Inconsistencies on Roshar's Technological Advancement?

[orc]

I'm wondering if I'm alone, but is anyone having a hard time trying to understand how technologically advanced Roshar is, or if it's simply being inconsistent?

At first glance, I thought it was like a classic fantasy setting historically, but then we're in RoW, we discovered a bunch of things. We are told the relationship between math and music, specifically wavelength and frequency. Both of which are much more modern discovered, and the relationship between frequency and music which is even more modern. And the first theories about frequency were about electromagnetic fields and light, not sound. We learn that Navani has a vacuum tube, courtesy or a Barometric Institute, but why would they have invented that? A vacuum tube is much different than a barometer. Like, a barometer uses a Torricellian vacuum, it is not the same principles of a vacuum chamber, so I have to wonder why a barometric institute would have this device. The process to extra air from the vacuum tube makes it pretty clear that it's not the same kind of vacuum used when taking barometric readings. Then Navani talks about waves not traveling through a vacuum, but how do they know that? Because again, that's a fairly modern theory. How does she know what a vacuum less environment is, let alone that sound waves can't travel through it? And a major statement that Navani keeps making is that oil and water can mix, but theory behind emulsification is again, another fairly modern idea.

I think there's more, but I'm just extremely confused, because Roshar does not know the existence of bacteria. Because if we remember, Kaladin didn't understand why he had to wash his hands before surgery, other than that was the wisdom of the Heralds. So how are complex theories about frequency, wavelength, even emulsification known as such common ideas to Navani? Because we know Raboniel does not know emulsification, and much of the wisdom of the Heralds was lost in time.

I'm just wondering if anyone else has an opinion to help try to bridge this gap. I mean, the more I look, the more I see that it's not exactly medieval fantasy, but maybe pre-industrial, but even then, a lot of these ideas weren't even thought of, and yet it's common knowledge to Navani. Just hoping someone can make a more rational argument, because I felt like all the science being thrown at us through the experiments felt completely out of place based on my perceived technological level of their society.

[StanLemon]

So the thing about scientific progress is that it doesn't have to happen in the linear fashion that it did here in the real world. Different discoveries can happen at different rates. For example, Raboniel knew what axi were even though Navani had no concept of them other than a theoretical smallest division. While the way it was presented in the book did seem somewhat jarring to me, I wasn't really confused. Scholars on Roshar might simply have tested things out before in a different order than they did here on Earth. We can even use real world examples to explain this, for example the ancient Greeks effectively invented a computer and steam engine thousands of years ago. 

[seriodor]

1 hour ago, orc said:

I'm wondering if I'm alone, but is anyone having a hard time trying to understand how technologically advanced Roshar is, or if it's simply being inconsistent?

At first glance, I thought it was like a classic fantasy setting historically, but then we're in RoW, we discovered a bunch of things. We are told the relationship between math and music, specifically wavelength and frequency. Both of which are much more modern discovered, and the relationship between frequency and music which is even more modern. And the first theories about frequency were about electromagnetic fields and light, not sound. We learn that Navani has a vacuum tube, courtesy or a Barometric Institute, but why would they have invented that? A vacuum tube is much different than a barometer. Like, a barometer uses a Torricellian vacuum, it is not the same principles of a vacuum chamber, so I have to wonder why a barometric institute would have this device. The process to extra air from the vacuum tube makes it pretty clear that it's not the same kind of vacuum used when taking barometric readings. Then Navani talks about waves not traveling through a vacuum, but how do they know that? Because again, that's a fairly modern theory. How does she know what a vacuum less environment is, let alone that sound waves can't travel through it? And a major statement that Navani keeps making is that oil and water can mix, but theory behind emulsification is again, another fairly modern idea.

I think there's more, but I'm just extremely confused, because Roshar does not know the existence of bacteria. Because if we remember, Kaladin didn't understand why he had to wash his hands before surgery, other than that was the wisdom of the Heralds. So how are complex theories about frequency, wavelength, even emulsification known as such common ideas to Navani? Because we know Raboniel does not know emulsification, and much of the wisdom of the Heralds was lost in time.

I'm just wondering if anyone else has an opinion to help try to bridge this gap. I mean, the more I look, the more I see that it's not exactly medieval fantasy, but maybe pre-industrial, but even then, a lot of these ideas weren't even thought of, and yet it's common knowledge to Navani. Just hoping someone can make a more rational argument, because I felt like all the science being thrown at us through the experiments felt completely out of place based on my perceived technological level of their society.

I think that when they say that a lot of the wisdom the heralds is lost, that just really means that they used to know that the heralds taught humanity a bunch of stuff, but nobody knows what that stuff was anymore. Pieces of it might have entered the common knowledge of different cultures over the years, or been written down by other scholars in a way that wasn't attributed to the heralds. I also feel like things having to do with air pressure are going to be studied a lot more on a planet with a crazy storm that destroys everything. Also they have probably been influenced by worldhoppers, I'm sure the second heightening of breaths would be really useful for figuring things out like sound frequency. 

