Time Travel and Technology questions

[pentadragon]

The Time Period: November 27, 1095/ April 8, 2005
The Location: Vatican City
The Research:  I've done some basic research, but am having trouble finding sources to fit my needs. I've tried some Google searches like, "Modern tech in ancient world", "reverse engineering", but I am having difficulties thinking of a phrase that will get me the results

Comments

[mad_maudlin]

Something to think about: reverse-engineering not only requires the materials, but the technology to process those materials correctly. Take firearms as an example: you won't be able to just walk into any medieval forge and create a duplicate of a modern handgun, because the quality of the metal won't be as high--load it with a modern bullet and it's more likely to explode in your hand than fire correctly. (This is disregarding the difficulty of producing the small moving parts like the trigger, firing pin, etc as well). Computers and cell phones? You wouldn't have access to the right material (rare-earth metals and special alloys) or the means of processing them. Reverse-engineering a gasoline car would be pointless without access to petroleum-based fuels, etc.

You also have to ask, are the people trying to reverse engineer this stuff going to understand why it does what it does? Because if they don't, the best they're ever going to do is produce exact duplicates of what they've already seen. In the first few years, there probably won't be much visible technological progress, but there will be an awful lot of theoretical development as people work out the general underlying principles, sometimes centuries ahead of schedule. (If they can. For instance, how much can you work out from a cell phone that can't connect to a network, or a computer with a dead battery? Especially given that empiricism wasn't really in style during your target time period.)

A major variable will be: who is transported back with the Vatican? Are there engineers, mechanics, science teachers, etc? That will be a HUGE boon in terms of shortcutting the original historical development of different technologies. It doesn't take much more than high school chemistry to construct a simple battery, after all, but that suddenly opens up a whole universe of electricity that would be completely unknown to 1095. This assumes the people involve are willing and able to communicate with the people of the time period, and that they're being taken seriously.