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[1]Home | [2]Articles | Book Extract: A History of Science
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Mar 09, 2004
Book Extract: A History of Science Rediscovered
by [4]Anand Ramanujan
The short form of the hypothesis is this: science was born in ancient
Greece around 600 B.C. and flourished for a few hundred years, until
about 146 B.C., when the Greeks gave way to the Romans. At this time
science stopped dead in its tracks, and it remained dormant until
resurrected during the Renaissance in Europe around 1500. This is
what's known as the "Greek miracle." The hypothesis assumes that the
people who occupied India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, sub-Saharan Africa,
China, the Americas, and elsewhere prior to 600 B.C. conducted no
science. They discovered fire, then called it quits, waiting for
Thales of Miletus, Pythagoras, Democritus, and Aristotle to invent
science in the Aegean.
As amazing as the Greek miracle is the notion that for over fifteen
hundred years, from the end of the Greek period to the time of
Copernicus, no science was conducted. The same people who stood idly
by while the Greeks invented science supposedly demonstrated no
interest or skill in continuing the work of Archimedes, Euclid, or
Apollonius.
The hypothesis that science sprang ab ovo on Greek soil, then
disappeared until the Renaissance seems ridiculous when written out
succinctly. It's a relatively new theory, first fashioned in Germany
about 150 years ago, and has become subtly embedded in our educational
consciousness. The only concession made to non-European cultures is to
Islam. The story goes that the Arabs kept Greek culture, and its
science, alive through the Middle Ages. They acted as scribes,
translators, and caretakers, with, apparently, no thought of creating
their own science.
In fact, Islamic scholars admired and preserved Greek math and
science, and served as the conduit for the science of many non-Western
cultures, in addition to constructing their own impressive edifice.
Western science is what it is because it successfully built upon the
best ideas, data, and even equipment from other cultures. The
Babylonians, for example, developed the Pythagorean theorem (the sum
of the squares of the two perpendicular sides of a right triangle is
equal to the square of the hypotenuse) at least fifteen hundred years
before Pythagoras was born. The Chinese mathematician Liu Hui
calculated a value for pi (3.1416) in 200 A.D. that remained the most
accurate estimation for a thousand years. Our numerals 0 through 9
were invented in ancient India, the Gwalior numerals of A.D. 500 being
almost indistinguishable from modern Western numerals. Algebra is an
Arab word, meaning "compulsion," as in compelling the unknown x to
assume a numerical value. (One traditional translation, that algebra
means "bone setting," is colorful but incorrect.)
The Chinese were observing, reporting, and dating eclipses between
1400 and 1200 B.C. The Venus Tablets of Ammizaduga record the
positions of Venus in 1800 B.C. during the reign of the Babylonian
king. Al-Mamum, an Arabian caliph, built an observatory so his
astronomers could double-check most of the Greek astronomical
parameters, thus giving us more accurate values for precession,
inclination of the ecliptic, and the like. In 829 his quadrants and
sextants were larger than those built by Tycho Brahe in Europe more
than seven centuries later.
Twenty-four centuries before Isaac Newton, the Hindu Rig-Veda asserted
that gravitation held the universe together, though the Hindu
hypothesis was far less rigorous than Newton's. The Sanskrit-speaking
Aryans subscribed to the idea of a spherical earth in an era when the
Greeks believed in a flat one. The Indians of the fifth century A.D.
somehow calculated the age of the earth as 4.3 billion years;
scientists in nineteenth-century England were convinced it was 100
million years. (The modern estimate is 4.6 billion years.) Chinese
scholars in he fourth century A.D.- like Arabs in the thirteenth
century and the Papuans of New Guinea later on - routinely used
fossils to study the history of the planet; yet at Oxford University
in the seventeenth century some faculty members continued to teach
that fossils were "false clues sown by the devil" to deceive man.
Quantitative chemical analyses set down in the K'ao kung chi, an
eleventh-century B.C. Chinese text, are never more than 5 percent off
when compared to modern figures.
As for practical matters, Francis Bacon said that three inventions -
gunpowder, the magnetic compass, and paper and printing - marked the
beginning of the modern world. All three inventions came from China.
