What are the underlying social, economic, or cultural elements that create a scientifically minded society? [closed]

Question

I am creating a little republic, one founded by religious dissidents and breakaway cults of the main religion of the setting. It's a trading republic, a wealthy one with high literacy by premodern standards. These are people, in other words, with a lot of access to wealth that allows a leisure class of intellectuals and to ideas.

For the sake of simplicity, we shall accept it's politically stable.

Now to the main topic. I want them to be the first nation in the setting to get the scientific revolution. I want them to understand the scientific method and to utilize it in every aspect of society from war to industry. I want them to know chemistry, mathematics, and all other sciences. I want them to be comparable to the modern First World countries in a few centuries.

What factors are necessary for that? I have wealth and literacy locked down, and they have sufficient material resources to build everything that Europe had in the 1600s. They can do it, but how would they? What are the elements that will provoke their intellectuals to adopt the scientific method and revolutionize society?

Answer 1

You need a reasonable calorie surplus to free more people from the basic task of generating food. Note this doesn't need to be a huge calorie surplus, the scientific revolution took place without a lot more people freed from the farm than previously, but there was some. And you need widespread literacy so that ideas can both be spread and consumed. Oral transmission simply is not enough to convey complex understandings, and besides requires people to be in the same place.

Answer 2

The third and definitive phase in the establishment of modern science was reached in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Intellectually, as we have seen, the ground had been prepared for it by the overthrow of the feudal-classical theories in the previous hundred years. Though this made further advance and consolidation of science possible, il was not the only, nor the main, cause of the outburst of activity which, in less than fifty years, virtually created modern science in most of its fields. This intense growth was more concentrated than at any time before or since. The principal foci were London and Paris, for the active scientists of Italy and Holland found no such centers of expression in their own countries, while those of central and eastern Europe had not yet come into action.

The condition which made this rapid growth possible and favored its concentration was first and foremost the establishment in Britain and France of stable governments in which the upper bourgeoisie had a dominating, or at least an important, part. In Britain the Civil War had brought about a real revolution, in which the richer merchants with the help of the townsmen and small landowners had won power from the king and the landed nobility. But these groups, after their triumph, soon quarreled. The small men had a distressing tendency to democracy and economic equality, and as soon as Cromwell was out of the way the merchant interest arranged a compromise with the landlords in which King Charles II came in as the first constitutional monarch. The merchants still dominated the economy, but a new class of manufacturers were making their first appearance, drawn partly from the ranks of the merchants, partly from that of the skilled craftsmen. The great increase of manufacture and trade that followed the end of the Civil War, together with the new possibilities of navigation, kept mechanical invention at a premium. The time and place were in every way most propitious for the growth of science.

Holland, though immensely rich, was by the middle of the century past her prime. Sixty years had passed since the revolution which had ended the rule of Spain. The popular support that had secured the independence of the country had been largely dissipated, and the government was in the hands of a combination of wealthy merchants and landlords. Soon, exhausted by commercial wars and without adequate manufactures, Holland was to prove too weak to maintain her leading place. Already by the end of the century some of the most able Dutchmen took service abroad, particularly in the development of Britain under William of Orange, while Holland’s greatest scientist, Christian Huygens, did most of his work in Paris as a member of the French Academy.

In France, on the other hand, the Revolution was still in the future. The strength of feudalism and of the Church had been shown in the crushing of the Huguenots; but this was a slow process and was only fully effected by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Nor could this vigorous and expanding country, then by far the largest and richest in Europe, stand aside from the general economic development. A compromise was patched up by which the nobles bartered part of their power for tax exemption, pensions, and pageants at Versailles. The executive power was cantered on the king, but his State machine was bourgeois throughout. It was largely run by intelligent lawyers, the Noblesse de Robe, from which many scientists were to come. Actually, the compromise only worked tolerably well in the early part of Louis XIV’s personal reign (1661–83) under the direction of the business-like Colbert, and this coincided exactly with the great period of science. The other countries of Europe played minor parts on the scientific stage: Germany and Austria had only begun to recover from the Thirty Years War (1618–48); the Inquisition neutralized Spain and Portugal almost completely; while in Italy the heirs of Galileo fought a gallant rearguard action against the forces of clericalism. Sweden, Poland, and Russia were still largely raw-material countries in the throes of a newly imposed serfdom and, though militarily strong, were only beginning to contribute to science at this stage.

