Anno Equestria: A Brief History of the Pony Nation

by Insert Pen Name

The Time of Reason*

Anno Equestria
A Brief History of the Pony Nation
A FiM fic by (Insert Pen Name)

The Time of Reason
AE1450-1650

Prior to the fifteenth century, the intellectual landscape of Equestria was very different than it is today. All books and other written materials had to be produced by hoof in scriptoria, usually staffed by clerics or professional scribes, a slow and tedious process that made books a relatively rare and expensive commodity. Most extant volumes were kept in the libraries of monasteries and universities. Though Princess Celestia, ever the scholar, had made great efforts to make these collections accessible to the public, most ponies of the time remained illiterate.

This is not to say that sciences and the pursuit of knowledge did not exist. For centuries, scholars of all stripes had followed the example of the great savant, Starswirl the Bearded.* During his remarkable career, Starswirl invented over two-hundred magic spells, perfected countless others, and wrote dozens of treatises on natural sciences, astronomy, physics, optics, chemistry, backgammon, and acoustics. For over a millenium, his legacy was an inspiration for mages and scientists alike, many of whom devoted their entire careers to replicating his experiments and inventions.

Nonetheless, literacy was the luxury of a relative few until the mid-fifteenth century, when an unlikely invention took the literary world by storm. In AE1450, an unsung, but heavily indebted clerk named Rubber Stamp developed the first movable-type printing press. Nopony is sure what inspired Rubber Stamp to create such a device, but it drew tremendous attention when he demonstrated his press at a symposium at the Royal University in Canterlot. Princess Celestia was especially impressed, and rewarded Stamp handsomely in exchange for his agreement not to patent his invention. Instead, the Royal Presses were established almost overnight, and within mere months, new books were being printed in large numbers and shipped to schools and libraries all across Equestria.

Privately owned print shops, including Rubber Stamp's (which enjoyed the exclusive patronage of the Royal University for decades after), followed soon after, printing popular books and poems of the day, as well as pamphlets, missives, letters, and handbills for all manner of clients. The sudden abundance of written material led to a surge in literacy, especially once schools across Equestria began offering reading lessons to the general public (at a cost, of course). Publicly-funded literacy programs were established soon after. By AE1500, the literacy rate in Equestria had skyrocketed to an estimated 70% of the adult population. The written word became an integral part of everyday life; written signs, letters, posted information, et cetera all became commonplace during this period.

The surge in literacy soon led to a growing demand for education, and the old universities, long accustomed to serving the wealthy few, soon found themselves unable to meet the growing demand. New public schools were soon established to educate common ponies of all ages in language, mathematics, logic, sciences, and the arts. Such a curriculum allowed many "common" ponies to rise to greater positions, furthering the long drive to equality in Equestria.

In AE1504, Princess Celestia established the Royal Council of Scholars to oversee the advancement of research and education in Equestria. Unfortunately, the Council soon became a hotbed of dysfunction as disputes, both personal and professional, kept the Council in a near-constant state of gridlock. Moderates within the Council managed to keep the organisation functional, but as a whole, the Council, and scientific progress in general, stagnated until a revolutionary discovery brought the entire system crashing down.

Of all the inventions of Starswirl the Bearded, none was treasured more by the Council of Scholars than Starswirl's Orrery. Painstakingly designed by Starswirl himself, and built by a group of his former pupils in the early first century AE, the Orrery was a mechanical representation of Starswirl's geocentric model of the universe, including all the known planets and both hemispheres of the night sky with the Earth at the very centre. The Orrery had been carefully salvaged from Old Canterlot following the Nightmare Moon Crisis, and for centuries it had been used by astronomers to help predict the movements of the stars and planets. The Orrery was considered a marvel of engineering, and the single greatest device in the Council's possession. It was therefore much to everypony's consternation when, in AE1542, the whole thing suddenly and unexpectedly broke down.

It was swiftly and unanimously agreed that a team should be formed to bring the device back to working order. However, the Orrery had been under-maintained for so long, that nopony any longer had sufficient knowledge of how it actually worked. As a result, the repair team was forced to study and analyse the Orrery before they could begin to fix it.

Among the repair team was a novice cleric and mathematical prodigy named Rhubarb Pi. Pi was tasked with reviewing Starswirl's notes, which contained the astronomic figures on which the Orrery's movements were based. However, Pi soon noticed a number of minor errors in Starswirl's calculations. When he corrected these errors and followed through with the rest of the calculation, he found that the correct figures he produced were very different from those that Starswirl had used to design the Orrery in the first place! Initially unsure of how to proceed, Pi finally gathered up all of Starswirl's observations, as well as several contemporary astronomy texts and treatises, and set about trying to calculate a new set of figures that could conform to the Orrery's design. He couldn't. Again and again he tried, and again and again he found himself unable to reconcile the observed movements of the heavenly bodies with Starswirl's model.

