In Search of Chinese Science (2009) | Hacker News Reader

In Search of Chinese Science (2009)

thenewatlantis.com

Most of what we understand as science has occurred within the last couple hundred years which is is a tiny interval out of the period that Homo Sapiens alone has been on the planet. Asking why science happened mostly over here, but not over there, seems pointlessly akin to asking, why did the column of effervescence start in this spot on the champagne glass, and not this other spot over here.

> Asking why science happened mostly over here, but not over there, seems pointlessly akin to asking, why did the column of effervescence start in this spot on the champagne glass, and not this other spot over here.

But that question is both interesting and significant. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleation for the phenomenon, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheating for an immediate consequence. In the other direction, and with less physically threatening consequences, we get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercooling

Needham's Science and Civilization in China volumes are a fascinating resource. Particularly interesting, and somewhat inexplicable, is that China was poised on the verge of an industrial revolution during the Song dynasty, in the 12th century. Steel production reached levels not surpassed until the English and American mills ramped up in the 19th century. The Grand Canal was possibly the greatest transportation project ever completed, before the invention of railroads. The banking system used by Song merchants may have been the most complex before the modern era.

Much of this progress was destroyed by the combination of the Mongol conquest and the subsequent wave of rebellions that unseated them and brought about the Ming dynasty. It's possibly the most destructive series of wars in history.

Very interesting piece (and serendipitous for me since I was reading The Man Who Loved China [very well-written bio, btw]).

"Thus Joseph Needham acquired what administrators at lonely outposts in the British Empire used to call a 'sleeping dictionary.' ”

It has often been commented that one of the fastest ways to learn a new language is to have a partner bilingual (or even better, monolingual) in that language; however, I had never heard of this interesting term before!

As for Needham's Question: Many, many pages have been written on this topic. As is briefly touched upon in the article the problem of moving from empirical to "modern" science is not unique to China. Similar comments have been made made on how the Babylonian math (that survives) is a list of algorithms to (sometimes surprisingly complicated) mathematical problem instances and not an attempt at general theory, cf. to be compared to the Greek advancements in geometry.

As it's stressed in the article cultural factors are often cited as the cause. Sayings similar to the Japanese proverb "A nail that sticks out will be hammered" (http://www.quora.com/What-do-you-think-about-the-Japanese-pr...) are commonly used in Middle East and Asia. There's a pervasive culture of not standing out both because it's found to be tasteless but also because it may bring danger to oneself (and to the family).

And it's not a question about geographical location, i.e being in the East, either, as is demonstrated by the examples of prominent outlier ports given in the article:

"Wesson put forward the late Roman and Byzantine empires as instances. He calls the latter “exceptionally uncreative,” and points out that the Byzantine trading port of Galata, controlled by the Genoese, was by the end of the fourteenth century producing seven times as much revenue as Constantinople, the imperial capital. The parallel with Chinese treaty ports like Hong Kong is hard to miss."

However, if this is the most satisfactory answer then we have the updated Needham Question: Why did such a culture develop in these societies?

The creation of science depended on a large number of random factors, from Judeic monotheism (or something like it) to the disasters of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and even (plausibly) the English Civil War and its aftermath. Those random accidents--including the founding of universities in the late Middle Ages--created a set of conditions where people with the brains to create science were given access to institutions that let them think and investigate at the same time when they had both the social freedom and the technological capacity to publish their work, and the freedom to engage in institutional innovation to create things like the Royal Society, whose founding should be considered the final act in the birth of modern science: once it existed, it would be extremely hard not to get something like science going.

So on this view, the reason why science happened here and not there was the same reason why hominids with the capacity for general, tool-using, representational intelligence and language happened in Africa and not the Americas: such developments depend on a confluence of multiple unlikely factors and as such are very unlikely to happen at all, much less multiple times. If science hadn't been created in Western Europe in the 1600's it might never have happened. It only looks inevitable because it did.

"Why did such a culture develop in these societies?"

'Guns, Germs and Steel' by Jared Diamond is probably the best attempt at answering that that I have read. His version of the Needham Question was put to him by a member of the John Frum cargo cult, and it is basically "How did your people end up with all the cargo?".

The book "Objectivity [0]" has many clues related to this topic. The history of science is closely tied with the history of how our sense of objectivity has been honed and culminated. Today, we take objectivity for granted, and the subject-object distinction is baked into English, also the Lingua franca of science.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Objectivity-Lorraine-J-Daston/dp/18909...

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