Timeline for Laws of Mathematics,
Astronomy, Physics , and
Parliamentary Procedure.
Newton's
Principia
Watt's
Steam
Engine
1687
Archedemes
Earliest
Babylonian
star catalogues
Great
Pyramid of
Giza
-1200
Pythagorus
-530
Enuma
Anu
Thales
Enlil
-650
-2559
-3000
-2500
Antikythera
Mechanism
-249
Euclid
Hipparchus
-300
-87
-155
1543
1969
Columbus
Ptolemy
1492
129
-575
Gutenberg
1903
1450
-2000
-1500
-1000
-500
0
500
Wright
Flyer
1000
1500
2000
Dark Age
Golden Age
of Greece
Hammurabi
-1772
Lunar
Landing
1778
Copernicus
Roman
Republic
1215
Fulk's
Written
Motions
Montfort's
Parliament
Robert's
Rules
1265
Rules written into rules of the British House of Commons
-One subject should be discussed at a time (1581)
-Personal attacks are to be avoided in debate (1604)
-Debate must be limited to the merits of the question (1610)
-Division of a question when some seem to be for one part but not the other (1640)
We begin with the Great Pyramid of Giza to establish that the
ancient Egyptians had some knowledge of geometry. It is worth
noting that today is closer to Shakespeare’s time (1600), than
Shakespeare’s time was to when his play Anthony and Cleopatra was
Industrial
Revolution
Rennaisance
Magna
Carta
Pericles
-462
2500
2013
1876
U.S.
Constitution
1787
set (41 BC). Also, Cleopatra was closer to our time, today, than
Cleopatra was to the time when the Great Pyramid of Giza was built.
In many respects, we is still part of the European Renaissance. […must
insert footnote or paragraph on Arab contributions to all this.]
The Saros cycle was apparently discovered by ancient Babylonians,
and can be used to predict lunar eclipses. The oldest known
Babylonian known star catalogues date back to 1200 BC. The Greek
astronomer Thales probably used Babylonian Enuma Anu Enlil tablets
in to predict a solar eclipse.
calculations. Gutenberg’s invention was significant because it helped
change the world, not because it solved challenging engineering
problems. Those who made the Antikythera Mechanism could easily
have invented Gutenberg’s press, had they considered the mass
production of books to be important.
Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy were
famous ancient Greek thinkers. While Pythagoras did not invent the
Pythagorean theorem (a2+b2=c2), he or one of his colleagues
apparently discovered a proof of it. Euclid’s textbook on geometry
serves as the basis for Euclidean Geometry we learn today, although
Euclid’s emphasis was as much on construction using straight edge
and compass as on rigorous “proof”. It has been speculated that
Euclid postponed introduction his “5th Postulate” because he
suspected that it could be proven, thus foreshadowing the
abandonment by that postulate in the 19th century non-Euclidean
geometry that eventually evolved into Einstein’s Theory of General
Relativity in 1916. Recent manuscripts suggest that Archimedes
developed mathematical methods often credited to Newton and
Leibniz in order to solve problems typically associated with calculus.
Hipparchus has been credited with discovering precession of the
equinoxes, and he probably relied heavily on prior efforts by the
Babylonians. Hipparchus also developed what we now know as
trigonometry. The Antikythera Mechanism was an intricate assembly
of 30 or more gears was used to predict the motion and eclipses of
the Moon. Ptolemy used available data on planetary motion to make
precise predictions of the motion of the planets.
Copernicus proposal that the Sun was the center of the Solar
System was published after his death in 1543. Soon afterwards,
Tycho and Kepler constructed mathematical formulas that tracked
the motion of the planets with greater precision than was achieved by
Ptolemy. Meanwhile Galileo and Newton invented a successful effort
to find a simple mathematical model for the motion of all objects
under the force of gravity. Soon afterwards, Watt improved the
steam engine, as one of a countless number of small steps towards
industrialization. Then the Wright brothers constructed the first
engine powered airplane, and two astronauts walked on the Moon.
Then a European Dark Age interrupted progress. The scientific
accomplishments are placed on an exponential curve, with a “pause”
of zero growth between the years 400-1000 AD. We offer no metric
by which scientific growth would follow such an exponential curve, or
that the growth in Europe was at or near zero during the Dark Age.
But it might be worth noting that there is something mundane about
the two events marking the beginning and end of the Dark Age. The
Antikythera Mechanism ‘s use of gears to describe the motion of the
Moon seems more impressive than Ptolemy’s heroic but tedious
Had this pause in scientific progress not occurred, someone like
Newton might have invented calculus and physics circa 400 AD. And
the engineering and scientific skills available to the ancient Greeks
and Romans could easily have led to a person walking on the Moon
well before Columbus was born
Virtually none of the Greco-Roman accomplishments occurred in a
political environment that resembles what we would call
“democracy”. Nevertheless, it is clear that scientific and technical
progress requires a nourishing environment. The Dark Ages and
recent history both show how political disruption can stop progress.
For this reason, progress in government and parliamentary procedure
are also charted on the same timeline. It must be kept in mind that
for much of history, there has been little or no causal correlation
between advances in technology and progress towards pluralistic
democracy.