A History of Science in World Cultures

Voices of Knowledge

Scott L. Montgomery, Alok Kumar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317439059
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

To understand modern science, it is essential to recognize that many of the most fundamental scientific principles are drawn from the knowledge of ancient civilizations. Taking a global yet comprehensive approach to this complex topic, A History of Science in World Cultures uses a broad range of case studies and examples to demonstrate that the scientific thought and method of the present day is deeply rooted in a pluricultural past.

Covering ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, Greece, China, Islam, and the New World, this volume discusses the scope of scientific and technological achievements in each civilization and how the knowledge it developed came to impact the European Renaissance. Themes covered include the influence these scientific cultures had upon one another, the power of writing and its technologies, visions of mathematical order in the universe and how it can be represented, and what elements of the distant scientific past we continue to depend upon today. Topics often left unexamined in histories of science are treated in fascinating detail, such as the chemistry of mummification and the Great Library in Alexandria in Egypt, jewellery and urban planning of the Indus Valley, hydraulic engineering and the compass in China, the sustainable agriculture and dental surgery of the Mayas, and algebra and optics in Islam.

This book shows that scientific thought has never been confined to any one era, culture, or geographic region. Clearly presented and highly illustrated, A History of Science in World Cultures is the perfect text for all students and others interested in the development of science throughout history.

A History of Science in World Cultures

To understand modern science, it is essential to recognize that many of the most fundamental scientific principles are drawn from the knowledge of ancient civilizations. Taking a global yet comprehensive approach to this complex topic, A History of Science in World Cultures uses a broad range of case studies and examples to demonstrate that the scientific thought and method of the present day is deeply rooted in a pluricultural past.

Covering ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, Greece, China, Islam, and the New World, this volume discusses the scope of scientific and technological achievements in each civilization and how the knowledge it developed came to impact the European Renaissance. Themes covered include the influence these scientific cultures had upon one another, the power of writing and its technologies, visions of mathematical order in the universe and how it can be represented, and what elements of the distant scientific past we continue to depend upon today. Topics often left unexamined in histories of science are treated in fascinating detail, such as the chemistry of mummification and the Great Library in Alexandria in Egypt, jewelry and urban planning of the Indus Valley, hydraulic engineering and the compass in China, the sustainable agriculture and dental surgery of the Mayans, and algebra and optics in Islam.

This book shows that scientific thought has never been confined to any one era, culture, or geographic region. Clearly presented and highly illustrated, A History of Science in World Cultures is the perfect text for all students and others interested in the development of science throughout history.

Scott L. Montgomery is an affiliate faculty member in the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington (Seattle). His publications include Does Science Need a Global Language? English and the Future of Research (2013), Science and Translation: Movements of Knowledge in Culture and Time (2001), and The Scientific Voice (1996).

Alok Kumar is professor of physics at the State University of New York, Oswego. His publications include Science in the Medieval World (1991 and 1996) and Sciences of the Ancient Hindus: Unlocking Nature in the Pursuit of Salvation (2014).

1 Cultural diversity and the scientific endeavor

DOI: 10.4324/9781315694269-1

Science knows no single country, because knowledge belongs to humanity.

Louis Pasteur

Francis Bacon, who lived from 1561 to 1626, is considered one of the founders of the Scientific Revolution and a major figure in England’s Renaissance. His famous work, Novum Organum (The New Instrument, 1620), says that “discoveries are new creations” and hold the highest place among human achievements. We must study them, Bacon said, because they have put new powers into human hands and altered the known world. We can see this

nowhere more conspicuously than in those three [discoveries] which were unknown to the ancients … namely, printing, gunpowder, and the compass. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world … such that no empire, no sect, no heavenly force seems to have exerted greater power and stimulus in human affairs.

Bacon was an extremely erudite man. Not only was he Queen Elizabeth’s Chancellor, elevated to the title of Lord Verulam, he also authored dozens of works on many subjects, including history and science. Where, then, did he think the three great inventions he mentions were made? Bacon said their origins were “obscure and inglorious.” He might well have guessed that they came from ancient Greece, for he also claimed: “The sciences we possess have almost all descended from the Greeks. For what Roman, Arabian, or later writers have added is not much or of much importance.”