The Incas of the Andes were the first to vulcanize rubber, and they
discovered that quinine was an antidote for the malaria that spread
among them. The Chinese made antibiotics from soybean curd twenty-five
hundred years ago.
---------------------------
For some, the failure to acknowledge the successes of non-Western
cultures derives not just from ignorance but from a conspiracy. Martin
Bernal, a professor of government studies at Cornell University, is
the author of Black Athena, a series of books that challenges our
Greek-rooted view of history. Bernal believes that the roots of Greek
civilization are to be found in Egypt and, to a lesser extent, in the
Levant -- the Near East of the Phoenicians and the Canaanites. Using
linguistic analysis, he determined that 20 to 25 percent of the Greek
vocabulary derived from the Egyptian. The roots of European
civilization are Afro-Asiatic. The Greeks knew this and wrote about
it, telling of Egyptian colonies in Greece during the Bronze and even
the Iron Ages. The great Greek wise men, including Pythagoras,
Democritus, and even Plato, traveled to Egypt and brought back
Egyptian ideas and knowledge. (We have Democritus's own writings to
acknowledge that his math skills were honed in the shadow of the
pyramids.) The Greeks acknowledged their debt to Egypt. This "ancient
model" held that the Greek culture had arisen as the result of
colonization, in around 1500 B.C., by Egyptians and Phoenicians, and
that the Greeks continued to borrow heavily from Near Eastern
cultures. It was the conventional wisdom among Greeks in the classical
and Hellenistic ages. This ancient model, writes Bernal, was also
embraced by Europeans from the Renaissance through the nineteenth
century. The Europeans, says Bernal, were enamored of Egypt.
For several centuries, Europe believed that Egypt was the cradle of
civilization. This began to change in the eighteenth century when
Christian apologists worried about Egyptian pantheism, and ideas of
racial purity began taking hold among Locke, Hume, and other English
thinkers. This led to the "Aryan model" in the first half of the
nineteenth century. This view denied the existence of Egyptian
settlements. Later, as anti-Semitism grew during the late nineteenth
century, proponents of the Aryan model also denied Phoenician cultural
influences.
The Aryan model was refined throughout the years to establish ancient
Greece as distinctly European. Accordingly, there had been an invasion
from the north --unreported in ancient tradition -- that had
overwhelmed the local Aegean or pre-Hellenic culture. Thus, Greek
civilization was now seen as the result of the mixture of the
Indo-European-speaking Hellenes and their indigenous subjects. It is
this Aryan model that most of us were taught during the twentieth
century. Bernal advocates a return to a modified ancient model, which
is supported by the historian Herodotus and other ancient Greeks.
---------------------------
In its January 14, 2000, issue, on the occasion of the beginning of
the third millennium, Science magazine, in conjunction with the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), published
a time line, called "Pathways of Discovery," that detailed ninety-six
of the most important scientific achievements in recorded history. The
Science time line included some sophisticated choices that many
educators would have missed: William Ferrel's 1856 work on ocean winds
and currents, the 1838-39 cell theory of Matthias Schleiden and
Theodor Schwann, and William Gilberts 1600 theory that the earth
behaves like a huge magnet.
Of those ninety-six achievements, only two were attributed to
non-white, non-Western scientists: the invention of zero in India in
the early centuries of the Common Era and the astronomical
observations of Maya and Hindus in A.D. 1000. Even these two
accomplishments were muted by the editors of Science. The Indians were
given credit only for creating the "symbol for zero," rather than the
concept itself. The Mayan and Hindu "skywatchers" (the word astronomer
was not used) made their observations, according to the journal, for
"agricultural and religious purposes" only.
Most interesting is the first entry in the time line: "Prior to 600
B.C., Prescientific Era." Science proclaimed that during this time,
before the sixth-century B.C. pre-Socratic philosophers, "Phenomena
[were] explained within contexts of magic, religion, and experience."
Science thus ignored more than two millennia of history, during which
time the Babylonians invented the abacus and algebra, the Sumerians
recorded the phases of Venus, the Indians proposed an atomic theory,
the Chinese invented quantitative chemical analysis, and the Egyptians
built pyramids. In addition, Science gave Johannes Gutenberg credit
for the printing press in 1454, though it was invented at least two
centuries earlier by the Chinese and Koreans. An essential precursor
to the printing press is paper, which was invented in China and did
not reach Europe until the 1300s. Science cited Francis Bacon's work
as one of its ninety-six achievements, yet ignored his opinion that
inventions from China created the modern world.
