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Science International (Beyond the West)
The ups and downs of trans-cultural science
Varadaraja V. Raman
Science is one of the finest expressions of the human spirit. It is the effort of the human mind to understand and interpret the world of experience, which includes countless physical entities and processes, a plethora of living organisms and minds that engender thoughts. Our conscious life is built around a reality that is formed by our faculties of perception. We may refer collectively to everything we become aware of through our senses as perceived reality. Science is concerned with all the components of perceived reality.
Human beings are complex biological entities. They have several dimensions: physical, physiological, psychological, emotional, spiritual and rational. Every one of these is important for a full and sane life. They cannot be separated into watertight compartments. But in every activity one dimension or other dominates. For example, in the context of religion the spiritual dimension dominates; in the context of love, the emotional and psychological dimensions dominate. In the context of science, the logical and rational dimensions dominate. What is interesting is that the scientific and psychological dimensions can be considered from religious perspectives; the religious and scientific dimensions can be considered from psychological perspectives; and the religious and psychological dimensions can be analysed from scientific perspectives.
There are a good many interesting and important ways of reacting to perceived reality. Science is one of these. We may admire the splendour in perceived reality, enjoy its aesthetic dimensions, reflect on its variety, compose poems on its elements and so on. Science tries to understand and explain every aspect of perceived reality. It formulates this understanding in coherent, consistent and rational frameworks. The scientific formulation of an aspect of perceived reality can be shared by all who are committed to the enterprise of science.
Science – an ancient phenomenon
Wonderment at the world and efforts to understand and explain it are as ancient as human consciousness, more ancient perhaps than music, dance and religion. In other words, science has been in human cultures since time immemorial. It begins with wonderment and is nurtured by questions. The first humans who were intrigued by rainfall and rainbow, who stared at the sky and were intrigued by the stars and who asked themselves why fire is hot and water cold were among the first scientists of the world.
Since the dawn of consciousness, countless questions have perplexed the human mind about the phenomenal world and the human condition. How does the sun rise and set? What causes thunder and lightning? What happens to humans after they die? And many more. Every question that arises in the human mind is also answered by a human mind. In very broad terms, all the answers to questions about perceived reality constitute humanity’s collective scientific heritage.
How those answers are arrived at is as important as the questions themselves. The questions form only a part – albeit an important part – of science. What distinguishes ancient from modern science is not just the final results of the quest, which are considerable, but in how one arrives at them. Associated with this are criteria for accepting or rejecting a proclaimed proposition by the scientific community (see Reichenbach 1961).
One often describes as ancient science most of the answers to questions relating to natural phenomena that were offered prior to the sixteenth century. But at a deeper level, the terms ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ are not to be taken in chronological terms. Irrespective of eras and centuries, these terms must emphasize that much of the science of previous centuries and civilizations differed markedly from modern science in their methodology and criteria for truth value. Moreover, the sciences of the ancient world were largely local in their practice and prevalence. They were generally anchored to specific cultures, religions and revered books. In ancient science, there were not many occasions for challenging authorities. In this sense, both ancient and modern sciences are very much alive even today (Silver 1998).
Modern science and ancient science are fundamentally different because of the different factors in their construction. Astrology, numerology, alchemy and omen mongering – all still prevalent worldwide – are part of ancient science. Even while underscoring the differences, it is appropriate to honour the nuggets of wisdom enshrined in ancient thoughts and pay homage to the considerable useful and valid knowledge in science, especially in astronomy and mathematics, which old cultures acquired and accumulated. In this context, one must acknowledge the scientific legacy of thinkers in China and India, Babylonia and Egypt, Greece and Rome and other parts of the world (see Raman 1999). Recognizing the contributions of distant generations of humanity’s heritage is as much being a fully civilized and awakened human as respecting cultures not one’s own.
Revolutions in history and the scientific revolution
History is continuity in a chain with minor or momentous turns now and again. These inject the normal steady flow of events with abrupt jerks of long-lasting consequences. Causes and effects may be observably interconnected, but sometimes they can be too subtle and silent, ignited by individuals, events or ideas. Revolutions are events that change the course of history in dramatic ways almost irreversibly.
Revolutions in history have been of three kinds thus far. To the first kind belong those that were initiated by charismatic individuals who founded great religious traditions. Men like Abraham, Buddha, Mahavira, Confucius, Vedic rishis, Zoroaster, Jesus Christ, Prophet Mohammad, Guru Nanak, Martin Luther and Baha’u’llah are the major instances of those who laid unexpected highways on the roadmap of recorded history. There must have been others of whom we know but little.