Lord Verulam was much mistaken. A scholar of his own country who had lived three centuries earlier could have informed Sir Francis of his error. Roger Bacon (c. 1220–1292), a Franciscan friar, devoted much of his adult life to the study of what was then called the “new knowledge” and which included the rich legacy not just of Greece, but of Islam, India, and China brought to Europe during the preceding hundred years by translations from Arabic into Latin. Friar Bacon had been asked by Pope Clement IV to write a summary of this knowledge and how it might impact Christian theology. The result, Bacon’s Opus Majus (Greater Work), completed in 1267, is a major entry in the history of European science. If Lord Verulam had but consulted it, he would have found that, far from owing all to the Greeks, much of the science that Europe possessed came from the works of Alhazen (al-Haytham, 965–1040), Algazel (al-Ghazali, 1058–111), Avicenna (Ibn Sini, 980–1037) and Alkindus (al-Kindi, 801–873), to name but a few.

Should we forgive Sir Francis his ignorance? Bacon was a contemporary of Shakespeare, who provided many references to the greater world in his plays, particularly to Islam. “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,” says Lady Macbeth in Act V Scene 1. Behind this statement lay the fact that a good many chemical techniques of distillation and extraction essential to perfume-making had come to Europe via Islamic science. Moreover, Shakespeare was not the only poet of pre-modern Britain who knew of such things. Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400), in his Canterbury Tales, tells us of an excellent physician who is described in this way:

With us ther was a Doctour of Phisyk

In al this world ne was ther noon him lyk

To speke of phisik and surgerye, …

Wel knew he the olde Esculapius,

And Deiscorides, and eek Rufus,

Old Ypocras, Haly, and Galien,

Serapion, Razis, and Avicen

Chaucer’s doctor is a learned man but not excessively so. He is familiar with the classic texts in medicine as understood by journeyman physicians of 15th century Europe. He knows the Greek god of medicine and healing, Asclepius, as well as the four great physicians of the classical world: Hippocrates, Rufus of Ephesus, Dioscorides, and Galen. He also knows the more recent classics of later writers, the 9th century physician Serapion the Elder, of Syria, as well as Rhazes and Avicenna, Persian thinkers and physicians of the 9th and 10th centuries, respectively.

Francis Bacon, it seems, knew less than he should have. Celebrating the Greeks while ignoring the Arabs was unbecoming of a man otherwise so knowledgeable. Today, nearly four centuries later, the history of science is a mature discipline, and so we might assume an oversight like Bacon’s is no longer possible or acceptable. Among scientists and the educated public, too, a wider appreciation for the cultural diversity of pre-modern science surely exists. And yet – what if this were not the case?

In 2000, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the largest scientific organization in the world, published an interesting chart. It was a timeline of the 100 most important scientific findings in history – thus, a kind of updated version of Bacon’s three great discoveries that changed the world – to accompany an article titled “The Endless Pathways of Discovery.” Many different types of inventions, breakthroughs, and scientific ideas were included, as we would expect. But looking more closely, we find that the ghost of Lord Verulam might well have had a hand in its making. There are striking flaws to this chart that are beyond debate and that send us immediately back to the “obscure and inglorious” problem.

First, nothing before 600 B.C. is included. Anything that happened before this date is relegated to a “prescientific era.” This leaves out all of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China, for example, over the course of more than 2,000 years, whether we consider metallurgy, mummification, or mathematics. Second, by far the greatest number of advances are younger than 1600; science, therefore, is inexorably modern and sprang to life full-grown, like Athena, goddess of wisdom, from the head of Zeus. Third, and most unfortunate, there are virtually no discoveries outside of ancient Greece and Europe. This means that no civilizations beyond these borders ever contributed knowledge or innovations that are worthy (India is given one mention for having invented the “zero,” while the Hindu and Mayan “skywatchers” are also given one mention). Even Bacon’s three world-changing discoveries find no place here.

What does this tell us? That there remains an enormous gap in understanding regarding the development of scientific thought through history. Though scholars have firmly established the long, multicultural nature of science’s history, little of this has yet to penetrate beyond specialist awareness. Students in both the humanities and the sciences are only rarely exposed to it. Even history of science courses themselves tend to remain overwhelmingly focused on the modern period, i.e. Copernicus and after.

Why does this matter? Because it warps our understanding of the past and thus the present. It does this by ignoring an essential truth about science itself. Scientific work and thought have never belonged to one race, one gender, one social class. Nor have they been confined to one time period or one culture or one part of the globe. On the contrary, scientific traditions evolved in all of the world’s major civilizations from a very early period – indeed, advanced civilizations were based on such traditions from the very beginning. It turns out that the growth of science in Europe leading to the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries depended profoundly on such earlier knowledge and would not have been possible without it. In a thousand ways, modern scientific practice is irretrievably rooted in this past. Cutting away these pre-modern roots leaves a damaged view, one that risks the provincial satisfactions of a colonial eye.

