How the mighty have fallen.
Julian Assange is to launch legal action against the government of Ecuador, accusing it of violating his "fundamental rights and freedoms". The Wikileaks co-founder has lived in its UK embassy since 2012 after seeking asylum to avoid extradition to Sweden over a rape claim - later dropped. He was given a set of house rules by the London embassy this week, including taking better care of his cat. In a memo, it threatened to confiscate the pet if he did not look after it, it said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45915017
Friday, 19 October 2018
Many Worlds makes everything meanignless
This is what I've been saying for aaaaages. I don't necessarily agree with everything here, especially the stuff about consciousness, but I agree with the overall conclusions.
But one of the most serious difficulties with the MWI is what it does to the notion of self. What can it mean to say that splittings generate copies of me? In what sense are those other copies “me?”
David Wallace, one of the most ingenious Everettians, has argued that purely in linguistic terms the notion of “I” can make sense only if identity/consciousness/mind is confined to a single branch of the quantum multiverse. Since it is not clear how that can possibly happen, Wallace might then have inadvertently demonstrated that the MWI is not after all proposing a conceit of “multiple selves.” On the contrary, it is dismantling the whole notion of selfhood. It is denying any real meaning of “you.”
What this boils down to is the interpretation of probabilities in the MWI. If all outcomes occur with 100-percent probability, where does that leave the probabilistic character of quantum mechanics? And how can two (or for that matter, a thousand) mutually exclusive outcomes all have 100-percent probability?
Or perhaps : how does probability have determinate values within individual realities ?
What the MWI really denies is the existence of facts at all. It replaces them with an experience of pseudo-facts (we think that this happened, even though that happened too). In so doing, it eliminates any coherent notion of what we can experience, or have experienced, or are experiencing right now. We might reasonably wonder if there is any value — any meaning — in what remains, and whether the sacrifice has been worth it.
It says that our unique experience as individuals is not simply a bit imperfect, a bit unreliable and fuzzy, but is a complete illusion. If we really pursue that idea, rather than pretending that it gives us quantum siblings, we find ourselves unable to say anything about anything that can be considered a meaningful truth. We are not just suspended in language; we have denied language any agency. The MWI — if taken seriously — is unthinkable.
As usual, I would slightly temper this. I accept that there's no reason the Universe should make sense or that what seems logical and irrefutable to me is definitely the case. There's no particular reason to assume a kilo or so of warm skull-based goop should be able to understand reality. But let's not go nuts with this. It might be that reality is fundamentally incomprehensible, even illogical. But that option is a last resort, and Many Worlds doesn't explain anything. It just resorts to saying everything is a statistical fluke, which is monumentally unhelpful.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics-has-many-problems-20181018/
But one of the most serious difficulties with the MWI is what it does to the notion of self. What can it mean to say that splittings generate copies of me? In what sense are those other copies “me?”
David Wallace, one of the most ingenious Everettians, has argued that purely in linguistic terms the notion of “I” can make sense only if identity/consciousness/mind is confined to a single branch of the quantum multiverse. Since it is not clear how that can possibly happen, Wallace might then have inadvertently demonstrated that the MWI is not after all proposing a conceit of “multiple selves.” On the contrary, it is dismantling the whole notion of selfhood. It is denying any real meaning of “you.”
What this boils down to is the interpretation of probabilities in the MWI. If all outcomes occur with 100-percent probability, where does that leave the probabilistic character of quantum mechanics? And how can two (or for that matter, a thousand) mutually exclusive outcomes all have 100-percent probability?
Or perhaps : how does probability have determinate values within individual realities ?
What the MWI really denies is the existence of facts at all. It replaces them with an experience of pseudo-facts (we think that this happened, even though that happened too). In so doing, it eliminates any coherent notion of what we can experience, or have experienced, or are experiencing right now. We might reasonably wonder if there is any value — any meaning — in what remains, and whether the sacrifice has been worth it.
It says that our unique experience as individuals is not simply a bit imperfect, a bit unreliable and fuzzy, but is a complete illusion. If we really pursue that idea, rather than pretending that it gives us quantum siblings, we find ourselves unable to say anything about anything that can be considered a meaningful truth. We are not just suspended in language; we have denied language any agency. The MWI — if taken seriously — is unthinkable.
