The forgotten revolution
by Lucio Russo, Silvio (translator) Levy
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…different social classes in 14th century England eg towns & cities, food, clothes, housing, employment, travel etc. I got about halfway through and lost interest in the subject matter. Lucio Russo - The forgotten Revolution. A very readable academic history of the development of science in ptolomaic egypt (eg euclid, archimedes, etc). This was certainly the most surprising book I read all year. This time period has been…
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?” ↗…comparable mechanical complexity from the roman period, neither in archeology or in Heron. See Russo[1] for very readable up to date academic scholarship on this kind of thing. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Revolution-Science-Born-Reb...
on “Was the Antikythera Mechanism the world’s first computer? (2007)” ↗I really enjoyed the post, even though I wasn't clear what part was fictional and what part was truthful. You might be interested in Lucio Russo's book The Forgotten Revolution. He describes how the Hellenistic scientific and technical culture which gave us Heron's aeolipile, Greek fire, the Antikythera mechanism, Archimedes' method of exhaustion, Eratosthenes' measurement…
on “Forgetting the Asbestos – how we lose knowledge and technologies” ↗…why the oft quoted trivia that Cleopatra is closer to us than to Imhotep is so striking. Having said that, there's an excellent scholarly work of revisionist history written by Lucio Russo called the Forgotten Revolution that I can recommend for some pleasuraeble outrage.
on “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939) [pdf]” ↗…of platon, sure, but eucleides was a quarter century later, archimedes didn't die until a century later, and ptolemaios and galenos were almost 500 years later. i recommend reading lucio russo's the forgotten revolution, which makes an excellent case that there was a sustained scientific enterprise in pre-christian hellenistic europe and, of course, today there is a sustained scientific enterprise throughout the world,…
on “Remembering a Medieval Polymath Who Paved the Way for the Renaissance” ↗It is as if in some post-apocalyptic future, scholars would learn about the work of Newton and Einstein from surviving articles in Scientific American or New Scientist. Yes. Lucio Russo in The Forgotten Revolution made the same point and tried to figure out what got lost in that game of telephone. (A lot!) Here's a book not exactly for the general reader but that I think is underappreciated: James Clerk Maxwell's…
on “Steven Weinberg: Science books for the general reader” ↗…information in the IA is well documented elsewhere. We don't need the IA for much at all. 2) Losing the Library at Alexandria would be like ... This did not happen. >>>>>>> Of course it did! Lucio Russo / "Forgotten revolution" argues that a large part of the scientific knowledge of the Hellenistic era was lost. 3) "Personally I would like to know if homedepot existed 14 years ago if I wanted to do business with them and they…
on “Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site” ↗Where you mention the book : The Forgotten Revolution by Lucio Russo The Kindle version of this is being sold on Amazon UK for £52.24! Not much cheaper than the paperback.
on “An ancient Greek calendar was ahead of its time (2006)” ↗…guilty of arid pettifogging. One thing Mates does in the book I mentioned is find translators' misunderstandings and prejudices, like the hair-sewing bit in the OP. That also comes up in Lucio Russo's The Forgotten Revolution about the sources on Hellenistic science -- classicists generally aren't scientists either. (This comment is turning out to sound really hard on classicists, and I certainly don't feel that way. I'm…
on “On Pins and Needles: Stylist Turns Ancient Hairdo Debate on Its Head (2013)” ↗In this topic: Lucio Russo “The Forgotten Revolution”. It's on my list to read; but a nice review/summary is here: https://woodtickquarterly.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/lucio-rus... In short, during Hellenistic period engineering was advanced; though, for…
on “James Watt: A Twelve-Year Flash of Genius” ↗The Forgotten Revolution by Russo blames the establishment of the Roman empire instead -- or rather all the troubles in the couple centuries before. For example, he showed a timeline of astronomical observations used by Ptolemy:…
on “The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets” ↗…to Ober), if not quite as high as in the classical period. Technological progress might've been even faster then -- it was the time of Archimedes and the Antikythera device, and much else. (Russo, The Forgotten Revolution.) Ober concluded with a post-Alexander chapter: the Hellenistic cities were not completely at the mercy of empire-building despots because a walled city at the time was very hard to conquer (instead of…
on “The End of the Past” ↗I snapped a few photos from Russo's book 'The Forgotten Revolution' that show the logical structure of the mechanism, and also the pump of Ctesibus mentioned in the article: https://imgur.com/a/BnaGIvW The full citation for [Price: Gears] is Derek J. de Solla Price,…
on “An ancient Greek calendar was ahead of its time (2006)” ↗…details about a period I am sketchy about. I used this 15-min video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV4xYG4KMIU] to get caught up on Mycenae. I remember grinning while reading in Lucio Russo's (2004 The Forgotten Revolution on 'Antikythera') caustic description of how, after Rome wiped out Greece, Greek writings became a very popular commodity with Roman book collectors. As Horace put it, "Conquered Greece took captive her…
on “Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?” ↗Lucio Russo's The Forgotten Revolution points out somewhat indignantly that Dedekind was ("just") restating in modern number-theoretical language a definition of proportion or ratio that he found in Book 5 of Euclid. The translation at https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/elements/bookV/bookV.html…
on “Dedekind's Subtle Knife” ↗