It is to help correct such a state of affairs that we have written this book. Science, we would say, has always been a world effort, pursued by different peoples from different linguistic, ethnic, and religious origins, in sometimes distantly separated, at other times overlapping, parts of the world. It has advanced at different levels, often with radically different goals and inventions that nonetheless seek to address similar fundamental needs, each civilization, therefore, developing its own scientific culture.

We in modern society today are the beneficiaries of this diverse effort. How so?

Much of it has a daily presence in our lives. Consider something as basic as the seven-day week. Where did it come from? It originated with the Sumerians, who assigned each of the visible planets (including the Moon and Sun) and, therefore, planetary gods, to its own day. Had there been another world between Mars and Jupiter instead of an asteroid belt, human beings in the 21st century would be organizing their existence around a week of eight days (six days of work, two days off?). After the Sumerians came the Babylonians, who developed a base-60 arithmetic system, by which they divided each hour into 60 minutes and each minute into seconds and a circle into 360 degrees. Another simple but profound example: the symbols now used everywhere for numbers (0, 1, 2, 3 … 9), often referred to as “Arabic numerals.” In fact, these were invented in India, then adopted by Persian-speaking mathematicians who inhabited the western part of the country. Their texts, in turn, were translated into Arabic during the 8th and 9th centuries, after which the symbols became widely used in Islam and were introduced to Europe during the 12th century Renaissance, when the greater portion of science in Arabic was rendered into Latin. Not knowing their true origin, nor the complex journey they had taken, European translators attributed the numerals to their Arabic sources. This included the zero, an Indian innovation of tremendous power and importance.

Every time we employ these symbols today – whether to record an observation, calculate a physical change, or do a homework problem – we make contact with scientific cultures of the past, with mathematics of the Hindus, Persians, Arabs, and medieval Europeans. None of these cultures, in other words, lie coated in dust or frozen behind glass. They are part of the organic body of contemporary science, no less than Galileo or Darwin. The history of scientific knowledge defines a living history that the world utilizes every minute of every day.

Definitions

The character of science today

Before going further along these lines, we need to define our terms. What do we actually mean by “science?” A reasonable working definition might go like this: science is the use of evidence to construct testable explanations (hypotheses, theories) and predictions of natural phenomena, as well as the knowledge generated through this process. Such is how the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S. defines “science,” and it was no small challenge to get agreement on it. The reason such a definition is challenging comes from the vast landscape of varied work and thought that comprise science – encompassing everything from field work on Arctic caribou to the study of subatomic particles with the Large Hadron Collider. Only a broad statement could hope to include such diverse labors.

A scientific theory, on the other hand, brings together a wide range of facts, observations, and other evidence and explains how they are related and why they occur. A theory in science is not a guess or a speculation, as in common speech (“I have a theory about why he does that….”). It is an entire explanatory system, a very powerful one, assembled over time and subjected to constant re-examination and testing as new evidence comes to light. One of the fruitful aspects to such a theory is that it often reveals new forms of evidence and new interpretations of older information. It also has the ability to make certain types of predictions, always, however, with significant margins of error.

In all cases, reassessment and, when needed, revision of a theory are key: scientific theories do not stand still. This helps make clear why such static (non-evolving) ideas as creationism and intelligent design do not at all qualify as alternatives to the theory of evolution, which has continued to change since Darwin’s lifetime. Other examples of major theories include: big bang theory, plate tectonic theory, quantum theory, and the theory of relativity, all of which represent the best elucidations of their phenomena that science can produce thus far.

Scientific work today, as practiced in research institutions, has some other elements that help determine its success and credibility. Scientists, that is, are willing to:

• Share their ideas, methods, and results with other scientists.
• Offer their work up to independent testing, thus to validation or invalidation.
• Abandon or modify accepted conclusions when confronted with new and more complete or reliable evidence.

Sharing of work and findings is mainly done in two ways: publication and collaboration. Scientific journals, which now probably number more than 20,000, reach a worldwide audience due to the Internet. Collaboration, meanwhile, has more and more become the norm, as reflected in the fact that the great majority of technical papers now have multiple authors. In March 2010, the journal Physics Letters B published a paper based on research at the Large Hadron Collider that had 3,222 authors from 32 nations. This may seem extreme, yet it is only a scaled-up version of what is happening elsewhere in science – researchers from different backgrounds, different areas of expertise, different cultures also collaborating on fundamental problems.

The three elements listed above provide a basis for scien...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Table Of Contents
• A History of Science in World Cultures
• Index