were from on high to design self-sustaining innovation, I think you would want to bring those elements into proximity.

And I guess this – unfortunately for them, didn't do it.

Probably good for the world.

The Romans are pretty nasty people in a lot of ways.

I definitely am of the opinion that sort of the high science matters, that like Isaac Newton is not a tinkerer, right?