A Glitch in Time..
Created | Updated Dec 1, 2010
Diary, 11th November 2010.
Well, today was my first day as a lecturer in the history of science at the Planetary University of Gliese IV and of course I began my inaugural lecture at the pivotal event in 242 BC when “The Engineer” Ctesibius demonstrated his new ‘steam rotor’ to King Ptolemy III.
As everyone knows, the King was uninterested, until the steam engine dramatically exploded covering Ctesibius in soot, and this so amused Ptolemy that, perhaps also with military aims, he funded the first “School of Experiment” which developed steam irrigation pumps, and started the Egyptian industrial revolution.
I then covered the invention of the petrol engine by Vitruvius in 50 BC, the use of the tank in 12 BC by Tiberius to conquer Germania, and the movement against pollution by Christos who was cruelly assassinated by business interests in 33 AD, only to give rise to Christosanity. I described the first space flight by Hero of Alexandria in 50 AD who sent increasingly depressed radio broadcasts back as he drifted helplessly into deep space, how the Roman President Hadrian sent settlers (and a few rival senators) to Luna in 120 AD, the dark ages during which the outer Solar System was settled by intrepid Vikings, and the renaissance when Leonardo di Marte demonstrated faster than light travel in 1492 AD by jumping from Mars to Pluto in a nanosecond. Typically, Leonardo never wrote up his methods and just pottered around on Pluto, but the news spread, and this opened the galaxy to human settlement.
Then one bright student, from the sect who like to appear as a sphere of light, said: “Isn’t it true that in 242 BC the dominant attitude to science was to assume like Plato that verbal arguments were better than experiments?”. He was right of course, so we then discussed what would have happened if The Engineer’s steam rotor hadn’t so amusingly exploded. We speculated that the ‘talkers’ might have won & science might have been so stymied that humanity would still now, in 2010 AD, be rotting on an overcrowded & polluted Earth! That got a good laugh.
© Mike McCulloch, 2010
Well, today was my first day as a lecturer in the history of science at the Planetary University of Gliese IV and of course I began my inaugural lecture at the pivotal event in 242 BC when “The Engineer” Ctesibius demonstrated his new ‘steam rotor’ to King Ptolemy III.
As everyone knows, the King was uninterested, until the steam engine dramatically exploded covering Ctesibius in soot, and this so amused Ptolemy that, perhaps also with military aims, he funded the first “School of Experiment” which developed steam irrigation pumps, and started the Egyptian industrial revolution.
I then covered the invention of the petrol engine by Vitruvius in 50 BC, the use of the tank in 12 BC by Tiberius to conquer Germania, and the movement against pollution by Christos who was cruelly assassinated by business interests in 33 AD, only to give rise to Christosanity. I described the first space flight by Hero of Alexandria in 50 AD who sent increasingly depressed radio broadcasts back as he drifted helplessly into deep space, how the Roman President Hadrian sent settlers (and a few rival senators) to Luna in 120 AD, the dark ages during which the outer Solar System was settled by intrepid Vikings, and the renaissance when Leonardo di Marte demonstrated faster than light travel in 1492 AD by jumping from Mars to Pluto in a nanosecond. Typically, Leonardo never wrote up his methods and just pottered around on Pluto, but the news spread, and this opened the galaxy to human settlement.
Then one bright student, from the sect who like to appear as a sphere of light, said: “Isn’t it true that in 242 BC the dominant attitude to science was to assume like Plato that verbal arguments were better than experiments?”. He was right of course, so we then discussed what would have happened if The Engineer’s steam rotor hadn’t so amusingly exploded. We speculated that the ‘talkers’ might have won & science might have been so stymied that humanity would still now, in 2010 AD, be rotting on an overcrowded & polluted Earth! That got a good laugh.
© Mike McCulloch, 2010
