Ancient Islamic Penrose Tiles (2007)
sciencenews.org
sciencenews.org
[1] http://www.engare.design/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15546761
At least we do have proof that they understood the law of refraction, but we still call it Snell's law instead of Sahl's law.
Maybe the Mayans knew about it too and we will never know thanks to the idiot known as Bishop Diego de Landa, that burned all thousands of years worth of knowledge present in the mayan codices for containing "satanic" glyphs.
Greek, Roman and Western Judeo/Christian knowledge survived. Not because we never had civil wars that tried to destroy/eradicate it, or had plundering armies ransack libraries, but because there were 10 copies and only 6 or so got destroyed (or in some cases all but one). The copies happened because since the 4th century or so the Church decided to dedicate quite a few people to copying all knowledge (all knowledge, not just Christian) (and before the church state-sponsored educational groups did it). But the amount of effort should not be understated: you have to understand that this was first thousands then tens of thousands people entire lifetimes dedicated to nothing other than creating backup copies of physical documents, a massive cost to an economy that was a LOT smaller than today's.
The point is, most civilizations develop scientific knowledge. And they advance rapidly during the formative years of the civilization. Then things get frozen, and vested interests both prevent further research, limit access to existing research, and effectively lock up scientists, librarians, etc. Western civilization (and the Roman empire and a few Greek city states before it) did not do so, and instead dedicated large amounts of economic activity to science. This is completely exceptional, and of course, this is the reason that you're complaining about it, in the sense that you wouldn't be complaining about it had this not happened.
You should also keep in mind that the Mongol Empire advanced while driven by hunger, and Bishop Landa by overpopulation and lack of economic opportunity in Europe. The control those people had over whether or not to destroy things was very limited or even nonexistent.
For those various reasons blame should not go to the Mongol Empire or Bishop Landa, or any other conquering tribe/nation/country/..., blame rests with Islam and Mayans for the loss of this knowledge. They restricted and locked up their scientific knowledge, to the point of not having backups, and then their point of control over that knowledge got destroyed, along with all the knowledge.
Probably, a few families in those empires got to enjoy a very powerful position for a few centuries and in trade the entire state structure that millions depended upon got utterly devastated, including probably quite a few of those people.
There is a famous incident where the Caliph of the Islam has a written exchange with the remaining Crusader kingdoms, in what is today Lebanon. The exchange is the kings telling him that if he continues his attack, it may well succeed, but it would destroy the agricultural base that fed the millions of Muslims under his rule ... he acknowledges this, states that allah will feed them ... then attacks ... thousands die in the attack, and millions die from the resulting famine. The vast majority of the dead ? Muslims. Odds are good that the Caliph simply did not have the control necessary to stop the assault.
At any rate, on the Christian monastic tradition and its roots in scribal cultures that were rooted in the eastern Mediterranean, you might want to check out the works of Peter Brown - The World of Late Antiquity is from 1971 but is still an interesting read.
And on the deep history of knowledge exchange between the two sides of the Mediterranean, this Wikipedia page is a good start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_world_contributions_to...
The Crusades is the famous binary, but when you dig down into actual sources, you end up in unexpected places, like one of the greatest philosophers of the Middle Ages (Maimonides) living happily as a Jew in Cairo, or the hugely inventive and experimental medical school in Norman Salerno which drew on Christian, Jewish and Muslim works, or Cordoba under the Ummayads, or the fact that Grosseteste, Bacon and other founders of medieval empiricism were directly engaging with writings on optics and chemistry from the Islamic Golden Age (which, incidentally, were better preserved in the eastern Mediterranean than in the Christian west)... the list goes on.
For that same reason that I'd blame the person who lost their bitcoins by a phone falling in the water:
If it wasn't that event, something else would have happened and destroyed that knowledge. It's not the fault of the disaster, rather of the inadequacy of the measures taken to prevent disasters, whatever they are, from taking it out. You cannot prevent disasters from happening at all, so you must simply be ready for them, and there's no excuse for not being ready.