J.D. Bernal, Science in History, 1954. Omnibus edition by Watts & Co, pp. 310–312; or in any edition, chapter 7 "The Scientific Revolution", section 7.7 "The Third Phase: Science Comes of Age (1650–90)". Freely available at the Internet Archive.

Answer 3

Very large topic. I'll do my best. I'll focus on a couple of general things.

Institutes

An institute in general. Has to have some sort of connection to science/knowledge and promote it. Contradictory to what movies want you to believe. The church was not science hating as you would think. Many early scientists and people experimenting with science were full on clergymen or otherwise connected to the church.

I don't want to simplify it or have an argument about the whole catholic church vs science stuff. My only purpose is to use some of that and apply it to you work.

Similarly it took about a 100 years for Islam to have established kingdoms and what followed was a lot of the same ideas. Science and prosperity and people working to build a civilization.

Anyway. My point is that you need 2 main things.

1- A general drive towards knowing, experimenting, and improving life.

2- Institutes that function to that end.

Your people have be religious or nihilist. Believing that building stuff rewards them from god or that we only got this life so we might as well do all what we can. But they have to have that drive, that ambition.

The second part is also important. As it is the one that will record and continue research. A large library that is well organized, promoting science, rewarding research...etc are all important steps in building a scientific community.

This also need to function with a degree of independence. By that I mean if you institute is completely reliant on state, it subjects it to the whims of the rulers. But if they have their own lands that they can at least sustain themselves. If they have some little extra money to buy stuff and experiment. If they have a place to stay and welcome this. Then you might expect good results.

Our modern day doctors and scientist get paid after all. You should not expect everyone to approach life from a completely altruistic motive. And oddly enough people can start something just for the profit and end up loving it and devoting their life to it.

Need & Pressure

Then changing life in medieval Europe lead to rise of a small elite force of knights, function as many were just men at arms but I digress.

This in turn meant that a number of people had a lot of money. Were expected to fight and lead armies.

This has lead them to commission, best stuff was commissioned btw, armors and arms. Which lead to a rise in the relevant professions.

This lead to the development of the full plate armor. Some are like tanks. And exquisitely made and decorated.

Also stuff like aqueducts. Again a need arise to supply very large city with water. People come up with solutions. Engineering improves.

The It is similar with horses. Horses used to be much smaller, we kept breading them to be bigger and stronger. So. It's not just science.

So. Your nation needs some pressure and needs. Nothing too much like a world war or an alien invasion. But also it needs to be real.

This can be anything. Rival nations, goblins and orks, general magic beasts, demons, neighboring elves that hate humans...etc

It should be there and real. And it should be dangerous and problematic, without being too much.

For example. Lets say your nation has a mountain range beyond which endless hordes of goblins roam the land. They gather every few years and start raiding.

Now. Someone makes a cannon or a gatling gun and uses it on the enemy. Seeing the destructive power of the weapon. The leaders would sure as hell will pay well and want more. This in turn will lead to improvements on the original designs, others copying it, others making similar stuff...etc.

But if your state is peaceful with nothing happening. Ah well. Who cares. Nothing ever happens here.

Answer 4

You need an enlightenment.(The overthrow of the existing ideology about the ways of the world).

The old view of the world was that there was nothing new under the Sun. People came and went but the cycles of life were unchanging. Everything that was important to know could be found in the Bible and the rest had already been described and discovered by the ancient Greeks and Romans in antiquity.

There was a huge resistance to change and it took from the latter half of the 15th century right through to the 18th century to change this world view. The new world view was that there were new things under the Sun that progress could be made and that rather than knowing everything under the Sun, humankind was in fact deeply ignorant about the the world and nature.

