In the last 500 years, we’ve seen unprecedented scientific and technological growth, so much so that a time traveler from 1500 would recognize very little of our world. For instance, since 1500, the world population has grown from 500 million Sapiens to 7 billion. Every word and number in every book in every medieval library could be easily stored on a modern computer. Further, we’ve built skyscrapers, circumnavigated the earth, and landed on the moon. We’ve discovered the world of bacteria, can now cure most diseases caused by it, and even engineer bacteria for use in medicines.
All of these advances were made possible by the Scientific Revolution.
In many ways, the Scientific Revolution was the result of a shift in the way Sapiens viewed the world and its future. We post-Scientific Revolution Sapiens understand the world differently than our ancestors:
1. We are willing to acknowledge our ignorance: Today, we assume there are gaps in our knowledge, and we even question what we think we know. As we’ll see below, this wasn’t the norm before the Scientific Revolution.
2. We emphasize observation and mathematics: Rather than getting our knowledge from divine books, we use our senses and the technologies available to us to make observations. We then use mathematics to connect these observations and make them into a coherent theory.
3. We strive for new powers: Knowledge is only valuable in its use to us. We don’t develop theories for the sake of knowing more. We use theories to gain new powers, new technologies in particular.
4. We believe in progress, whereas our ancestors believed that the golden age was behind them.
Let’s look at the history of each of these features of the scientific mind.
Man’s acknowledgment of his own ignorance was the breakthrough that launched the Scientific Revolution. This awareness of ignorance leads to experiments that take us closer to knowledge. For instance, today, biologists readily admit that they don’t know how our brains produce consciousness and physicists acknowledge that they don’t know what caused the Big Bang. The acknowledgment of these gaps motivates researchers to fill them.
Before the Scientific Revolution, Sapiens got the majority of their knowledge from their religions. The traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, among others, claimed that anything worth knowing was already known. You could find these revelations in the holy texts. Any information missing from these texts was unimportant—If God wanted us to know how spiders weave webs, He would have put it in the Bible.
In contrast, even today’s most established scientific theories would still be debatable if new evidence emerged that contradicted them. Generally, we’re far more open to questioning what we think we know.
Before around 1500, collecting scientific observations about the world was unnecessary because all of the world’s important knowledge was already contained in the holy texts. The holy texts used stories to link various observations together and create a coherent theory.
Today, rather than stories, we use math to link observations. For example, Newton’s three equations, made public in 1687, aim to explain and predict the motion of everything in the universe.
There are benefits to using math. Stories can’t reliably make predictions about the future—they can only tell you something about the past. But mathematical equations are extraordinary in their ability to predict. For instance, if you’re trying to set up a life-insurance fund for the families of deceased clergymen in Scotland, but you don’t know how much each clergyman should contribute in his lifetime, equations can tell you with surprising accuracy how many ministers would die every year, how many family members they’d leave behind, and how many years widows would outlive their husbands. The use of math to link observations allowed previous knowledge to be useful in predicting the outcomes of new situations.
Even though most of us don’t understand modern scientific fields, science is respected because of the almost magical powers it gives us. Presidents and officers don’t really care how nuclear physics works, but they certainly understand the uses of a nuclear bomb.
The most sought-after power of the modern age is the power of technology. The relationship between science and technology is recent, even though now we tend to confuse and conflate them, thinking that new technology only comes from scientific research and that the purpose of scientific research is to develop new technology.
Before the 19th century, power came from organizational improvements rather than developments in technology. Rulers and commanders didn’t bother to finance research. They didn’t think technology could be more helpful than strategy. For example, the army of the Roman Empire had no technological advantage over Carthage’s army or the army of the Seleucid Empire. But the Roman army was organized, disciplined, and large. It won many wars because of these qualities.
The history of gunpowder sheds light on how little technology was valued. Gunpowder was an accidental discovery, made by alchemists trying to develop the elixir of life. The Chinese didn’t immediately recognize the military use of gunpowder because they didn’t think that new military technology was going to be what won wars for them. They used gunpowder mainly for fireworks. It took 600 years for Sapiens to recognize how useful cannons could be. There had been so little technological progress for so long that our ancestors dismissed advances as amusing toys.
In the late 16th century, Francis Bacon made the connection between scientific research and the production of technology. Bacon saw that assessing how “true” knowledge is isn’t a good yardstick because we can’t assume that any theory is 100% correct. A better yardstick is how useful that knowledge is.