As usual, I would slightly temper this. I accept that there's no reason the Universe should make sense or that what seems logical and irrefutable to me is definitely the case. There's no particular reason to assume a kilo or so of warm skull-based goop should be able to understand reality. But let's not go nuts with this. It might be that reality is fundamentally incomprehensible, even illogical. But that option is a last resort, and Many Worlds doesn't explain anything. It just resorts to saying everything is a statistical fluke, which is monumentally unhelpful.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics-has-many-problems-20181018/
Brain May is really into 3D photography
He might be best known for his day job, playing guitar in one of the world’s biggest rock bands, but May also holds a doctorate in astrophysics and is a lifelong fan of stereo photography, a photographic process which creates 3D images from prints or digital images. May has now combined his two his biggest passions to create a book that charts the Soviet-American race to our nearest neighbour in all its 3D glory.
The LSC has already published several books about 3D photography, but May says this is their most ambitious yet. “No one had ever done a 3D book on the whole Apollo history and we thought ‘Can we do it, is there enough material?’. So my good friend Claudia Manzoni, who spends her whole life trawling through Nasa archives, gradually sifted through and found images which looked promising.”
The astronauts didn’t take stereo cameras up with them, but they were trained in a rudimentary stereo photography method which meant their normal photographs could later be turned into 3D images.
“Very often they were too busy to remember it and practice it,” May says. “But they were taught to do the ‘cha-cha’ thing – take a picture here and a picture there and eventually it became a 3D picture. Occasionally you’re lucky enough to find one of those."
“For me it’s a passion, I’m completely geeky where this is concerned so if we’re on tour with Queen I’ll be back in the hotel at 3am trying to put two of these images together that Claudia has sent me and make them work as a 3D. That’s what you see in the book. I’m not the first person to make 3D pictures in this way but I think we are the most persistent… we’ve got something like 200 stereo pictures in the book, and they all work.”
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181019-the-space-race-like-youve-never-seen-it-before
The LSC has already published several books about 3D photography, but May says this is their most ambitious yet. “No one had ever done a 3D book on the whole Apollo history and we thought ‘Can we do it, is there enough material?’. So my good friend Claudia Manzoni, who spends her whole life trawling through Nasa archives, gradually sifted through and found images which looked promising.”
The astronauts didn’t take stereo cameras up with them, but they were trained in a rudimentary stereo photography method which meant their normal photographs could later be turned into 3D images.
“Very often they were too busy to remember it and practice it,” May says. “But they were taught to do the ‘cha-cha’ thing – take a picture here and a picture there and eventually it became a 3D picture. Occasionally you’re lucky enough to find one of those."
“For me it’s a passion, I’m completely geeky where this is concerned so if we’re on tour with Queen I’ll be back in the hotel at 3am trying to put two of these images together that Claudia has sent me and make them work as a 3D. That’s what you see in the book. I’m not the first person to make 3D pictures in this way but I think we are the most persistent… we’ve got something like 200 stereo pictures in the book, and they all work.”
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181019-the-space-race-like-youve-never-seen-it-before
The forgotten female Samurai
Let's ignore the presumed typo :
The expedition was successful, and upon her return, it is said that the early empress subdued revolts and ruled for the next 700 years until the age of 100.
Because the rest of it is interesting :
Between 1180-1185, conflicts between the rival samurai dynasties of Minamoto and Taira gave rise to one of the most famous women warriors in Japanese history: Tomoe Gozen. The Heike Monogatari, a medieval chronicle of the Genpei War, gives a particularly vivid character description: “Tomoe had long black hair and a fair complexion, and her face was very lovely,” recounts the text, “moreover she was a fearless rider whom neither the fiercest horse nor the roughest ground could dismay, and so dexterously did she handle sword and bow that she was a match for a thousand warriors.” Gozen’s expert talents included archery, horseback riding, and the art of the katana, a long, traditional samurai sword.
Particularly interesting about Gozen: She was one of the few women warriors who engaged in offensive battle, known as onna-musha, rather than the defensive fighting more common among traditional onna-bugeisha. In 1184, she led 300 samurai into a fierce battle against 2,000 opposing Tiara clan warriors, and during the Battle of Awazu later that same year, she slayed several adversaries before decapitating the Musashi clan’s leader and presenting his head to her master, General Kiso Yoshinaka. Gozen’s reputation was so high, it’s said Yoshinaka considered her the first true general of Japan.