By this point, the Council was growing impatient, and Rhubarb Pi was forced to appear before them to account for his delays. Reluctantly, Pi presented his conclusions; that the Orrery was inherently flawed, and that for all his genius as a mage, Starswirl the Bearded was a rank amateur when it came to math. Predictably, the Council did not react well. Even those fellow clerics who sat on the Council admonished Pi for embarrassing them and their order. Nonetheless, Pi's work aroused the curiosity of many of his younger colleagues, and a few months later, Pi was approached by an astronomer named Clear Skies.

Clear Skies had been studying the motions of the planets, and she too had found Starswirl's model increasingly unsatisfactory. The two scholars now began collaborating to develop a more accurate model to replace it. However, neither had initially thought to question the geocentric concept itself. It wasn't until AE1545 that Clear Skies first hypothesised that the Sun, and not the Earth, was the centre of the visible cosmos. Rhubarb Pi soon confirmed this theory, constructing a mathematical model that almost perfectly** conformed to all major planetary observations, and even explained such phenomena as the apparent "retrograde" motion of certain planets. Armed as such, the duo reappeared before the Council to present their complete theory of a heliocentric universe. Events may have unfolded poorly even then, were it not for the fact that Princess Celestia herself (who, incidentally, was a leading authority on the Sun and its properties) was in attendance. While we have no authoritative transcript of the presentation, one alleged witness quotes the Princess as loudly commenting; "This actually makes sense!"

A new trend of scientific reason and discovery followed that fateful day. The Council of Scholars was eventually disbanded in AE1546, after several other independent astronomers had confirmed the heliocentric theory. In its place, Princess Celestia created the Royal Research Council, devoted to advancing scientific and technological discovery. Rhubarb Pi and Cloudy Skies (who were eventually married) continued to pursue their respective fields well into their twilight years, though they never again made any significant discoveries. Instead, new scholars and explorers (who to describe here would require an entire volume in its own right) emerged with advancing theories of physics, chemistry, medicine, engineering, et cetera. Though this "Time of Reason", as it has been poetically dubbed, eventually tapered off around 1650, its legacy continues to affect our daily lives in ways we seldom consider.

* Starswirl the Bearded (PE103-5). To attempt describe his complete life and achievements, even in summary, would be utterly tangential to the purpose of this text. Those interested are encouraged to read "The Lauded Life of Starswirl the Bearded" by E. Tail & S.B. Weaver, Royal Press, AE1842.

** It was not until 1609 that astronomer Kelp Green proposed elliptical planetary orbits, thus perfecting the heliocentric model.

Comments

[djthomp]

Sweet, the printing press. Arguably one of the most important inventions in history. Makes sense from the semi-industrialized society we see in the show that they've had it for a few hundred years or so, plenty of time for an educated populace to become the norm.

I'm assuming The Time of Reason is a bit of a take off of The Enlightenment? Or do I not quite have the timing/cause of The Enlightenment correct?

[Insert Pen Name]

2135723 More like the late Renaissance. The Enlightenment was after all the stuff I've paralleled here.

[djthomp]

2136939 Ah, Renaissance, I knew I was forgetting the more appropriate term.

[shutaro]

I can't imagine how those scholars reacted to Celestia's comment:
"Your highness, you worked with the sun and the moon for several hundred years and never noticed this?"
"Must have slipped my mind."

[CanterlotBrony]

Another good chapter.

I feel this is coming to a conclusion.

How many more chapters do you think there might be? Are we 3/4 of the way through?

[TheWhiteFreak]

Excellent story, love the references.

One minor grip i have is when Starswirl is called a savant as a savant is usually mentally handicapped in some way while excelling in another. Such as an autistic person being able to play a song perfectly after hearing it once.

[BenRG]

So, Starswirl was Equestria's equivalent of Ptolomey and this Rhubarb Pi of Copernicus? I wonder what Celestia actually does? Does she control the rotation of the planet then?

[Wellwater]

Um... as far as I can tell, it's astronomically impossible for Equestria to be located on a conventional heliocentric planet. The moon and sun rise and set at the same time each day (subject to the quirks of the alicorn raising them), and at more or less the same point on the horizon, and therefore either the moon cannot orbit the planet (as this would change either the time or the location of moonrise, over the course of a month, all the way around) or the planet cannot rotate (which constrains the rising and setting to the actual orbital periods of the sun and moon around it).

The only exceptions to this are Lagrange points, which don't work for massive bodies like the moon and are highly impractical to position anyway, or a complex and bizarre dual-star system with the planet perfectly positioned between a massive and distant "moon" (actually a white dwarf or similar) and the much brighter sun, which suffers the problem of perturbations being catastrophically cumulative: any disturbances in the balance will cause the planet to drift more and more rapidly toward one or the other star.

Heliocentrism does not and cannot work in MLP. Sorry.

[SWEETOLEBOB18]

Yeah, I echo Well Water. The varying lengths of the days on Earth is due to axial tilt. No tilt and no variance -but also no seasons However, the events of the pilot & Twilight's Kingdom clearly show Celestia is doing something and is NOT just claiming credit for natural events.