Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments.―Julius Sextus Frontinus, Roman Engineer, 10 A.D.
We usually quote him in order to giggle at him; but there's one interesting circumstance: he was right. In the following millenium, what significant inventions have the Romans made? Very few, if any. There were minor inventions and incremental improvements, but real progress had to wait until the Empire fell.
The Romans were not set up to do pure research. They were good at engineering and applied research, especially applied to making war. Pure research, not so much. When they came across its fruits, they took them and applied them; but they would never advance it. For a millenium, they used the same math textbook, with all its faults major and minor, never advancing the field.
After a century or so with no pure research, applied research starts going in circles. (And after a decade or so with no applied research, engineering starts going in circles.) There was no domestic pure research, and by the time of Julius Sextus Frontinus, the limits of the expansion of the empire have pretty much been reached. Certainly Greece had been conquered more than a century prior. If he felt that they were starting to go in circles invention-wise, even if he didn't know the cause, he might well have called it.
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30 April 2008, 23:06 UTCcomment by Paul Harrison
I wonder if there is any link between this and the circumstances under which rapid evolution can occur that you were talking about earlier.
(About which, I am somehow reminded of http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html)
Certainly I can imagine inventiveness disappearing as mysteriously as it appeared, and no-one knowing precisely why.
