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Science Since Babylon: Difference between revisions
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== 1. The Peculiarity of a Scientific Civilization == | == 1. The Peculiarity of a Scientific Civilization == | ||
===Summary=== | ===Summary=== | ||
Science is a cornerstone of the modern (western) world. | |||
* “We cannot construct a respectable history of Europe or a tolerable survey of western civilization without it. It is going to be as important to us for the understanding of ourselves as Graeco-Roman antiquity was for Europe during a period of over a thousand years”. | |||
To understand this importance, Price is going to look back through history highlighting pivotal moment, moment where people had to change the way they thought. | |||
Just because a society has developed components of science, even if to a high level, it does not make it scientific. | |||
* The background knowledge and understanding of the scientific method must be present. | |||
* “As evidence may be cited the Mayan calendar, a maze of arithmetical juggling which permeated an entire culture without making it “scientific.”” | |||
“It is a delicately subtle historical error to carry back too rigorously the compartmentalization of science before the sixteenth century, when learning was much more a single realm and even the genius was a polymath.” | |||
The Almagest, an astronomy book, provides a direct line between the science of the Hellenistic period Greeks and the Scientific revolution through Copernicuss important to the endeavour of this chapter | |||
* “It is the only branch of the sciences that survived virtually intact when the Roman Empire collapsed and Greek higher mathematics was largely lost.” | |||
* It “constitutes an intellectual plateau in our culture—a high plateau present in our civilization but not in any of the others.” | |||
* “Relative to its times, the Almagest must have seemed as formidable and as specialized as Einstein’s papers on relativity do to us.” | |||
* However, It is “no guarantee that this is the local oddity that has given us modem science.” | |||
** “If the Almagest is seen to develop by steady growth and accretion, spiced with flashes of inspiration, the history is similar to that proceeding from Newton to Einstein and is reasonably normal.” | |||
** “If, on the other hand, we can show the presence of some intrinsic peculiarity, some grand pivotal point, we may be sure that this is the keystone of our argument.” | |||
** The concepts on their own are not enough. The Chinese had them | |||
A peculiar problem is it that “one successful textbook to extinguish automatically and (in those times) eradicate nearly all traces of what had gone before.” | |||
- It is widely assumed (hoped even) that whatever came before was indeed inferior in every way. | |||
- This hope was entirely misplaces, as in 1881 a great amount of Babylonian mathematics and astronomy was discovered. | |||
Babylonian mathematical astronomy was equal in competency to that of the Greeks, “but vastly different in content and mode of operation.” | |||
* “At the kernel of all Babylonian mathematics and astronomy there was a tremendous facility with calculations involving long numbers and arduous operations to that point of tedium which sends any modem scientist scuttling for his slide rule and computing machine.” | |||
The Babylonians and the Greeks approached math in '''completely''' different ways: | |||
* “It is one of the greatest conjuring tricks of history that these two contemporary items of sophistication [Greek and Babylonian math] are as different from each other as chalk from cheese. Spectacularly, where one has deep knowledge, the other has deeper ignorance, so that they discuss precisely the same basic facts in manners so complementary that there is scarcely a meeting ground between them.” | |||
* "Although these were concerned with number, and at times more than trivial, they were devoid of any difficult computation or any knowledge of the handling of general numbers far beyond ten. '''One need only examine the attitudes of each civilization toward the square root of two. The Greeks proved it was irrational; the Babylonians computed it to high accuracy.'''” | |||
The Babylonians and the Greek societies represent two completely different ways of approaching the world, two perfectly interconnecting pieces: | |||
* “The Greeks had a fine pictorial concept of the celestial motions, but only a rough-and-ready agreement with anything that might be measured quantitatively rather than noted qualitatively.” | |||
* “The Babylonians had all the constants and the means of tying theory to detailed numerical observations, but they had no pictorial concept that would make their system more than a string of numbers.” | |||
* Price is surprised that more interest has not been taken into their differences. They do not stop at math: “Think, for example, of the Mayan, Hindu, and Babylonian art works with their clutter of content-laden symbolism designed to be read sequentially and analytically, and compare it with the clean visual and intuitive lines of the Parthenon!” | |||
** “It is more than a curiosity that of two great coeval cultures the one contained arithmetical geniuses who were geometrical dullards and the other had precisely opposite members. Are these perhaps biological extremes…?” | |||
*** “The left hemisphere … seems to be “Babylonian,” the right hemisphere … “Greek”.” | |||
Ancient China was isolated from both Babylon and Greece. Despite this, they came up with both geometry and arithmetic skills. And yet, “is it not a mystery that, having both essential components of Hellenistic astronomy, they came nowhere near developing a mathematical synthesis, like the Almagest, that would have produced, in the fulness of time, a Chinese Kepler, Chinese Newton, and Chinese Einstein?” | |||
Price argues (and quotes Einstein, mention of a Chinese Einstein prompts me to cite here the text of a letter by the Western Einstein" ) that China’s course is the norm; by creating what we know as science, western culture is the strange anomaly. | |||
** “Dear Sir, Development of Western Science is based on two great achievements, the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationship by systematic experiment (Renaissance). In my opinion one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.” — Albert | |||
During the centuries after Alexander the Great, math (which could only have come from Babylon) slowly enters the Greek math and astronomy. | |||
* “We can see only that it must have been supremely exciting to grapple with the end results of a science as alien to one’s own as the Martians’ but concerned with, and perhaps slightly more successful in treating, the same problems.” | |||
This sudden merging of Greek and Babylonian math, targeting the same problem but from different angles, is one of the pivotal moments Price talks about. | |||
* He hypothesizes that this merger of two parts from two entirely separate and different entities is important. He argues it’s why the Chinese were not similarly impacted given that they had all of the components needed. | |||
* If cross-fertilization was so important to the scientific revolution in the western world, then we should afraid of the ever increasing siloing of scientists. | |||
* “Historically speaking, many of these have been due more to happy accident than to deliberate planning. Indeed, this is the strongest argument for the unpredictability of research and against the otherwise natural inclination of a society to plan the general direction of its fundamental researches.” | |||
“It has become usual to refer to the postponed scientific revolution in chemistry and the still more delayed freeing of the life sciences from their primitive states, and then to seek reasons for the tardiness of these changes. Once more this conventional attack may be fruitlessly seeking an explanation for what was, after all, the normal way of growth. Physics was forced early by the success of its neighbour subject astronomy, and when chemistry and biology develop, it seems very much as if the motivating forces are not internal but rather a pressure from the successes of physics and later chemistry.” | |||
“Philosophers of science generally consider only one possibility: science, as it is known to us, has an essential mathematical backbone.” | |||
* Nowadays anything that does not have a mathematical backbone is scoffed at, e.g. the usual verbal scare quotes around “social science”. | |||
“Since the historical origin of that backbone seems such a remarkable caprice of fate, one may wonder whether science would have been at all possible and, if so, what form it might have taken if a situation had existed in China which caused the chemical and biological sciences to make great advances before astronomy and physics.” | |||
Price argues that the consistently poor results of certain children with mathematics is so long standing that it cannot be merely “bad teaching”. | |||
* He hypothesizes that some children think like the Greek and some like the Babylonians. | |||
* We would not expect the Babylonians to prove √2 was irrational, likewise we should not expect that the “Babylonian” children would do well with Greek-style math, or vice versa. | |||
===Further Reading=== | ===Further Reading=== | ||