After the Meiji Restoration in 1868—a new era of imperial rule that stood for modernization, industrialization, and Westernization—the Samurai class who had once bravely protected the nation fell from power, and the legacy of the equally fearsome onna-bugeisha faded from view. Meanwhile, Westerners rewrote the history of Japanese warring culture, overlooking the heroic quests of the onna-bugeisha and elevating, instead, exaggerated representations of swaggering male Samurai and subservient Japanese women, clad in kimono and tightly-bound obi. Indeed, historian Stephen Turnbull regards “the exploits of female warriors as the greatest untold story in samurai history.
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/a383aj/female-samurai-onna-bugeisha-japan?fbclid=IwAR3yjDcllZI29TDUb7Wa9F9CZUDRqSEF-dBeu_g6Te7IUc-ieg26SOG4Fjc
The expedition was successful, and upon her return, it is said that the early empress subdued revolts and ruled for the next 700 years until the age of 100.
Because the rest of it is interesting :
Between 1180-1185, conflicts between the rival samurai dynasties of Minamoto and Taira gave rise to one of the most famous women warriors in Japanese history: Tomoe Gozen. The Heike Monogatari, a medieval chronicle of the Genpei War, gives a particularly vivid character description: “Tomoe had long black hair and a fair complexion, and her face was very lovely,” recounts the text, “moreover she was a fearless rider whom neither the fiercest horse nor the roughest ground could dismay, and so dexterously did she handle sword and bow that she was a match for a thousand warriors.” Gozen’s expert talents included archery, horseback riding, and the art of the katana, a long, traditional samurai sword.
Particularly interesting about Gozen: She was one of the few women warriors who engaged in offensive battle, known as onna-musha, rather than the defensive fighting more common among traditional onna-bugeisha. In 1184, she led 300 samurai into a fierce battle against 2,000 opposing Tiara clan warriors, and during the Battle of Awazu later that same year, she slayed several adversaries before decapitating the Musashi clan’s leader and presenting his head to her master, General Kiso Yoshinaka. Gozen’s reputation was so high, it’s said Yoshinaka considered her the first true general of Japan.
After the Meiji Restoration in 1868—a new era of imperial rule that stood for modernization, industrialization, and Westernization—the Samurai class who had once bravely protected the nation fell from power, and the legacy of the equally fearsome onna-bugeisha faded from view. Meanwhile, Westerners rewrote the history of Japanese warring culture, overlooking the heroic quests of the onna-bugeisha and elevating, instead, exaggerated representations of swaggering male Samurai and subservient Japanese women, clad in kimono and tightly-bound obi. Indeed, historian Stephen Turnbull regards “the exploits of female warriors as the greatest untold story in samurai history.
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/a383aj/female-samurai-onna-bugeisha-japan?fbclid=IwAR3yjDcllZI29TDUb7Wa9F9CZUDRqSEF-dBeu_g6Te7IUc-ieg26SOG4Fjc
Thursday, 18 October 2018
How immigration sparked a revolution in healthcare
People had a vague sense of these inequalities at the time, but it took decades for statisticians to put hard numbers on them. Once they had, they realised that the explanation must lie in differences between human populations – notably, socioeconomic differences.
All over the world, the poor, immigrants and ethnic minorities were more susceptible – not, as eugenicists liked to claim, because they were constitutionally inferior, but because they were more likely to eat badly, to live in crowded conditions, to be suffering from other, underlying diseases, and to have poor access to healthcare.
Previously, social Darwinist – and misguided – thinking about some human "races" or castes being superior to others had mixed insidiously with the insight of Louis Pasteur and others that infectious diseases were preventable. They produced a toxic cocktail of an idea: people who caught infectious diseases only had themselves to blame.
The pandemic revealed the truth: that although the poor and immigrants died in higher numbers, nobody was immune. When it came to contagion, in other words, there was no point in treating individuals in isolation or lecturing them on personal responsibility. Infectious diseases were a problem that had to be tackled at the population level.
Starting in the 1920s, this cognitive shift began to be reflected in changes to public health strategy. Many countries created or re-organised their health ministries, set up better systems of disease surveillance, and embraced the concept of socialised medicine – healthcare for all, free at the point of delivery.
