Inserting technology into the past

[meurig]

i'd go back to nowadays with a time machine.

Excellent answer.

 

[spitfire]

Eratosthenes famously proved the world was round in the 3rd Century BC.

I'd give the Ancient Greeks a printing press.

 

[Jonti]

Shippou's got the right idea, I reckon. Romans were great engineers. But what the Romans really lacked was any chemistry. Heat engines depend on chemistry (well, you know, they're oxidising stuff), and need a fair bit of applied chemistry to be useful. There's corrosion issues too; and the need for oil.

So I'd introduce those brilliant Roman engineers to the ancient mixture of finely mixed saltpetre, sulphur, and charcoal. Gunpowder! That's what the Romans really lacked.

Showing the Romans gunpowder would stimulate interest to learn more about mixtures and substances that can contain stupendous amounts of releasable energy. Eventually, the startling properties of a lump of coal in this regard would be realised, and the Romans would build themselves engines.

 

[kyser_soze]

I reckon the printing press would be the best to take back - it'd still be equally socially disruptive, but wouldn't require a whole new way of looking at the world/universe to understand (don't forget, all modern technology is based around the worldview and mindset that developed after the Enlightenment - some people have already mentioned being burned at the stake for being a heretic, but it goes deeper than that. Medical science UTTERLY requires a secular viewpoint outside of the most basic stuff (even something like penicillin would require a major philosophical leap or some seriously good metaphors/analogies before you convinced people that the 'ill spirits' were actually eeny creatures etc)

Someone took a calculator back in time to help Isaac Newton out a bit, he thought he was from the devil, shopped him to the authorities and got him burnt at the stake. Doh!

Read a similar story in a 'Star Wars' comic once - dude goes back in time with a camera, radio and something else (can't remember that) - camera gets destroyed by a guard who thinks it's a weapon, and the radio doesn't work because, obviously there are no radio stations...dude ends up mad and court jester...

So taking all that into account, I reckon Shippy's right with the steam engine, and meurig with the printing press...

 

[In Bloom]

How can you have technology without it's political implications?

Even the most basic of innovations has always had massive implications for the way people interact with each other. Look at the advent of the printing press, for Christ's sake.

 

[kyser_soze]

I don't think anyone is denying that - but introducing the printing press to the Greeks, or giving them the knowledge of how to harness steam wouldn't be reliant on a whole new mode of thinking, whereas much medical and other post-industrial rev technologies require a different kind of worldview...one that would probably arrive quite quickly in both those societies which is when yer politics would start to kick in!

 

[In Bloom]

I don't think anyone is denying that - but introducing the printing press to the Greeks, or giving them the knowledge of how to harness steam wouldn't be reliant on a whole new mode of thinking, whereas much medical and other post-industrial rev technologies require a different kind of worldview...one that would probably arrive quite quickly in both those societies which is when yer politics would start to kick in!

That wasn't so much aimed at you as the whole pretext of the OP.

I agree with your post, for what it's worth. I remember reading something which suggeted that it was only when water pumps became relatively sophisticated and commonplace that it was possible to have a proper understanding of how the heart worked, since it gave a useful analogy. An interesting notion, to say the least.

And yeah, a printing press for the Greeks would be an interesting one.

 

[red rose]

I was going to suggest germ theory but I see its already been mentionned. I think it would be a fairly good one to do as the experiment is fairly self explanatory. Obviously taking it back too far wouldn't work, but sometime after the printing press was invented...

To be honest given this opportunity I'd probably just experiment with stuff like taking a box file back to the anglo saxons, or giving cavemen teaspoons and see how it would change things.