How cosplaying Ancient Rome led to the scientific revolution

“Petrarch thought he would make a world which shared his values. Instead, he made a world that doesn't share his values, but that is capable of curing a disease he never imagined would be curable. And if you showed him this future, it would be scary. It would be weird to him because it does not embrace his values. Our values are different. He would be horrified by democracy. He did not create a world that went as he wanted, but he created a world that went well.”

“So you're on your way to this matchlessly filthy dive of scum and villainy. And then you approach the city, and there are these statues. And they look like ancient statues, the kind that are so lifelike that it's as if they're about to breathe and move. You've never seen an intact new statue like that. That isn't something we know how to do. And you ride through the city a bit, and it's a large impressive city. And you get to the cathedral. It has this massive dome, way bigger than anything you've ever seen except for old Roman ruins.”

“You're Gutenberg. You have figured out how to produce 300 copies of a book for the cost of one copy of a book. You do so. You print your Bible. You have 300 Bibles. You sell seven of them to the seven people in your small landlocked German town who are legally allowed to read the Bible in a period in which only priests are allowed to read the Bible. Congratulations, mister Gutenberg. You have 293 bibles, and you can't sell them, and you go bankrupt.”

“Then we get to, the propagators of Bacon's scientific method, meaning Voltaire and Montesquieu, who are also big campaigners for inoculation against smallpox. Pamphlets are much faster, much harder to censor. When Luther makes the 95 theses public, they're in print in London in seventeen days after he releases them in Wittenberg because the pamphlet runners go voom, voom, voom, and get the news there, and things are printed overnight, and come out that fast.”

“Because the resistance failed if we're looking at it in black and white. The republic fell. There wasn't a republic anymore. There was a duke. He took over. The old system was gone. But because the republic fought so hard and because the people really believed in it, the people had a lot more rights. And the tyrant was a lot less tyrannical because there had been that fight. It's a great example of how even when resistance loses, resistance wins.”

“And he bribes his way out, and he offers the equivalent of about 3, $300,000 to the guard outside the cell and $700,000 to the captain of the guard to smuggle him out of the tower. And he wrote in a letter later that they were the two most foolish men he'd ever met because he was Cosimo de Medici. He would happily have paid them tens of millions of dollars to let him out of there. But they weren't ambitious enough to think to ask for more than a few 100,000.”

“Most of our knowledge from antiquity is not lost at the burning of the Library of Alexandria. It's lost between four hundred and six hundred AD when the papyri are falling apart. And here you are with a library of a thousand books, and you can only afford to make 100 new books. So you have to choose which 100 of these thousand do we save because there literally is not enough industry on your continent to make enough leather to copy down all this text.”

“Because they saw themselves as guarantors of truth and of accuracy and information. And so they decided after Galileo that they had a duty to verify the truth of the books that they were sent to censor, And that if people were going to be doing mechanical experiments, they needed to repeat the mechanical experiments to see whether they were true. So they effectively the inquisition invented peer review, which is to say they invented a second laboratory trying to recreate the results of the first. And they're these amazing people who by day are inquisitors and by night are going home to write their own scientific treatises as they do these experiments.”

“Whatever they're looking at, They're always wrong from our perspective about what they should be worried about. Right? If we had a time machine and our goal is to, like, go give them advice. So here we are in the French enlightenment. Voltaire and Rousseau and the Marquis de Sade and La Mettrie's articulations of materialist atheism are flying around Europe. And what is the inquisition worried about? It's worried about Jansenist treatises about the nature of the trinity.”

“What does Leonardo do? He writes everything he discovers down in coded mirror writing, so that nobody but him can possibly use it. And he refuses to share even with his students and assistants the secrets of what he's doing, because Leonardo does not want to contribute to human progress. Leonardo wants to make unique masterpieces so that hundreds of years later, people will see them and marvel and say, how did he do it? No one else has ever been able to replicate that method.”