The second type of revolution is not associated with any historical figure. Their long-range impacts have generally been trans-cultural and global rather than on only particular peoples. Such were the agricultural revolution, the invention of writing and the practice of numeration (see Bernal 1983a).
The third kind of revolution is a combination of the two: they are impersonal in not having been initiated by one specific individual and also personal in that they result from the thoughts and actions of individuals. The scientific revolution which refers to the emergence of modern science in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries belongs to this category, as do the industrial revolution and the computer revolution (see Bernal 1983b).
What we find in these instances is that the zigzag course of history can be drastically redirected now and again by the appearance of individuals whose insights and doings lay new paths and provinces in the web of human affairs. In the case of modern science, Copernicus and Kepler, Galileo and Newton and quite a few others in seventeenth-century Europe were important factors in its blossoming. But it must also be recalled that the recovered knowledge about Ptolemy, Hipparchus, Archimedes, Avicenna, Mahavira and other ancient giants gave a kick-start to the scientific revolution as much as the new and utterly unexpected discoveries of the new pioneers. No less importantly, the invention of the printing press, the construction of new instruments and the initiation of scientific academies played indispensable roles in the genesis of the scientific revolution. These latter factors explain the swift progress of modern science in what White-head called the century of genius (see Whitehead 1948, chapter 3).
What is significant about the scientific revolution is not so much who and what caused this powerful outburst, but the resulting series of discoveries and possibilities that had never before been experienced or visualized by the human mind. These came about not so much because the revolution started with the overthrow of geo-centricity, but because it included tools used for collecting, recording and measuring information about the world and phenomena. Prior to the seventeenth century, no human eye had peered through a telescope and noticed Jovian satellites, nor peeped through the lenses of a microscope and uncovered the existence of micro-organisms one had never even imagined before. It began to define new quantities such as air pressure and temperature, which would serve as fruitful parameters for reckoning the world, and devised ever more precise instruments for measuring them. These factors were necessary, as the rediscovery and transmission of ancient thoughts through translations and new commentaries were not sufficient for igniting modern science.
Of equal significance was the insight that the laws of nature could be expressed in the language of mathematics. Galileo’s terse assertion that the laws of nature are inscribed in the language of mathematics is more than a cute quote. It is a nugget of profound insight, summarizing in a phrase the project for the coming centuries. The mathematization of nature was an enormously significant step in the elaboration of modern science, affirming as it does the still-to-be fully appreciated idea that science, like mathematics, transcends local cultures and traditions and does not derive from the sacred books of any religion, major or minor (see Schiffer 1984).
There had been considerable progress in arithmetic and geometry, in algebra and trigonometry in earlier centuries, many of them of everlasting value and interest. The use of mathematics for determining the heights of mountains or estimating the distances of objects was well known to the ancients. But mathematics for describing dynamic motion and processes, and thence to predict their evolution, emerged from the calculus. This extraordinarily fecund and powerful branch of mathematics, from its incipient format and in its many sophisticated later expansions, has been serving physics and other sciences that only the initiated can fully understand and experience. Likewise, casting what seems like pure whims of chance (as in the throw of a die) into calculable modes opened up ways of estimating what came to be called the probabilities of events yet to transpire. This inaugurated techniques that are drastic departures from astrological predictions, omen foresight and prophetic utterances, which were the only modes of talking about the future in times past.
The dynamic and productive link between mathematics and the laws of nature which came about in the seventeenth century is essential and enormously powerful for describing natural phenomena in revealing and predictable modes.
On the emergence of modern science
Scholars have speculated on why modern science emerged in Western Europe and not elsewhere. Some have opined that Christianity in one form or other was responsible for the emergence of science. Thus, for example, Stanley Jaki, a highly respected scholar, has argued that the civilizations of Greece, China, India and Islam, great as they are, failed to usher in modern science because of their erroneous notions of God. He goes on to say that modern science evolved in the West because it had accepted Christ as the only begotten Son of God (Jaki, 2000). It is unclear why it took 1,500 years after Christ for science to be born and in a region quite distant from where people first embraced Christianity, and not even in Eastern Christendom.
