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Comment by chris_st | Hacker News Reader

In the spirit of Douglas Adams, maybe that's exactly what happened, and we're now, in fact, 17 years behind where we should be.

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Not only did it happen, I'm pretty sure we're about 200-400 years behind due to the Dark Ages, even with the Muslims and the Chinese taking up the slack.

And I'm not kidding about Muslim math and science achievements when Europe was busy fucking itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_in_medieval_Islam

We made a lot of progress through the so called dark ages. It was mostly decentralized, but if you track things like farming yields there was significant advancement which paved the way for further progress.

Don't forget food surplus is what enables people do something other than just farm food, so farming efficency has dramatic long term benifits.

I think the parent poster's comments are still valid. There was a good article yesterday about Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, who was killed unnecessarily during the French Revolution (but not during the dark ages). Someone said it most probably set back chemistry 20 to 50 years. It happened, often. Or Galileo and his rotation of the planets. Many people consider Europe to have been largely ignorant during the dark ages. I'd definitely agree.

> There was a good article yesterday about Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, who was killed unnecessarily during the French Revolution (but not during the dark ages). Someone said it most probably set back chemistry 20 to 50 years. It happened, often. Or Galileo and his rotation of the planets.

Worth noting that Galileo also lived hundreds of years after basically any definition of the "Dark Ages".

Wikipedia has a nice turn of phrase calling the term a caricature of the period. There are aspects to it that were true, but overall misleading to inaccurate (the Islamic world certainly was in a Golden Age at the time, however).

The Dark Ages never happened and are an rethorical tool used by Enlightenment thinkers to elevate their own position. Europe did not slack during the middle ages. Far from it.

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