There had been moves in this direction earlier – you don't put a universal healthcare system in place at the drop of a hat – but the pandemic seems to have galvanised governments. In Britain these efforts came to fruition in 1948, with the birth of the National Health Service, but Russia already had a centralised, fully public healthcare system up-and-running by 1920. To begin with only urban folk benefited (rural populations were finally covered in 1969), but it was still a major achievement, and the driving force behind it was Vladimir Lenin.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181016-the-flu-that-transformed-the-20th-century
All over the world, the poor, immigrants and ethnic minorities were more susceptible – not, as eugenicists liked to claim, because they were constitutionally inferior, but because they were more likely to eat badly, to live in crowded conditions, to be suffering from other, underlying diseases, and to have poor access to healthcare.
Previously, social Darwinist – and misguided – thinking about some human "races" or castes being superior to others had mixed insidiously with the insight of Louis Pasteur and others that infectious diseases were preventable. They produced a toxic cocktail of an idea: people who caught infectious diseases only had themselves to blame.
The pandemic revealed the truth: that although the poor and immigrants died in higher numbers, nobody was immune. When it came to contagion, in other words, there was no point in treating individuals in isolation or lecturing them on personal responsibility. Infectious diseases were a problem that had to be tackled at the population level.
Starting in the 1920s, this cognitive shift began to be reflected in changes to public health strategy. Many countries created or re-organised their health ministries, set up better systems of disease surveillance, and embraced the concept of socialised medicine – healthcare for all, free at the point of delivery.
There had been moves in this direction earlier – you don't put a universal healthcare system in place at the drop of a hat – but the pandemic seems to have galvanised governments. In Britain these efforts came to fruition in 1948, with the birth of the National Health Service, but Russia already had a centralised, fully public healthcare system up-and-running by 1920. To begin with only urban folk benefited (rural populations were finally covered in 1969), but it was still a major achievement, and the driving force behind it was Vladimir Lenin.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181016-the-flu-that-transformed-the-20th-century
Views of Earth from space
The in-article photos are of oddly low resolution but if you enlarge them they get much better.
The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is a master of the post-industrial sublime. His sweeping point of view is, at the very least, ambivalent. His shots, most recently taken from the coolest possible standpoint of a helicopter and sometimes a satellite, are at first sight surreal and glorious, but they have an ominous documentary undertow.
His large-format photos aestheticise mining, deforestation, industrial waste and decay, monumental piles of garbage, plastic, rubber; expanses of new and decommissioned equipment so vast that they look like crystalline formations; dense human settlements which from an Olympian standpoint look like creeping mould or infestations.
“Most people would walk by a dump pile and assume that there’s no picture there,” Burtynsky has said. “But there’s always a picture, you just have to go in there and find it.” One of his famous sequences depicts mountains of discarded tires in California. Another shows mountains of poached ivory being burnt. Waves of rock curve into an unsettling symmetry in his photo of Chuquicamata, one of the world’s largest open-pit mines. There is dark irony in his radically anti-idyllic view of the world.
“Scientists do a pretty terrible job of telling stories, whereas artists have the ability to take the world and make it accessible for everyone,” argues Burtynsky. According to his new book Anthropocene, it is estimated that it currently takes 60 billion tonnes of material annually (biomass, fossil energy carriers, metal ores, industrial and construction minerals) to feed humanity’s global metabolism. Burtynsky’s images offer a disturbing insight into how we’re consuming the Earth at an alarming rate – as well as giving a sense of the scale at which we’re dumping it back out, in giant heaps, streams, and lagoons.
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20181017-striking-photos-of-human-scars-on-earth
The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is a master of the post-industrial sublime. His sweeping point of view is, at the very least, ambivalent. His shots, most recently taken from the coolest possible standpoint of a helicopter and sometimes a satellite, are at first sight surreal and glorious, but they have an ominous documentary undertow.
His large-format photos aestheticise mining, deforestation, industrial waste and decay, monumental piles of garbage, plastic, rubber; expanses of new and decommissioned equipment so vast that they look like crystalline formations; dense human settlements which from an Olympian standpoint look like creeping mould or infestations.
“Most people would walk by a dump pile and assume that there’s no picture there,” Burtynsky has said. “But there’s always a picture, you just have to go in there and find it.” One of his famous sequences depicts mountains of discarded tires in California. Another shows mountains of poached ivory being burnt. Waves of rock curve into an unsettling symmetry in his photo of Chuquicamata, one of the world’s largest open-pit mines. There is dark irony in his radically anti-idyllic view of the world.
