It is a bold to equate the Scientific Revolution of the 16th-18th Century with the formalization of the Scientific Method by Descartes and Bacon. Consider Aristotle’s claim that he “invented” logic. The substance Euclid’s Elements was probably already largely discovered prior to Aristotle’s writings, and there is evidence that the Pythagorean Theorem was used for practical applications as far back as the Babylonians. Aristotle was the first to formalize a formal method of inquiry that people had been using in fits and starts for millennia.

Likewise, Kepler published his revolutionary celestial mechanics 11 years before Bacon published his formalization of the scientific method. (It’s not clear Bacon even knew about Kepler’s findings.) Galileo described claimed that natural laws were mathematical (just as the Pythagoreans had over a millennium before), and conducted his experiments on the acceleration of falling objects long before Bacon.

It is difficult to write a precise history of why ideas did not occur to people sooner, but throughout human history there seems to have been an ebb and flow to this creativity that is difficult to attribute to exact causes. Having an intellectual class devoted to study does not alone seem to be enough, as the post-Yuan Dynasty decline in Chinese scientific discovery demonstrates. And standard of living alone seems inadequate, as shown by the lack of new mathematics and physical science in the halcyon days of Rome in the Second Century. And the ebb and flow of religiosity seems inadequate to explain things, as the start of Europe’s scientific revolution coincided with a fanatical deepening in devotion (and religious warfare).

It’s a question that defies easy answer. But it took more than simply writing down the steps for hypothesis testing.