Knowledge as a stochastic process

Are civilizations gaining of knowledge a stochastic process? The "standard" textbook approach is that our knowledge and science basically more or less have been growing linearly through time.

Looking at the history it looks more like our knowledge at best is a stochastic process with strong(?) positive drift and some big knowledge crashes on the way.

And we only have good knowledge about recent history. When ancient civilizations went under we also to some degree can expect a lot of knowledge went lost, plenty of evidence of this....

Luckily ancient civilizations wrote some of their knowledge down in stone. Today all is paper based and computer disks. If we should get a long period not re-printing our knowledge then most of it would go lost in a few hundred years...

I suggested to my publisher to print my next book in stone, but they refused to listen to me ;-) But at least I presued them to use some good paper quality....My forthcoming book: "Derivatives: Models on Models" is now in for copy editing... a lot of people have asked me about why the title: Models on Models, here are a few reasons for this title:

1. Many of our current moldels are based on ancient ignored and forgotten models.

2. Interview with 16 top modelers from Wall Street and academia...about their view on derivatives and financial models.

3. How we often ignore hidden asumptions in the model behind our model

4. and of course Models on Models (whatever that is, time will show)

The book was much more work than expected (as every book), so will not be out before late this fall October to November.. Sorry will only be in paper edition, no stone edition...but a few of the pages was originally written on material guaranteed to last at least 500 years (canavas). but also this material not used in print edition.