“Scientists do a pretty terrible job of telling stories, whereas artists have the ability to take the world and make it accessible for everyone,” argues Burtynsky. According to his new book Anthropocene, it is estimated that it currently takes 60 billion tonnes of material annually (biomass, fossil energy carriers, metal ores, industrial and construction minerals) to feed humanity’s global metabolism. Burtynsky’s images offer a disturbing insight into how we’re consuming the Earth at an alarming rate – as well as giving a sense of the scale at which we’re dumping it back out, in giant heaps, streams, and lagoons.
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20181017-striking-photos-of-human-scars-on-earth
The strange tale of the sailing submarine
Go home, submarine, you're drunk.
And it did.
Gallemore came up with an unusual idea: turn the submarine into a sailboat. They could rig masts and arms to the superstructure of the boat, and make sails out of the crews’ hammocks. It wouldn’t be pretty, and it wouldn’t be fast, but it would get them going again.
Lt. Douglas gave the go-ahead to the unconventional idea, and all hands got to work. Some sewed hammocks together to make sails, other found whatever they could to rig them. The torpedo loading crane was brought on deck and assembled; it would serve as a mast for a foresail made of twelve hammocks. Bunk frames were disassembled to make the yards, and the motley assembly was unfurled. The sail caught the wind, and they started slowing making way.
The crew continued putting on sail. Six blankets were stitched together to make a mainsail that was rigged to the apparently useless radio antenna mast on the conning tower. That added another 0.5 knot (0.9 km/h) to their speed, but Lt. Gallemore wasn’t finished yet. He ordered a third sail rigged, this time of eight blankets and rigged to a third mast by the stern. With a foresail, a mainsail, and now a mizzen, the R-14 was a three-masted square-rigged sailing vessel, the first and only submarine to be so rigged.
http://hackaday.com/2018/10/17/hacking-when-it-counts-setting-sail-in-a-submarine/
And it did.
Gallemore came up with an unusual idea: turn the submarine into a sailboat. They could rig masts and arms to the superstructure of the boat, and make sails out of the crews’ hammocks. It wouldn’t be pretty, and it wouldn’t be fast, but it would get them going again.
Lt. Douglas gave the go-ahead to the unconventional idea, and all hands got to work. Some sewed hammocks together to make sails, other found whatever they could to rig them. The torpedo loading crane was brought on deck and assembled; it would serve as a mast for a foresail made of twelve hammocks. Bunk frames were disassembled to make the yards, and the motley assembly was unfurled. The sail caught the wind, and they started slowing making way.
The crew continued putting on sail. Six blankets were stitched together to make a mainsail that was rigged to the apparently useless radio antenna mast on the conning tower. That added another 0.5 knot (0.9 km/h) to their speed, but Lt. Gallemore wasn’t finished yet. He ordered a third sail rigged, this time of eight blankets and rigged to a third mast by the stern. With a foresail, a mainsail, and now a mizzen, the R-14 was a three-masted square-rigged sailing vessel, the first and only submarine to be so rigged.
http://hackaday.com/2018/10/17/hacking-when-it-counts-setting-sail-in-a-submarine/
Dogs process words differently to people
The Emory researchers focused on questions surrounding the brain mechanisms dogs use to differentiate between words, or even what constitutes a word to a dog.
For the current study, 12 dogs of varying breeds were trained for months by their owners to retrieve two different objects, based on the objects' names. During one experiment, the trained dog lay in the fMRI scanner while the dog's owner stood directly in front of the dog at the opening of the machine and said the names of the dog's toys at set intervals, then showed the dog the corresponding toys. As a control, the owner then spoke gibberish words, such as "bobbu" and "bodmick," then held up novel objects like a hat or a doll.
The results showed greater activation in auditory regions of the brain to the novel pseudowords relative to the trained words. "We expected to see that dogs neurally discriminate between words that they know and words that they don't," Prichard says. "What's surprising is that the result is opposite to that of research on humans -- people typically show greater neural activation for known words than novel words."
The researchers hypothesize that the dogs may show greater neural activation to a novel word because they sense their owners want them to understand what they are saying, and they are trying to do so. "Dogs ultimately want to please their owners, and perhaps also receive praise or food," Berns says.
