how much more advanced would we be today if the library at Alexandria hadn't been destroyed?

Question

Would Leonardo Da Vinci have actually built a working car? what kinds of electronics inventions would have done by Ben Franklin? What kind of information did we miss out on by this one act?

Answer 1

Boy, this is a great question! (even though it really belongs in Humanities or History.)

Well in the first place, you must consider how accurate much of the information contained there would have been. Compare to existing Greek myths we know of, for example, with men turning into trees and women into rivers-- obviously mythological.

I suspect that the history would have been fairly accurate, because we could compare all the sources to each other and eliminate the portions that didn't agree. Thus, we could approach a fairly good history.

About scientific stuff, I'm not so sure. There may have been early theories by Democritus et alii, but how developed were they? How widely accepted were they? How practical were they?

To drawn an analogy, we currently have a theory of teleportation by quantum entanglement. If a time traveller should come to today and pick up a copy of that theory, would it significantly advance his efforts to develop teleportation...? Probably not. Today's theory is neither sufficiently developed nor widely accepted nor practical.

It's interesting that you mention Ben Franklin. I've heard a report that he was working on an electrical system of communication prior to the Revolutionary War. Now, Ben was a printer-- he thought in terms of letters printed on paper with ink. And the only kind of electricity he knew was static electricity.

His system was going to have 26 wires, one for each letter of the alphabet, and a little slip of paper with the printed letter hanging on the end of each one. He would touch his Leyden jar (a primitive capacitor) to the end of the wire. At the far end of the wire, the paper slip would flip up due to electrostatic repulsion. There would be someone sitting there, transcribing the message, one letter at a time.

If it hadn't been for silly little things like the cause of American independance and subsequent diplomacy, Ben would have found time to experiment more. He would probably have invented data compression (by eliminating vowels) and duplicate letters (c,s,k), (j.i), (u,v) resulting in a greatly simplified system (and spelling reform at the same time!)

Can you imagine what a difference a telegraph would have made to the Revolutionary War...? We would have called it the Franklin code, instead of the Morse code. Morse would have invented the telephone, and Bell would have invented the radio, and Marconi would have invented the television, and Bill Gates would have bought antigravity off the guy who invented it, and we'd all be living on Mars by now!

Check out something called the Dead Media Project. I think you'l find it interesting.

But, to reiterate, I think that the library at Alexandria didn't have enough well-developed information in a useable form that would have advanced civilization much. Da vinci is much more modern, and some of his ideas could actually have worked if he had access to modern materials.

Please don't deny me ten points just because I disagree with you in one part of your question! And keep on asking great questions like these!

Answer 2

David, I'm sure we will never know. But I am sure that many of the answers regarding antiquity would not be as hotly debated by scholars in our day and age. There were probably myriad answers to the host of questions today's acedemics argue about that were preserved in that library.

Pro or con, knowledge is a precious jewel and all efforts must be made to preserve it.

Answer 3

Probably be at about the same stage that we are now considering that most of the progress in science and technology has been made since WW2. You don't have advancements in technology in a vacuum.

Answer 4

actually i dont think that science would have had a faster development, because in this Bibl. were no handbooks of modern quantumphysics. ;)
ehat I mean is, that there where mostly literatur and tales, maybe history-"books" or somthing. but science at that time wasnt' the same it is now. but we would hav a real good insight in that times special the times befor the burning. this knowledge is for ever lost to humankind!

Answer 5

That is so true, there was so much that was destroyed and whats more the place has my name. Alexandria...land of beauty and knowledge

Answer 6

a lot more
they do a show on PBS where they build Davinci's inventions to see if they work successfully

if it does, he was the first person to accomplish flight

Answer 7

The answer to this question was destroyed in the fire.

Sorry.

Answer 8

who knows??????????