> So now the question is: why did Europe care about telescopes, and China didn't?

Copying another comment I made in this thread (much hand-waving and unsubtly/non-nuance):

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Literacy, individualism, lack of tribalism/clans, a 'mechanistic'/logical/Aristotelian view of reality (which led to the development of science), a 'general' of separation spiritual and civil powers (Matthew 22:15–22, Mark 12:13–17, Luke 20:20–26).

Max Weber (1864-1920) was one of the first people to ask this question:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber

For more recent thoughts, see The WEIRDest People in the World by Heinrich:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_Wor...

And Toby Huff (The Rise of Early Modern Science, Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toby_Huff

Intellectual Curiosity makes some interesting observations from the historical record: the telescope was invented in 1608 (where it ended up revolutionizing things), and the Europeans brought the technology to Imperial China and Mughal India. They brought it as 'supplicants' to the court to try to grant greater access to each nation; the Jesuits in China used it to show that their 'superior' knowledge of the universe and reality to help with converting folks to Christianity/Catholicism (e.g., by better predicting eclipses).

Neither country was interesting and continued, through a top-down decree, to simply do things the way they always did them.

The telescope arrived in the the Ottoman Empire by osmosis, and they didn't do much with it either.

Fast forward 100+ years and the scientific/technological advances made through curious minds allowed by a different worldview allowed the Europeans to develop more efficient (product output per energy input) economies and then walk all over the rest of the planet. The Indians and Chinese were arguable equally (if not more) advanced in the 1600s, but by the 1700s and later they were 'primitive' in comparison to the Europeans.

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* https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=30742959

> I think this might add some nuance to what "thinking the Earth was flat" meant

To add nuance to nuance: IIRC, the only way to really "prove" or provide evidence of the Earth's motion around the sun was through parallax of stars. Things came close with Bradley and stellar aberration in ~1728:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bradley

Giuseppi Calandrelli finally directly measures parallax in α-Lyrae in 1806. The Earth's motion (rotation) around its axis was demonstrated by Guglielmini:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Battista_Guglielmini

And it's not like folks didn't think of the possibility, as even Aristotle wrote in De Caelo (II.14):

> Again, everything that moves with the circular movement, except the first sphere, is observed to be passed, and to move with more than one motion. The earth, then, also, whether it move about the centre or as stationary at it, must necessarily move with two motions. But if this were so, there would have to be passings and turnings of the fixed stars. Yet no such thing is observed. The same stars always rise and set in the same parts of the earth.

* http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/heavens.2.ii.html

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Heavens