[Bilbo Swaggins]

I think its worth noting that roshar is a bit of a special case. For thousands of years any technological advancement roshar made seemed to be wiped out with the desolations. Think about how much farther they would be as a society if that was never an issue. However, I think because of the Heralds and the nature of humans some of that advancement persisted through the desolations. Also its worth noting that they have had 7000 years since the recreance to make advancement. Compare that to our own timeline and they seem relatively behind the curve. I think its definitely plausible that they're ahead in some areas and behind in others.

Edited November 25, 2020 by Bilbo Swaggins

[Kuldak]

2 hours ago, Bilbo Swaggins said:

I think its worth noting that roshar is a bit of a special case. For thousands of years any technological advancement roshar made seemed to be wiped out with the desolations. Think about how much farther they would be as a society if that was never an issue. However, I think because of the Heralds and the nature of humans some of that advancement persisted through the desolations. Also its worth noting that they have had 7000 years since the recreance to make advancement. Compare that to our own timeline and they seem relatively behind the curve. I think its definitely plausible that they're ahead in some areas and behind in others.

Also, several of the orders of Knights Radiant were commonly scholars, and would have likely been among those keeping information between desolations. They also had access to spren willing to work with them. While we haven't really seen many of old Radiant spren in action, the spren we have seen appear to have significant knowledge of the workings of the cosmere. Even discounting the greater spren the Bondsmiths had access to, being able to have conversations with a living embodiment of mathematical constructs in nature (in the case of a Cryptic) would probably be able to give a good bit of insight on how the underlying mechanics of the cosmere worked. Lightweaving itself would have demonstrated that there is some link between sound and light, since both light and sound are manipulated by the same surge. While significant amounts of that information would have been lost when the Knights Radiant and Silver Kingdoms fell ~2000 years ago, at least some percentage of it would have likely stuck around to modern day Roshar, even with the Heirocracy working to suppress any knowledge associated with the Radiants in the Vorin nations.

[Rushu42 she/her]

Well, you have to think about the sort of technological advancements that the Rosharans would be motivated to make. The three main things that they appear to be behind in is weaponry, transportation, and medicine. A lot of our other modern conveniences are accomplished to some degree by fabrials. So why not these?

Consider the powers of the Knights Radiant. Using Stormlight, they could create powerful weapons, transport people great distances, and provide instantaneous healing. If you already have these things, why put in the effort to invent a different way of doing it? Once you've excluded the things already covered by the magic system, Roshar is very advanced.

[LordTheodore]

20 hours ago, Bilbo Swaggins said:

I think its worth noting that roshar is a bit of a special case. For thousands of years any technological advancement roshar made seemed to be wiped out with the desolations. Think about how much farther they would be as a society if that was never an issue. However, I think because of the Heralds and the nature of humans some of that advancement persisted through the desolations. Also its worth noting that they have had 7000 years since the recreance to make advancement. Compare that to our own timeline and they seem relatively behind the curve. I think its definitely plausible that they're ahead in some areas and behind in others.

The recreance was 2000 years ago. The Last Desolation was 4500 years ago which is equivalent to 4950 Earth years.

[ftl]

Yeah, technological advancement isn't a linear progression, from more to less advanced. It's affected by the world they live in and what people actually research and how.

Rosharans have very advanced progress in the study of light and sound. That could be because of the way Roshar is - Light and Tones are extremely important to the functioning of the world, they've got easy access to pure light of different colors via different gemstones (giving them an impetus to research this kind of thing), sound is apparently key to making Stormlight move around, their cities are in the shapes of cymatic patterns.

On the other hand, they're far "behind" in their study of biology and microbiology. This could be because of the fact that Rosharans are more heavily Invested than normal, giving them stronger immune systems and making disease theory not really work right. In addition, because Spren are such are core part of the ecosystem, normal biology studies just don't work right - if you tried to take apart a large crustacean to find out how it works, you'd find that things don't add up, because the spren bonds are key to making creatures on Roshar function.

So yeah. Roshar has it's own unique mix of scientific knowledge and ignorance. It's not really medieval or pre-industrial or industrial - some areas are more advanced, some are less advanced, and there's no real reason to expect that all the discoveries will happen at the same cadence they do on Earth.

[Bilbo Swaggins]

12 hours ago, LordTheodore said:

The recreance was 2000 years ago. The Last Desolation was 4500 years ago which is equivalent to 4950 Earth years.

Ahh true, ROW has the 7000 years on the brain lol. I still think my point stands though 

[Stormtide_Leviathan]

The Rosharans have different pressures than we do due to the nature of their world, and so their innovations will lead them to different places. For a simple example we saw in the book, the existence of rotspren probably hinders development in germ theory since a lot of people ill look to rotspren as a disease vector, but also allows them to intuit things about infections we needed germ theory to know.