Some of the key elements were the invention of the printing press in around 1450 and its slow but steady improvement and refinement (it was hampered by a lack of proper distribution network initially). This allowed ideas to flow ever more easily to a wider audience.

Another key change was the age of exploration. In the 15th and early 16th centuries exploration of the oceans began to uncover new territories, plants and animals that were previously unknown and showed that there were new things under the Sun and that the old views were wrong or at least in need of adjustment.

Some people started to question the old ways of thinking. As an example Copernicus and Galileo. Apart from his astronomical observations Galileo took great delight in upending some ancient ideas that nobody had thought to check such as the notion that ice is heavier than water and only floats because it cannot penetrate the surface. This was easy to show as false by the simple expedient of pushing ice under water and releasing it. To the subsequent embarrassment of many supposedly learned men who supported the old views.

Challenging the old ways took a long time. Even as late as Shakespeare who fully understood the changing history of the lives of men but did not really understand the idea of progress changing the world.

Perhaps the best thing that could happen to speed progress would be for a visionary to persuade a king and sections of nobility that progress was possible at an early point in history. This might just work with a sufficiently good visionary if the king were of the correct temperament.

Once the higher echelons of the ruling class bought into the idea it could percolate down through the aristocracy and if new ideas were found to be useful progress could catch on in a big way. Kingdoms entrenched in older style thinking would ultimately be at a serious disadvantage.

Answer 5

Aside from what was already written by others:

• you need to get rid/never have your world's version of Plato/Aristotle. These two, but especially Aristotle, laid foundations to an impossible system of physics that could not support science, but became entwined with religion and thus very hard to remove. Aristotelean Physics, married to religion is what prevented any real kind of science being done. Either do not have Great Ancient Philosophers like that, or keep religion and philosophy completely separate.
• You need paper and print. Scientific revolution is extremely hard without the means to mass produce books, and for that you need cheap paper (not parchment pr papyrus) and printing presses.
• empower engineers. The unseen part of the scientific revolution was not done by haughty natural philosophers, but simple craftsman engineers who did "scientific experiments" just by doing their jobs. A port engineer who designed and built shipping cranes for a living knew more about tension, torsion, energy storage, inertia, conservation of mass and energy than the best Natural Philosopher at the Academy. Illiterate medieval engineers who worked with cranes, trebushets, men who build ships, castles, or even looms, understood Newtonian Physics 1000 years before Newton was born. they simply lacked the sciency words to describe what they knew. Have your Republic depend strongly or Shipyard Engineers, give them education (especially in mathematics) and you will have a revolution in Practical Physics long before the Theoretical Physics are even conceived.
• give them access to coal. Easy reached coal seams improve the ability to heat things, smelt metals, produce steel etc, all which is needed for practical engineering, which in turn leads to practical physics.
• promote meritocracy. A guy or gal who understands (even instinctively, not intellectually) How Things Work should be able to rise in your society. For example, a man who, despite being otherwise unimpressive, is very very good at understanding how tackle-blocks work, should be able to become rich by making them, and rise in society to become a famous Tackle-Block Master, run a profitable business making them, and focus on tackle-block R&D. You cannot have religious castes, aristocracy, conservative Craftsman Guilds halting the progress of a by-their-boostraps person. It could be even possible to tweak the religion to promote "Craftsman Ethic"; that God/Gods smile upon people who invent, improve, build and tinker. Maybe have some kind of a Hephaistus -like god or a saint that one worships by free-thinking and tinkering?
• create challenges that can only be overcome with technology, but seem just within reach. The simplest option is to have a resource-rich continent just across a very dangerous and stormy ocean. People would know that gold/silver/mithril/cocoa/cotton whatever is like, waiting there, but to transport it reliably you need much better ships. This calls for improvement in shipyard technologies, metallurgy, clothmaking, cannons (to fend off pirates), for which you need new ideas about chemistry and physics. Because of that, rich merchants would be willing (nay, desperate!) to invest in even the wildest schemes of Mad Scientist Engineer Philosopher Alchemists, who can promise even incremental improvements in their ships.
• wage war against a much bigger, but technologically stagnant and religiously conservative Empire. Nothing bolsters Enlightened Spirit as much as the Fundamentalist troops burning your hometown in the name of their God. The more anti-scientific the Empire, the more rabidly pro-scientific the Republic will be to spite them, and to bolster their own patriotism. Also, the moment the newfangled scientifically advanced republican cannons blow the Imperial Armada to smithereens, the Belief In Science will be greatly enhanced. You'll want Science (mind the capital letter) to be "their thing", the defining trait the Republican citizens pride themselves on ("Our island may be tiny, but we carved a nation out of its sheer, barren stone by the might of our minds alone!")