This relationship between science and technology wasn’t become strong until the 19th century. But from that point on, it accelerated quickly. By WWI, governments depended on scientists to develop advanced aircraft, efficient machine guns, submarines, and poison gases. During WWII, the Germans held on for so long because they believed their scientists were on the verge of developing the V-2 rocket and jet-powered aircraft, weapons that may have turned the tide of the war. Meanwhile, Americans ended the war with a piece of new technology, the atomic bomb.
Our views on the value of technology have strayed so far from those of our ancestors that we now turn to technology to solve all our global conflicts. The US Department of Defense has invested research money into bionic spy-flies that stealthily track the movements of enemies and fMRI scanners that can read hateful thoughts.
Before the Scientific Revolution, people didn’t believe in progress. They believed the golden age was behind them, and if the great prophets and saints of the past couldn’t solve the world’s problems, neither could they.
At best, they thought a messiah would come to earth and solve all its problems. To think that humans could solve these problems was hubris, and stories about Icarus and the Tower of Babel made it clear that humans shouldn’t overstep and aspire to godly powers.
But with the admission of ignorance came the possibility of discovery and progress. When Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a storm and discerned that lightning was an electrical current rather than the hammer of an angry god, he invented the lightning rod, effectively taking the power of lightning away from the gods. By Franklin’s time, this was no longer seen as hubris. This was the epitome of scientific research producing useful technology.
In the New Testament, Jesus says that “The poor you will always have with you” (Mark 14:7), and our ancestors truly believed that the problem of poverty would see no progress. But today, poverty is declining due to technological advances in agronomy and medicine and the relief efforts of private companies, government organizations, and NGOs. In some countries, people are far more likely to die of obesity than poverty.
The more scientific discoveries Sapiens made, the more they perceived progress. This motivated them to continue searching for discoveries, reinforcing the cycle.
Perhaps one of the biggest consequences of the Scientific Revolution is the way we perceive and deal with the “problem of death.” Through most of history, people have regarded death as inevitable, but even that “knowledge” is becoming questionable as scientists openly tackle this thorniest of problems.
One source of thorns in that most religions are meaningless without the concept or reality of death. Religion teaches us to live life in accordance with its laws so that we can find peace in the afterlife. Without death, many religions no longer make sense.
Whereas death used to be solely a religious problem, it’s now seen as a technical problem. Today, we can revive a fluttering heart with a pacemaker; we can kill cancer with drugs and radiation; we can conquer bacteria with antibiotics. We’ve developed new treatments and artificial organs that can extend life, and the average life expectancy has increased from 25 years, in the centuries before the Scientific Revolution, to 67 years (80 years in the developed world). Some think that humans will become “a-mortal” (immune to deaths caused by “natural causes,” rather than accidents) by 2050.
Further, today’s newest and most widespread religions, such as liberalism, socialism, and feminism, make no mention of the afterlife, reflecting the growing idea that we won’t ever have to die, and that what happens during life is more important than what comes after it.
Research is expensive, and often money does more than brilliance in making important discoveries. Modern science has made the impact it has because governments, businesses, and private donors have given billions of dollars to scientific research. If Galileo or Darwin had never been born, their discoveries would probably have been made eventually by someone else (in fact, Alfred Russel Wallace formulated the theory of natural selection independently of Darwin and only a few years after Darwin did). But if European governments hadn’t financed scientific research, Darwin and Wallace wouldn’t have had the data they needed to come up with their theories in the first place. Scientific progress depends on the money invested in it.
Science is usually funded for political, religious, and economic goals, not out of altruism. For example, in the 16th century, kings financed geographical expeditions rather than child psychology, because the expeditions would give them the information needed to conquer new lands, while child psychology wouldn’t. People with money and power dictate the scientific agenda.
We can’t not fund politically. When resources are limited, science itself has no way of determining which projects to fund. For instance, if we’re judging scientific discoveries based on their usefulness, how do we determine usefulness? And for whose use? If we have a limited amount of resources, should we use our discoveries about genetics to cure cancer, create genetically engineered humans, or alter foods? Science can’t answer these questions. That’s the job of those with power and the social structures they maintain.
Our imagined orders—our religions and ideologies—finance research. In return, they determine how its discoveries are used (and what gets studied in the first place). Therefore, we can’t just look at the scientific discoveries themselves to understand the origins and impact of the Scientific Revolution. We need to look at history’s social and political orders: imperialism (Chapter 15) and capitalism (Chapter 16).