Man moved into the north just when the climate there was turning to ice. ibid.
The history of man is divided very unequally. There is his biological evolution ... And then there is his cultural history. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 2/13: The Harvest of the Seasons
It’s usually called the agricultural revolution. But I think it’s something much wider – the biological revolution. ibid.
It became necessary for man to settle. ibid.
Before 8,000 B.C. wheat was not the luxuriant plant it is today. ibid.
The Bible is a curious history: part folklore and part record. History is of course written by the victors. ibid.
Agriculture creates a technology from which all physics, all science, takes off. ibid.
The most powerful invention in all agriculture is of course the plough. ibid.
The wheel is found for the first time before 3,000 B.C. and from then on the wheel and the axle become the taproot from which invention grows. ibid.
How is it that the machine in its modern form now seems just a threat? ibid.
War – organised war – is not a human instinct. It is a highly planed and cooperative form of theft. ibid.
War, theft, is not a permanent state that can be maintained. ibid.
The Earth has existed for more than four thousand million years. Through all this time it has been shaped and changed by two kinds of action: the hidden forces within the Earth ... And on the surface the erosion of snow and rain and storm and stream and ocean and sun and wind have carved out a natural architecture. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 3/13: The Grain in the Stone
Why did civilisation begin so much later in the new world than in the world? ibid.
Sometimes the stone had a natural grain ... The notion of discovering an underlying structure in matter is man’s basic concept for exploring Nature. ibid.
A city is stones and a city is people. ibid.
At the heart of the terraced culture is the system of irrigation. ibid.
What is a city? It is a community which lives on a base of agriculture. ibid.
The arch is an engineering invention. ibid.
They called themselves free masons as early as the fourteenth century. ibid.
In one sense everything we discover is already there. ibid.
The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. ibid.
Sulphur and mercury are the two elements of which the alchemists thought the universe was composed. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 4/13: The Hidden Structure
Physics is the knife that cuts into the grain of Nature. ibid.
Bronze becomes from this time onwards a material for all purposes: the plastic of its age. ibid.
By 1,000 B.C. steel is being made in India. ibid.
Iron is a later discovery than copper because at every stage it needs more heat. ibid.
The sword is the weapon of the samurai. ibid.
Gold is the universal prize in all countries, in all cultures, and in all ages. ibid.
The first written reference we have to alchemy is just over two thousand years old and it comes from China. ibid.
The belief of the ancients that all cures must come either from plants or from animals – a kind of vitalism. Now the alchemists introduced minerals into medicine – salt for example. ibid.
The new scourge – syphilis. To this day we don’t know where syphilis came from. ibid.
Fire is the alchemist’s element. ibid.
Fire is a process of transformation and change by which material elements are rejoined into new combinations. ibid.
Arithmetic-like language begins in legend. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 5/13: Music of the Spheres
Numbers are the language of Nature. Pythagoras found a basic relation between music harmony and mathematics. ibid.
For a long time the astrolabe was the pocket watch and the slide rule of the world. ibid.
Easter Island ... The question about these statues is – why were they all made alike? Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 6/13: The Starry Messenger
A civilisation which failed to take the first step on the ascent of rational knowledge. ibid.
Copernicus put the sun at the centre of the heavens. ibid.
In 1600 the Mediterranean was still the centre of the world, and Venice was the hub of the Mediterranean. ibid.
Galileo is the creator of the modern scientific method. ibid.
Galileo seems to me to have been strangely innocent about the world of politics. ibid.
The trial of Galileo in 1633: but every political trial has a long hidden history of what went on behind the scenes. ibid.
When Galileo worked the opening pages of The Dialogue he said twice that Italian science and trade was now in danger of being overtaken by northern rivals. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 7/13: The Majestic Clockwork
His [Newton’s] achievements were solitary ... Mathematics: he invented what we now call the Calculus ... Newton kept ‘fluxions’ as his secret tool. ibid.
He had his own small laboratory and his own garden. ibid.
Newton had conceived the idea of a universal gravitation in the plague year of 1666. ibid.
He practised alchemy; in secret he wrote immense tomes about the Book of Revelation. ibid.
The village boy had made good. ibid.
The universe of Newton ticked on without a hitch for about two hundred years. ibid.
Einstein was always full of beautiful simple illustrations of such principles ... What would the world look like if I rode on a beam of light? ibid.
Light is the carrier of information that binds us. ibid.
The crux of all his papers: this unfolding of the heart of knowledge almost petal by petal. ibid.
E=MC2: that comes from a profound insight into the processes of Nature herself, but particularly into the relations between Men, Knowledge, Nature. Physics is not events but observations; relativity is the understanding of the world not as events but relations. ibid.
Revolutions are not made by fate but by men; sometimes they are solitary men of genius. But the great revolutions in the eighteenth century were made by many lesser men banded together. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 8/13: The Drive for Power
England was already the leading manufacturing nation. ibid.
Water had become the engineers’ element. ibid.
The greatest Freemason of all in that age the printer Benjamin Franklin. He was American emissary here in France at the court of Louis XVI in 1784 when The Marriage of Figaro was first performed. ibid.
The scientific entertainment of the day was electricity. ibid.
This was a heroic age – Thomas Telford felt that, spanning the landscape with iron. ibid.
Nearly a thousand pieces for Catherine the Great of Russia ... His [Wedgwood] own pottery Creamware. ibid.
Societies like the Lunar Society represent the sense of the makers of that revolution – that very English sense – that they had a social responsibility. ibid.
Cotton underwear and soap could work a transformation in the lives of the poor. ibid.
We think of pollution as a modern blight but it’s not. ibid.
Energy had become the central concept in science. ibid.
The railways – they were made possible by Richard Trevithick. ibid.
The Industrial Revolution was terribly cruel to those whose lives and livelihoods it overturned. ibid.
The story of the British gentlemen and their scientific eccentricities is not irrelevant. It was such men who made Nature romantic. ibid.
The theory of evolution by natural selection was put forward in the 1850s independently by two men: one was Charles Darwin who lived in this house in the village of Down in Kent, the other was Alfred Russel Wallace. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 9/13: Evolution: The Ladder of Creation