I've been pondering a lot lately about the question: "what took them so long?". Why wasn't the printing press already invented/discovered by the Romans? Electricity? The Newton laws? The modern University? The steam engine? And on a related note, how come there are these "golden eras" where science advanced tremendously in certain regions at certain times (e.g. Germany 1871-1914 with Planck, Einstein, Röntgen, to name just a few)
I have some ideas, but would welcome your comments/sources...
There was a precursor to the steam engine in ancient Greece [1]. Invention happened throughout history, but the context has to be there for the invention to be applied, the inventor to be free to invent and rewarded for doing so, and the flow of information to occur so other inventors can build on top of their work.
Case in point, no single individual invented the steam engine, it was a process that involved dozens of people across decades before a truly useful steam engine resulted, and the only reason those people could contribute is because of a society which didn't claim inventions as toys for a palace or required then to work all day every day as a farmer. See for example the difference between north and south Korea, same people, same starting point, different society and government, radically different outcome.
Not sure if the Korean peninsula is the best example, given the massive trade embargo going on.
Frankly we may be looking at a variant of learned helplessness on a national scale, in that if NK leadership is faced with a dilemma they can throw a proverbial tantrum and get the rest of the world to step in to calm them down "before the nukes start flying".
That is, the peninsula did not develop in a vacuum. they were part of a larger power struggle between ideologies.
There was a synergy with coal too. Wood is much easier to obtain, but lower energy density for industrial uses. Steam engines help move coal and pump water out of mines. Europe was becoming relatively deforested and there wasn't enough for big engines.
Steam, coal, iron, banks all co-developed for the first phase on the industrial revolution.
I recall a interview in recent years with James Burke, about his Connections tv series.
At one point he mentions that he basically had to ignore certain aspects to fit things into a clean narrative, as things were just so darn interconnected.
And even then you get some inkling of that in some episodes, where he basically has to tell the viewers to keep some event in mind while he rewinds and starts on a different branch that will eventually reconnect to the event to drive the story onwards.
And from a technical aspect you can sometimes see this in old telecom setups. Where now retired box A was used to bootstrap box B, that then bootstrapped box C, that was used to bootstrap box A+1. Except that if you then have a complete power failure you find that you can't bring up any of it because none of them can be booted on their own.
For the Romans, an often cited reason for the comparatively low rate of advance in manufacturing (and farming) techniques was the abundance of slave labor.
Makes me think of my musings on corners cases in computer programming. As of late it feels like whenever a corner case is "fixed", a couple of new ones sprout at the edge of said fix. End result is something akin to zooming in on a fractal, and finding ever new ones.
That's actually a really great visualization. Technology and progress are fractal. There's also increasing cost, and generally diminishing returns (both also addressed by Tainter). Chip tech is a very notable outlier, but even there you've got the end result impact: what exactly does more processing power, storage, and transmission speed buy you? Particularly in terms of the lower end of Maslow's hierarchy.
Another aspect is that tech tends to have a narrower operating bound than low tech: prerequisites and conditions which must be met. Higher tech means less flexibility.
