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The Fifth Revolution
Robert G. Watts
1.1 Introduction
Certainly, one of the most important events in the long history of mankind’s
development was the mastery of re. In his book, The Next Million Years, Charles
Galton Darwin (1953) suggests that the history of humankind has seen four
occasions when man took a step forward that was essentially irreversible, in
the sense that the progress afforded was never lost. He refers to these as four
revolutions. The rst of these was the discovery of re. It was, of course, not
the discovery of re, but its mastery, that was so important. The use of re for
cooking and warmth, and eventually for the c