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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Brother MacLaren" data-source="post: 1363933" data-attributes="member: 15999">The concepts of critical thinking, experimentation, and questioning established knowledge are absolutely essential to scientific progress and yet surprisingly rare in human history.  Check out Cosmos, by Carl Sagan.  He makes some good points about how close the Greeks were to the Industrial Revolution and how they turned from that path.Many civilizations throughout history have had a mindset that encourages doing things the way they've always been done.  This is true even for those with an interest in some aspects of science, especially if they revere their predecessors overly much.  For 2,000 years, people accepted Aristotle's laws of motion because they seemed like "logic" or "common sense"!  They simply didn't conduct some fairly simple experiments because common sense said that of course a heavy object would fall faster than a lighter one.At least as far as Europe goes, the key to the rapid advance in science after the Renaissance was that it became okay to say "Aristotle was wrong" or "Galileo had it almost right, but I can do better."  The advance in science over the past 500 years is not the norm for all periods or for all cultures.  It's quite conceivable that a fantasy world could remain in the Middle Ages or Bronze Ages for 10,000 years if they don't have events that lead to a lasting change of mindset.  And the Greek experience shows that you can have a questioning mindset and then lose it, so progress is by no means inevitable.Of course, once one of the civilizations makes that mental switch and really begins to advance, the rest remain behind at their peril.Turmoil can be a benefit to science and creativity (witness the Italian Renaissance) or a detriment (Babylon in 700 BC was probably not all that different than it was in 2700 BC, due in part to repeated disruption of progress).</blockquote>

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