1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

234 9. Science, Technology and Economy
synchronicity; one period may be consuming resources accumulated in an
earlier one. The cultural policy of Hellenistic rulers clearly favored technological
research and innovation more than the Roman one (indeed there are
very few technological novelties in Roman times), but the widespread diffusion
of technology already invented requires something different from
research. A long period of peace accompanied by a heavy fiscal burden
may have been more effective than the Mouseion ever was at causing an
increase in production and the application of all available technological
resources.
The Romans were not interested in science and favored the legal and
military structures of dominion over technological and economical ones,
but they certainly did not reject the benefits of technology and wealth: they
simply thought that it behooved lowly folks to generate them and aristocrats
to enjoy them. Rome found an effective solution for the problem of
acquiring and controlling competent technicians, but not for that of forming
them. It was a system based on the exploitation of provinces where,
independently of the central power, a technological and scientific cultural
tradition still survived. Together with the crumbling of Rome’s political
system came the cultural, economic and technological crumbling of the
West. In the eight century the Venerable Bede was the greatest mathematician
in what had been the Western empire. In his most exacting work he
describes a method for representing numbers with hand gestures. Many
could still do it up to ten: Bede, using a sort of sign language, manages to
go a bit further. When this is what a “mathematician” can aspire to, urban
life has already disappeared. In the Eastern empire, where the nexus of
science, technology and economy subsisted, however precariously, things
came out differently.
Revision: 1.4 Date: 2002/10/12 00:00:03