There are at least two reasons why this claim becomes seriously questionable. The first is that Christianity had been in vogue for more than a millennium before the scientific revolution occurred. One might wonder why it had to wait for those many centuries before Copernicus thought of his treatise, Galileo directed a telescope skyward or Newton uncovered the laws of motion. None of these and others which stirred up the new turn in history had anything to do with the Testaments, Old or New.
Second, Christianity was well and popular in many regions beyond Italy, Germany, France and England, where the first seeds of modern science began to sprout. The Christian faith was widespread in Byzantium, Greece, Russia, the Middle East and elsewhere where nothing of the sort came to pass. Clearly, with due respect to the nobler elements of Christianity, it is difficult to argue that it was among the causes for the birth of science in the Western world. Indeed, given the constraining forces of the Roman Catholic Church and Martin Luther on Copernicus and Galileo, the wonder is that modern science arose in spite of Christianity as an institution directing minds and beliefs. Luther said of Copernicus, ‘This fool wishes to reverse the entire scheme of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth.’ And Calvin asked rhetorically, ‘Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?’ (Durant 1957: 858). The opposition of Martin Luther and John Calvin to the Copernican idea is not as widely known as that of the Roman Catholic Church. What also diminishes Jaki’s argument is the fact that in this world of global economy and parochial scholarship thinkers and historians from practically every major religion have expounded on the importance, relevance and uniqueness of their respective tradition for modern science.
It should be noted in this context that though there are irresolvable incompatibilities between many scientific results and the received wisdom of most religions regarding natural phenomena, modern scholarship suggests it would be simplistic to maintain that science and religion have always been at loggerheads with each other (see Numbers 2009).
Another idea to explain the rise of modern science is that ships crossing the Atlantic to fetch booties from the New World needed better equipment and geographical knowledge; clearer coordinates using stellar positions; and other facts, figures and concepts in their explorations and that these were furnished by systematic probing of the phenomenal world. In a fascinating study, Larrie D. Ferreiro shows how the scientific revolution and naval architecture were closely intertwined (see Ferreiro 2007).
But the printing press was perhaps the most powerful invention that served the cause of science (see Eisenstein 1997). By reproducing many copies of scientific literature and books, it helped spread the good word from Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Huygens and Newton to people far and wide. Every new idea and insight is like the seed of a sturdy tree. When it is sown far and wide, not only is knowledge spread, but it can also blossom in a hundred different ways, nurtured and nourished in a hundred different modes, opening up the possibility for building more on it. Gutenberg’s invention was not unlike the role that social media is playing in our own times in the political context.
The scientific academies and societies which were established in the seventeenth century gave an enormous boost to science. An expressed goal of the Académie des Sciences (1631) was “to work for the perfection of the sciences and the arts and to seek generally for all that can be of use or convenience to the human race,” and “to disabuse the world of all those common errors that have long passed for truth” (Smith 1930: 170). These words are very important. They are the equivalent in the modern world of the declarations of the ancient prophets who were to disabuse the world of the common errors about God that had long passed for truth. However, this disabusing was not to be done through prayer or from the preaching of messengers from God or His spokespersons, but through the tireless and concerted efforts of hundreds and thousands of disinterested inquirers all over the world. Membership was international; even positions of importance were offered to outsiders, as in the Académie des Sciences. The international spirit was expressed in a letter of Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society, which states, ‘I hope that in time all nations… will embrace each other as dear comrades, and will join forces, both intellectual and material, to banish ignorance and to make true and useful philosophy (science) regnant’ (Smith 1930: 149). It was because of such a world view and the work inspired by this that in the centuries that followed the spirit and message of science spread beyond the borders of particular countries. Indeed, scientific societies published the works of people who did their investigations in different countries.
Other theories to account for the emergence of modern science include the rise of medieval universities, the Puritan ethic which was opposed to Catholicism and was in favour of freedom of thought and first-hand experience (see Hill 1965). Yet another theory credits the rise of capitalism with the blossoming of modern science. Clearly, the rise of modern science is quite a complex phenomenon.
Hugh Kearney pointed out that one can detect three important strands in the genesis of modern science which may be traced to the ancient Greeks. These are the organismic model going back to Aristotle, the magical mystery model originating from Pythagoras and the mechanistic model which began with Archimedes. All these intermingle in modern science (see Kearney 1971). What is to be noted here is that there have been parallel insights in other cultures. In particular, in classical Hindu thinking too there was an organismic way of considering the world, a magical one and a mechanistic mode. In other words, undercurrents of certain world views have continued over the ages, reflecting, as it were, the simplistic aphorism...
