[marcosdumay]

They had nothing like the Modern age's science. I can't imagine any reason for it not appearing there given enough time, but they didn't have the dispassionate questioning of every theory and total submission to empiricism that are fundamental to science today.

Math advanced a huge amount during the Medieval age. They simply didn't have good tools for calculations, and nearly all of the Modern Age's math was based on questions that they didn't even consider to ask by then.

There were huge advances on material handling during the Medieval and Modern ages. Not only the obvious ones on metallurgy, but on glass working and ceramics too. All of those were important.

And let's not underestimate the individuals. Had Newton not been born, our Industrial Revolution could be delayed for many decades too. Anyway, it's no accident that when he appeared, he was at England, there was basically no other place on the world where somebody like him could do what he did.

[xyzzyz]

You are giving way too much credit to science in the early phase of industrial revolution. Science has been extremely important in technological development from late 1800s onwards, but the most critical leaps of late 1700s and early 1800s had little to do with Newton-style science. Instead, they mostly about engineering improvements, combined with a newly widespread social attitude that technology actually can be significantly improved. Flying shuttle has not been based on some theoretical scientific model, but rather on experience with making looms and ingenuity in improving them. Similarly, Watt didn’t create his engine based on theory of thermodynamics, instead he just observed that repeatedly heating and cooling the cylinder is wasteful, and came up with a technique to avoid that.

If you follow the development Industrial Revolution, you’ll see that it’s mostly thanks to ingenious engineers, not smart scientists. The scientists did occasionally deliver something valuable, often in fact paradigm-changing, but importantly, this only became very relevant around the turn of 20th century.

[krallja]

> The scientists did occasionally deliver something valuable, often in fact paradigm-changing, but importantly, this only became very relevant around the turn of 20th century.

James Watt was only able to build efficient steam engines because Joseph Black discovered latent heat in 1761. Without steam engines, there’s no industrial revolution.

[xyzzyz]

> James Watt was only able to build efficient steam engines because Joseph Black discovered latent heat in 1761.

No, in fact both Black and Watt explicitly claimed that their research and results were independent.

[shakna]

Whilst Hero's aeolipile is incredibly wasteful, the ancient world did have the right conceptual basis for steam engines to have developed.

[andrewjl]

Any good references you'd recommend for learning more about this?

I read about Oliver Heaviside and that helped shed some light on engineering improvements from that period of time. He was around a bit later in the 1800s, though.

[marcosdumay]

Having forces defined as a quantifiable concept that you can easily predict is quite important for tooling and creating reproducible machines. The Mechanics is quite important for mechanical engineering.

Yes, those engineers were inventing most things by themselves, but they didn't work in a vacuum.

[toomanydoubts]

I find interesting that Archimedes came so, so close to calculus millenniums before Newton. I wonder how things would've panned out had him had the mathematical tools to formalize calculus.

[Vetch]

You're correct that Archimedes presaged core concepts of calculus: in his work building upon the method of exhaustion, quadrature for certain conic sections and tangent of a spiral. It's nonetheless quite a ways up the tech-tree from calculus. Important developments were also contributed by al-Tūsī in the 12th century and Kerala school mathematicians (Indian, prominently around 14th century, though their broader influence is uncertain).

As advanced as Ancient Greek mathematics was, its heavy emphasis on geometric formulations made many developments more difficult. The Hindu-Arabic numeral system, algebra, invention of a zero number concept (Cardan's proof of the cubic and quartic would have gone significantly easier if he had utilized zero as a number) and Descartes's Analytic geometry were important developments on the way to calculus. By the time of Barrow's and Fermat's contributions, nearly all essential components of calculus existed, just requiring some genius to grab, synthesize and streamline them.

[marcosdumay]

It's interesting that calculus was independently invented 3 times nearly simultaneously (AFAIK there's a lesser known one). Yet, I don't know any reason for it not to be invented 3 centuries earlier.