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So at four o'clock this afternoon a few dozen hacks will be locked in the
Bank of England, where we will be given a 100-page review by the Bank on
how and whether leaving the European Union would affect its
responsibility to deliver monetary and financial stability.
It all sounds pretty momentous (important). We'll be briefed for an hour by the
deputy governor Sir Jon Cunliffe, and we will not be allowed to leave, email, phone or
tweet till six o'clock, when the governor will give a speech about all this in the
Cairncross memorial lecture at St Peter's College Oxford.
We like to think that we are currently living through a period when technology has an
unparalleled hold on society, but it is nothing compared with that of the ancient world, when
invention and technology were the most powerful forces shaping civilization. Throughout the
ancient world, technology was the one factor that made all the other changes – social, political
and cultural – possible. Without the inventions of ink and papyrus, many of man’s ideas would
not have spread as fast nor as widely. Without weapons and, later, the wheel, armies would not
have conquered new territories as quickly.
The single largest step in early man’s social evolution came around 10,000 years ago
with the invention of animal husbandry and agriculture. This enabled him to progress from living
in nomadic communities to settling in villages and small towns. The progress was brought about
by a combination of climatic change and man’s invention of more efficient hunting tools, of a
means of controlling and utilising fire to clear undergrowth and of ways of building lasting
shelters. It led to a massive growth in population, which in turn triggered a further rapid increase
in technological innovation. Most of this change took place in the eastern Mediterranean, where
the climate and the annual flooding of fertile soils favoured the development of agriculture and
later of cities such as Babylon. By around 6500 BCE, Jericho is believed to have been the largest
city in the world, with a population of 2,500.
Four thousand years later, the urban revolution had brought about a momentous cultural
transition that in turn generated new needs. These were met by a quantum leap in technological
innovation and the establishment of craftsmen and scientists. For the first time, manufacturing
became established as man invented ways of making textiles, firing ceramics, producing
metalwork and processing foodstuffs. This prompted barter methods to evolve into more
sophisticated trading arrangements, culminating in the invention of tokens or early money.
It was also a period when science and technology’s symbiotic relationship was reversed.
Technology, now often the application of scientific discovery and observation, predated science
and in this period was empirical and handed down through the generations. By the time the city
states were flowering in the early centuries BCE, scientist-inventors began to emerge. Figures
such as Hero, Strato, Ctesibius and Philon used observations and measurements of the physical
and natural world to devise inventions. However, they were all minnows when compared with
Archimedes. Here was a man of the calibre that the world would not see again until Sir Isaac
Newton in the 17th century. The inventor had truly arrived.
Classify the following events according to whether the reader states that they occurred during:
Experts say that there is no doubt (that) / things will get better.
Astronomy has been around for thousands of years. In ancient times, people
observed the sun and the stars on a daily basis. They planted crops and held
certain events relating to the movement of objects in the sky.
Ancient civilizations, like the Greeks and Romans, however did not have the
instruments that later generations had. They had to observe the skies and stars with
their naked eye. It helped them navigate the seas and guide them to other places.
They saw that stars were arranged in patterns that looked like humans or
animals.
In ancient times, people thought that the Earth was the centre of the universe and
that everything revolved around it. Towards the end of the Middle Ages some
astronomers were not quite convinced about this theory. In the early
16th century Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish astronomer, was the first to show that
in fact the sun was the centre of the solar system and planets revolved around it.
Almost a century later Italian astronomer Galileo used the first telescope to
observe space. His studies supported Copernicus’ theories. German
mathematician Johannes Kepler proved that planets travel around the sun
in elliptical paths. Isaac Newton used Kepler’s findings to explain
how gravity worked.
Since the middle of the last century, things have shifted in the global scientific
community. English is now so prevalent that in some non-English speaking
countries, like Germany, France, and Spain, English-language academic
papers outnumber publications in the country’s own language several times
over. In the Netherlands, one of the more extreme examples, this ratio is an
astonishing 40 to 1.