The exponential growth in knowledge output and technological advancement started before the formalization of the scientific method though.
There's a variety of factors contributing to this, to name some:
- Social mobility as a result of the Black Death
- Excess agricultural output, leading to population growth and specialization
- Wealth extracted from the Americas leading to a new class of Idles
- Certain inventions, like the printing press, massively increasing knowledge retention and spread.
Even more egregiously, this is a distinctly English view - neither the French nor the Germans have such a narrow view of science and at least until the late 1800s both had a higher scientific output than the English. This narrow view of science is ok if there is a positively-connotated word to describe the process of knowledge advancement, in English I guess that would be academia, although that is too narrow still. Without engineering and mathematics, science would have started to stagnate centuries ago - or never been formalized in the first place.
There's a variety of factors contributing to this, to name some:
- Social mobility as a result of the Black Death
- Excess agricultural output, leading to population growth and specialization
- Wealth extracted from the Americas leading to a new class of Idles
- Certain inventions, like the printing press, massively increasing knowledge retention and spread.
Even more egregiously, this is a distinctly English view - neither the French nor the Germans have such a narrow view of science and at least until the late 1800s both had a higher scientific output than the English. This narrow view of science is ok if there is a positively-connotated word to describe the process of knowledge advancement, in English I guess that would be academia, although that is too narrow still. Without engineering and mathematics, science would have started to stagnate centuries ago - or never been formalized in the first place.