Are there good historical examples of this happening, where foundational knowledge is completely lost?
I know I have read about it in books as a fiction, but I assume it must have already happened here before.
Maybe its an oxymoronic question to ask, seeing as if its lost we might not even know its lost, but more in the vein of "We put the lime in the mortar because this is what we have always done", unaware of the actual properties of lime when interacting with concrete.
>Are there good historical examples of this happening, where foundational knowledge is completely lost?
Usually following the fall of empires. Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) wrote:
"Perhaps they have written exhaustively on this topic, and their work did not reach us. There are many sciences. There have been numerous sages among the nations of mankind. The knowledge that has not come down to us is larger than the knowledge that has. Where are the sciences of the Persians that ‘Umar ordered to be wiped out at the time of the conquest? Where are the sciences of the Chaladaeans, the Syrians and the Babylonians, and the scholarly products and results that were theirs? Where are the sciences of the Copts, their predecessors? The sciences of only one nation, the Greeks, have come down to us, because they were translated through Al-Ma’mun’s efforts. He was successful in this direction because he had many translators at his disposal and spent much money in this connection."
> Are there good historical examples of this happening, where foundational knowledge is completely lost?
Maybe not quite in the context you were asking, but philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues as the premise in his book After Ethics that this is what happened to the philosophy of ethics after antiquity.
Copypasting from its Wikipedia article [0]:
> [After Ethics] begins with an allegory suggestive of the premise of the science-fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz: a world where all sciences have been dismantled quickly and almost entirely. MacIntyre asks what the sciences would look like if they were re-assembled from the remnants of scientific knowledge that survived the catastrophe.
> He claims that the new sciences, though superficially similar to the old, would in fact be devoid of real scientific content, because the key suppositions and attitudes would not be present. "The hypothesis which I wish to advance", he continues, "is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described." Specifically, MacIntyre applies this hypothesis to advance the notion that the moral structures that emerged from the Enlightenment were philosophically doomed from the start because they were formed using the aforementioned incoherent language of morality.
It is all things. Encapsulate all things. Think fractals, hopf and always remember the turbo encabulator.
The original machine had a base-plate of prefabulated aluminite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two main spurving bearings were in a direct line with the pentametric fan. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzlevanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotus-o-delta type placed in panendermic semi-bovoid slots in the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a non-reversible tremie pipe to the differential girdlespring on the "up" end of the grammeters.
— John Hellins Quick, "The turbo-encabulator in industry", Students' Quarterly Journal, Vol. 15, Iss. 58, p. 22 (December 1944)
Since you’re citing fiction, have you read the foundation series? The original inspiration for that book was The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which is a history book (arguably the first modern history book).
Anyways, that just to say that people in post-Roman Empire Europe lived out the reality of lost knowledge. They lived with the remains of incredible art, architecture like the coliseum, public works like the aqueduct, etc. But they wouldn’t have known how to reproduce those works. How to make concrete, etc. was knowledge that was lost to them.
I think that's essentially what the medieval dark ages were before the renaissance revived historic cultural and intellectual achievements and began building upon them again.
We lose knowledge all the time. Every person that dies carries a lifetime of experiences and information.
The thing is, we tend to lose the knowledge that is deemed useless. Anything considered useful is well spread. The problem is when our opinion doesn't match the reality, we have something around a generation to prove it, or the chance is gone.
Mathematics is full of examples of things that were discovered again and again, until somebody found a use for them and they entered our textbooks.
With the tech and politics of the late 1960s it would have been far easier to actually land on the moon than fake it with the vast reams of evidence we have.
no I'm talking about a manned mission to the moons surface including all the cameras and "live" coverage as well as the lander. apparently that tech is lost.
I know I have read about it in books as a fiction, but I assume it must have already happened here before.
Maybe its an oxymoronic question to ask, seeing as if its lost we might not even know its lost, but more in the vein of "We put the lime in the mortar because this is what we have always done", unaware of the actual properties of lime when interacting with concrete.