1600 Years of Progressive Failure: the Scope

You probably have some idea, through television and movies if nothing else, what medical technology was like a hundred years ago. You can probably imagine what it would be like to visit a hospital a hundred years from now, with technology that would look almost like magic to us, although the food might be just as bad.

You can imagine humanity having a hundred-year head start on medicine. How about two hundred years? Four hundred?

How about 1600 years? That's how much more advanced our scientific and medical knowledge might be, if yesterday's progressives hadn't screwed up. And it's going to happen again if today's self-styled conservatives don't stop attacking science.

Here's what happened.

Humanity has been using glass or crystal lenses for at least 2000 years. Those primitive boneheads of the ancient world used them for the same reasons we use magnifying glasses today, to read fine print and to burn ants.

Good for the progressives. One of them probably found a piece of clear river gravel, noticed the magnifying effect, and worked out how to make a lens artificially. It's a noteworthy achievement.

But a single lens has limitations. To really get the most out of lenses, you need to put one behind the other. That's how we make microscopes and telescopes. We put one lens behind another.



View through a 4x rifle scope. Image credit: Captaindan and Jellocube27 at en.wikipedia

For 1600 years, humanity's progressive element either didn't think of putting one lens behind another, or they thought of it but didn't write it down. And that's what put us hundreds of years behind in medical technology, because it put us hundreds of years behind in science.

The modern scientific revolution didn't really get going until the 1600s with the invention of the telescope and the microscope. These new tools gave science what it needed to begin to flourish, new data. New data gave us new knowledge, and new knowledge lets us invent things like cruise missiles and blenders.

Obviously, the invention of the scope 1600 years earlier, even though it was technologically feasible, would not necessarily have put our scientific advancement exactly 1600 years ahead. The scientific revolution depended on improved reasoning as well as improved tools and more data.

Still, we could certainly have been much farther along than we are now, if only humanity's progressive element had done its job and put one lens behind another instead of goofing off for 1600 years.

Here's the point of all this. One thing that helped modern science thrive is the idea of persistent scientific inquiry. In the old days, when a scientist died, his research died too, or at least the part about putting one lens behind another did.

Today we have institutions that keep the research going beyond the lifetime of any single scientist. We need that, because some lines of scientific research take a long time. There's no way around this. The better we understand our universe, the better the chances of long-term survival for humanity in general and America in particular. Understanding the universe takes time, and it takes some continuity in our research and development endeavors.

Imagine starting and stopping your military in the middle of a war. Messes up your war effort, right? Same thing happens if we take a start and stop approach to research.

If those primitive boneheads of the ancient world had understood the value of persistent scientific inquiry, they'd have established a lens institute to develop the magnifying glass, and we might be hundreds of years more advanced, and your next trip to the doctor would be amazing. If we don't want to fall hundreds of years behind again, we need to keep enabling long-term research, because the cost/benefit ratio has been very, very good.

If you don't believe that, get a magnifying glass and take a good look at it. Now take a good look at the computer or tablet or phone you're using to read this. See what a difference science makes? The newer tools do way more than the old tool did.

Last thought on this little talk about progressive failure. If you actually got a magnifying glass when I told you to, you'll see the value of preserving the good ideas of the past, which is the foundation of genuine conservatism. That magnifying glass design is at least 2,000 years old, yet it's still useful, and it's still a component in many modern tools.

That's how civilization progresses. Progressives come up with new ideas. Conservatives preserve the good ones. Let's not wait another 1600 years for the next good idea.