"Dogs may have varying capacity and motivation for learning and understanding human words," Berns says, "but they appear to have a neural representation for the meaning of words they have been taught, beyond just a low-level Pavlovian response."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181015120901.htm?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook
For the current study, 12 dogs of varying breeds were trained for months by their owners to retrieve two different objects, based on the objects' names. During one experiment, the trained dog lay in the fMRI scanner while the dog's owner stood directly in front of the dog at the opening of the machine and said the names of the dog's toys at set intervals, then showed the dog the corresponding toys. As a control, the owner then spoke gibberish words, such as "bobbu" and "bodmick," then held up novel objects like a hat or a doll.
The results showed greater activation in auditory regions of the brain to the novel pseudowords relative to the trained words. "We expected to see that dogs neurally discriminate between words that they know and words that they don't," Prichard says. "What's surprising is that the result is opposite to that of research on humans -- people typically show greater neural activation for known words than novel words."
The researchers hypothesize that the dogs may show greater neural activation to a novel word because they sense their owners want them to understand what they are saying, and they are trying to do so. "Dogs ultimately want to please their owners, and perhaps also receive praise or food," Berns says.
"Dogs may have varying capacity and motivation for learning and understanding human words," Berns says, "but they appear to have a neural representation for the meaning of words they have been taught, beyond just a low-level Pavlovian response."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181015120901.htm?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook
Wednesday, 17 October 2018
There is no one scientific method
One of the Science of Discworld books claimed that you can't have an individual scientist because scientists must always check each other's work or it's not science. This has always struck me as wrong-headed and gives too much weight to peer review and not enough to observational testing. I like this interpretation - there simply different kinds of science - much better.
So what is it that distinguishes the science of the ancient world from modern science? Modern science has developed far beyond ancient science primarily due to the organization of the scientific community which has developed institutions that facilitate the dissemination of knowledge. In antiquity, even the greatest scientists usually worked alone, or at most had a few students. The isolation of scientists meant that idea diffusion was severely limited compared to what it is today, and it also meant that ancient science never embodied what philosopher of science Imre Lakatos called a scientific research program.
While the scientific revolution was a unique historical event that had to wait for Goldilocks conditions to obtain before it could occur, science without a scientific revolution was not historically unique. Nor have scientific research programs been unique to modern civilization. It would be fair to say that there was an ancient scientific research program, and indeed also a medieval scientific research program, but it must also be said that these early research programs differed from modern research programs in important ways. And while the difference between early and modern scientific research programs may be a difference of degree rather than a difference in kind, as we know from the study of emergent complexity, sometimes more can be different.
The tightly-coupled scientific research programs of today converge on results (or even upon falsification) much more rapidly than the loosely-coupled scientific research programs of the past, which might produce an interesting result every few hundred years.
https://medium.com/p/boundary-conditions-of-the-scientific-revolution-25c29b08181d
https://medium.com/p/boundary-conditions-of-the-scientific-revolution-25c29b08181d
So what is it that distinguishes the science of the ancient world from modern science? Modern science has developed far beyond ancient science primarily due to the organization of the scientific community which has developed institutions that facilitate the dissemination of knowledge. In antiquity, even the greatest scientists usually worked alone, or at most had a few students. The isolation of scientists meant that idea diffusion was severely limited compared to what it is today, and it also meant that ancient science never embodied what philosopher of science Imre Lakatos called a scientific research program.
While the scientific revolution was a unique historical event that had to wait for Goldilocks conditions to obtain before it could occur, science without a scientific revolution was not historically unique. Nor have scientific research programs been unique to modern civilization. It would be fair to say that there was an ancient scientific research program, and indeed also a medieval scientific research program, but it must also be said that these early research programs differed from modern research programs in important ways. And while the difference between early and modern scientific research programs may be a difference of degree rather than a difference in kind, as we know from the study of emergent complexity, sometimes more can be different.
The tightly-coupled scientific research programs of today converge on results (or even upon falsification) much more rapidly than the loosely-coupled scientific research programs of the past, which might produce an interesting result every few hundred years.
https://medium.com/p/boundary-conditions-of-the-scientific-revolution-25c29b08181d
https://medium.com/p/boundary-conditions-of-the-scientific-revolution-25c29b08181d
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