Travelling 500 Years Back in Time ...

Wow! That would be a development.

That's not a bad idea for a thread, Wapentake. Maybe you could start one.

I agree.
I started one on another forum ''greatest/most influential inventions of all time'' which went on a long and interesting run.
If I did it again I'd draw a distinction between inventions and developments though as was hard to argue against fire and language as the most influential.
I put up a strong case for glass.

I've just heard an interesting little tidbit on QI. Fry explained that the Chinese preference for tea held the development of their culture back by hundreds of years. According to him, the West's liking for wine caused glass to be developed to hold it. This led to dozens of other things. Glass was ground to make lenses, extending the intellectual lives of the leading lights in science, etc., by up to 20 years, telescopes were made possible, thus leading to all sorts of discoveries in astronomy. Amazing how one little development can change history.

The Chinese did drink wine they drank it out of fine porcelain cups though.
We really admired their porcelain but just didn't know how to make it and the Chinese wouldn't share the recipe with us so we refined the old Roman technology of glass instead.
The Rhetoric of life and I had a big discussion about glass in my thread on the US site that I mentioned a couple of posts above. He never really got his head around it and he made a running joke about my ''obsession with glass'' when I first arrived on the old site.

I won't post a link to the thread on the US forum as ''most important inventions'' will make an interesting topic here and I don't want to give away all the things we came up with before. A lot of the things we think were invented in the west were invented in China long before though. From paper to gunpowder and the printing press, the Chinese got there first, It might even be a thread His Grace the Baron might enjoy.

It was. Long before Gutenberg.
Gutenberg's innovation was moveable type but the Chinese had carved block printers hundreds of years before that.

I had to look him up if I'm honest ttl.
It's not an area of particular interest to me.
I'm guessing he was a major influence in the move away from rigid Catholic doctrine though.
That move away is a part of the Renaissance and reinforced the move towards more critical thinking and eventually the scientific method and the modern world so I understand why you would befriend him.

I find it ironic that the starting point for the scientific era was an act of God. I forget the exact date but the Lisbon earthquake on All Saints Day which occurred when most of the population was in church celebrating the important religious celebration when the quake hit the Portuguese city. It was a triple whammy too. First the earthquake, then a massive fire started by all the candles burning to honour the day and finally the tsunami created by the quake.
That's enough to shake anyone's faith in God. How could a loving God make or allow such a thing to happen? Of course now we know it wasn't an act of God but a consequence of plate tectonics and the beginnings of the end of the totalitarian power of the Catholic church who had previously persecuted philosophers for suggesting things like the earth moved around the Sun rather than the other way around.

That's not to say I think faith has no value or that it hasn't played a big part in who we are and what our culture and traditions have become over the centuries and also provided solace for vulnerable and successful people alike.
It was a major barrier to learning before that fateful day though.

I even have my own faith systems of beliefs and dogma. I'm a follower of mother Earth and a Pastafarian.
All praise to Gaia and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, all praise his noodly appendages.


Edit  1755, I thought it was a bit earlier than that.