Pre-Columbian achievements in the New World have long eluded
traditionalists. The Maya invented zero about the same time as the
Indians, and practiced a math and astronomy far beyond that of
medieval Europe. Native Americans built pyramids and other structures
in the American Midwest larger than anything then in Europe.
---------------------------
Many traditional Western historians believe that little original
science was conducted after the collapse of the Greek civilization;
that the Arabs copied the work of Euclid, Ptolemy, Apollonius, et al.;
and that eventually Europe recouped its scientific heritage from the
Islamic world. During the Middle Ages, Arab scholars sought out Greek
manuscripts and set up centers of learning and translation at
Jund-i-Shapur in Persia and Baghdad in Iraq. Western historians don't
often like to admit that these same scholars also sought manuscripts
from China and India, and created their own science.
Scholarship moved to Cairo and then to Cordoba and Toledo in Spain as
the Muslim empire expanded into Europe. When the Christians recaptured
Toledo in the twelfth century, European scholars descended upon the
documents. They were interested in all Arabic documents-- translations
of Greek works but also original Arabic writings and Arabic
translations of other cultures' manuscripts. Much of the scientific
knowledge of the ancient world - Greece as well as Babylonia, Egypt,
India, and China - was tunneled to the West through Spain. George
Saliba has found that there was an intense traffic in Arabic
manuscripts between Damascus and Padua during the early 1500s, and
more and more scientific documents, written in Arabic, are being
rediscovered in European libraries. Saliba has documented that many
European scholars in the Renaissance were literate in Arabic. They
read the Islamic papers and shared the information with their less
literate colleagues.
One example is Copernicus, who studied at Padua. Saliba points out
that if Copernicus did borrow from Islamic astronomers - and the jury
is still out - he had good reason not to acknowledge his intellectual
debt. It would have been impolitic, says Saliba, to mention Islamic
science when the Ottoman Empire was at the door of Europe. Another
European scholar who studied at Padua was William Harvey, who
established the geometry of the human circulatory system in 1629,
an-other landmark in science according to the AAAS's Science time
line. A 1241 Arab document, notes Saliba, lays out the same geometry,
including the crucial assertion that the blood must first travel
through the lungs before passing through the heart, contrary to the
opinion of the ancient Greek physician Galen and past medical
scholarship.
---------------------------
In 1915, about the time, according to Otto Neugebauer, that the
Germans were rewriting their encyclopedias to edit out the Phoenicians
from Greek history, the English science historian G. R. Kaye
admonished "western investigators in the history of knowledge" to look
for "traces of Greek influence" because the "achievements of the
Greeks" form "the most wonderful chapters in the history of
civilization." Our pop science historians--Bronowski, Daniel Boorstin,
Carl Sagan, et al.--have certainly been faithful to that directive.
Western historians have also criticized past non-Western scientists,
such as the Maya and Egyptians, for their strange religious beliefs,
implying that acute religiosity disqualifies the work of a scientist.
Then again, when Pythagoras finally proved "his" theorem, he offered a
hundred oxen to the Muses in thanks.
Science is science. It can be practical or impractical. The Danish
physicist Niels Bohr owned a cabin retreat, to which he invited his
scientist friends for long intense discussions about the meaning of
quantum physics. Over the door of the cabin was hung a horseshoe on a
nail.
His guests often viewed this with a roll of the eyes. Finally one
screwed up the courage to say, "Come on now, Niels. You don't believe
in this nonsense, do you?" .
According to legend, Bohr replied, "That's the beauty of it. It works
whether I believe in it or not," For our purposes, science embraces
those facts about the physical world that work . . . whether we
believe in them or not.
Note: The above article is an excerpt from "Lost Discoveries: The
Ancient Roots of Modern Science - from the Babylonians to the Maya" by
Dick Teresi. Simon & Shuster, 2002.

Copyright © 2004, Swaveda

References

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