Roman Engineering: Crash Course History of Science #6

by Panzer
The Romans invented concrete over two thousands years ago and built roads which are still
around today.
They used arches and domes to create monumental buildings with big airy interiors that looked
truly Olympian—also still around.
And they moved thousands of tons of water using aqueducts to keep a bustling population
un-thirsty.
These old buildings?
Also still around!
But did the Romans come up with ideas about physics?
Like why arches support weight differently than right-angled structures?
Did they ask proto-chemistry questions—that is, “what is stuff?”—such as which tiny
things make up a good concrete?
Nope.
Let’s look at what knowledge the Romans made in order to set up a debate that, spoiler
alert, is still going on: do you understand something when you can explain why it’s
true, in the abstract?
Or do you understand something when you can do things with it, even if you can’t explain why?
[Intro Music Plays]
The Romans inherited much of their knowledge from the Greeks.
From 323 to 31 BCE, the geometry, physics, astronomy, and other disciplines developed
by the Presocratics, Plato, and Aristotle spread throughout the Hellenistic world.
This “world” combined the parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe influenced by Greek thought
due in large part to Alexander’s brief supervillain rampage.
In Alexandria, Egypt—the biggest of the seventy cities that Alexander named after
himself—the kings paid for the Museum, or “house of the muses.”
This wasn’t a museum in the modern sense of the word but more like a research university.
In Pergamon, in what is now Turkey, the kings paid for the Library, which was—wait for
it—a really big collection of books.
These institutions lasted for centuries, drawing visitors from far and wide.
Alas, over the same period of time that these Greeks were supporting research, a tribe from
central Italy called the Romans went on a new supervillain rampage… that also lasted
for centuries.
The Romans would continue to spread classical Greek thought: we even call their culture
“Greco-Roman.”
But natural philosophy during Greco-Roman times didn’t advance much.
Today, we remember the Romans for their engineering—or ability to improve some real-world system—not
their deep thoughts about why the world is the way it is.
Roman engineering built on Greek engineering.
Making knowledge is political, and most politicians really want the same thing: bigger catapults