something the Romans never thought of and why should they, it was against the will of the gods (Vulcan's domain, after all, the Titan who brough humanity fire and metallergy was punished by being chained to a mountain for eternity and having his eyes pecked out) and slavery made for an easy work force.
This is a highly ill-informed take on how the Romans viewed and interacted with their gods. They took omens to determine the will of the gods on individual things, not entire schools of thought. There was no "this is such-and-and-such deity's domain so we shouldn't mess with it" kind of thinking. It was more like "Will so-and-so approve of us building an aqueduct in a certain way at such-and-such place?" "It's God's will" on entire subjects, such as science as a whole, is a monotheistic trait - not exclusive to monotheism in the history of the world, but more common, certainly.
Do you wonder why all the major technological explosions happened in Judeo-Christian Europe, after its conversions and in a rather short time period while the pagan world (which often was even ahead of the pagan Europeans) never progressed even 10% as far?
Are you kidding? The Roman Empire collapsed, and with it disappeared much of the accumulated knowledge of thousands of years of classical culture, a very short time (relatively) after Christianity became the state religion. We're still recovering the stores of knowledge and learning that were lost, but most of it will never be recovered. The Dark Ages were NOT a period of fantastic innovation in science and engineering - that's one BIG reason they're called the Dark Ages - I can't believe anyone would even try to argue otherwise. Most of the great leaps in thinking in science began to take place until well after the Middle Ages, when the hold of the church finally began to loosen a bit.
> Most of the great leaps in thinking in science began to take place until well after the Middle Ages, when the hold of the church finally began to loosen a bit.
More specifically, when the long-lost knowledge of the classical civilizations, including the basic precepts fo science, started to filter back into Europe from *the* *Arabs.*