Answer 6

You need women to enter the workplace

Science relies on people having the free time to specialize and learn more about a narrow area of life. To do that you need more free time, which means women need to be out of the house and taking over more jobs. The black death in europe was notable for encouraging women to take a more active role in the economy.

You need a fractured society with complicated networks

Large hegomonic empires are bad for science. The elites tend to make deals with rich merchants to suppress unwanted advancements. You need competition and conflict between the factions in the city, with science and technology being the thing that can break the stalemate.

But they also need to be able to connect, to share ideas and theories. You need enough unity from state, culture, or whatever for them to share their ideas and experiments.

You need staple crops and animals

The horse and wheat have been well domesticated. To have a more advanced nation you need strong crops and animals that let humans handle society more efficiently and have more free time to think. This was one of the major differences between north America and Europe. Their big plant was corn, which in its native form isn't very tasty.

Small dry rock like food. By contrast wild wheat is already a great food.

Answer 7

Legal System

For a society to support a working academia producing outstanding results, you need more than a food surplus and tax money, you need a working legal system. A working legal system prevents fraud, makes reaping the rewards for things you did not produce unfeasible, and thus rewards long-term endeavors. A strong legal system is also an indicator of a strong state, that can finance scientific endeavors where the rewards is not instantly visible. Societies legal system today are mostly built with third-sex slavery or by conformity pressure kettle society. We are currently trying out panopticon societies, which are omnipresent pressure kettle societies.

Survival Threatening Conflict

War is the greatest driver of innovation. Even the most stupid and fanatic, become pro-innovation, if it forwards their survival. War also destroys the market incentives to blockade and hold back innovations and use corruption to block roads forward. The great leader does not care about your monopoly, he wants to sit on his chair tomorrow without bombs raining.

Artificial prolonged Childhood

A short childhood is a shitty thing. Being one of the cool kids that drink, do drugs and have sex, is really not beneficial in the long run to you and society as a whole - especially academically. The same happens if you have a production job that does not challenge your mind, like drilling for coal or working at the conveyor track in a factory. Every step towards a long, protected childhood, helps your society to build more long-term components.

Neurotypical Diverse Academia

There is a great zoe of thinkers. Some are subconscious "whales" who digest lots of information, and disappear for a while, until their subconscious produces interesting outcomes. Some are great at the recombination of ideas, not directly affiliated, usually somewhere on the schizoid spectrum. Lots can systematically, and incrementally work towards a result within the scope of an idea. Here outstanding memorization and recall and the ability to focus are of great importance. Only if brought to work like a fragile ego-driven machine, by a capable director of such a theater production, will you see outstanding results. Which is why we currently see relatively little for all the people involved in the churn of academia at the moment.

If you inject ideology/religion-dogma into academia you will end up with strange crippled science similar to the nazi-germany sciences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik This ideology utterly destroyed the formidable science it had. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_G%C3%B6ttingen#%22Great_purge%22_of_1933

The Tree of Worlds

Every time you move innovation-wise - you gain a capability and move up the scenario tree into a new branch of the world, with new risks, and new other trees you can climb. Its like traversing a house, whos layout of dangers and opportunities change with every move. For some, your society may not be ready. Some may unravel the fabric, or just end society for a while or humanity permanently.

An agency that has that tree in view- and traverses it controlled and responsible, aware of the world you move into may prevent you from running into a world, where everyone has a nuke. Then again, sometimes you just cant plan- the ICBM to end us all, helped develop the chips, that might save us all. Science management is a difficult thing.