The difference between civilizations with lasting scientific progress and those without is not Cortez, or flooding, or ... it's whether they had backups of their knowledge and whether they spread it. Most didn't, and knew perfectly well that they didn't. They simply preferred having a small group that had power solidified into that power forever, and locked up everything including their scientific progress, to that end. That's what happened to Mayan scientific progress. That's what happened to Islamic scientific progress, that's what happened in a LOT of places.
this is the big missing link in most stories. Why is western civilization destroying indigenous tribes, e.g. in Africa ? Mostly (I'm not claiming there were no atrocities, there were. And they're no OK, they are not the major cause of the destruction though) because their members would much rather be westerners than tribe members ... That's the local perspective and this does not seem to be well understood in the West. Life in indigenous cultures is mostly boring, short, and painful. It has a few positives that we in the west may or may not have lost, but in general individuals in the west live a lot better than members of indigenous cultures. That, of course, causes a systematic "leak" of individuals choosing to "join the West", rather than maintain their indigenous customs. Often just partially.
But then, the Roman Catholic Church fought fiercely against science for a long time. They banned the works of Copernicus, they prosecuted Galileo, Kepler and many others. Science had to be done and published in secret for fear of prosecution. The church can legitimally be blamed for lagging our progress.
As the study of philosophy started making society more secular, science could start making progress again.
We would be in flying cars on mars if the church was a bit more open minded.
The large problem for science is that public opinion turns. And ... it turns against science, sometimes with catastrophic results. You can see it turn even today. I would say the tolerance we currently have for "science for the sake of science" is much reduced from what it was in the 90s. Is it so hard to imagine that public opinion might turn further, all the way into "we must destroy evil scientists". I would even say that I'm seeing that in some cases when it comes to genetic research (oh my god ! an artificial gene might get loose ! ...), nuclear/physics research (what about radiation ? What about waste ? Won't the LHC blow up the earth ?). Etc.
When it comes to the church the thing is, one of these actions was utterly critical for progress to exist in the first place. One slightly delayed very specific parts of progress. One of these is an existential issue for our civilization and culture. The other is a detail.
I would even argue that people might consider there may have been other factors. Galileo, for instance, was a dangerous and cruel nutcase, and not at all important to geocentrism. You might also consider that the true discoverers and advocates against the Ptolemaic model were very much part of the church, funded by the church, and devoted to the church, and published papers and books against the Ptoleamic model before, during and after the events related to Galileo.
But anyway.
This is just not true. The most of the ancient philosophers' works were completely lost in the West after the fall of Western Roman Empire, and were saved only by the somewhat longer lasting Byzantine Empire and then later taken over by Arabs. Of course, some fragments were saved or copied all the time, through the contacts with the eastern lands, but the first really significant knowledge transfer to the West was after the re-capture of Toledo from Arabs in 1085, because Toledo's library at that moment had more books then all catholic libraries of the time together. Catholic church (or more likely scholars inside the church) then started copying these and spreading them all over Europe which in a way kick-started the Western Civilization as we know it today.
What's the difference?
This illustrates what happened though: large (and I do mean LARGE) parts of the West had seriously damaged and/or eradicated science. But ... that wasn't the last part. And the remaining part did believe in science. That wouldn't have mattered at all if the knowledge was in only one location ... but because of the copying, it did matter. Only small parts of the knowledge were totally lost, even if they did disappear almost from all of western europe for quite a while.
Oh, and to make matters even worse ... what was the dominant religion in Toledo in 1085 ? Not the rulers' religion ... the religion of the population ... (despite the constant muslim massacres I might add)
Woah there that’s harsh. You can’t judge a civilisation based on how much they back-up their knowledge - much of the survival is based on luck, like how fortunately the Rosetta Stone was written in stone and not papyrus. I would argue that the acquired knowledge did survive ... through Europe!
It’s also incorrect to say that the Muslim civilisation was closed. It flourished because it was open (with some restrictions for sure), for Muslims and non-Muslims, and there was genuine passion for knowledge in general (hence non-religious activities such as scientific endeavours and preserving Ancient Greek works.) Many of the scholars were in fact non-Muslim and non-Arab.
Also: if islam ever was open (depends very strongly on what you mean by that), it didn't remain so.