How did all this science get here?
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[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31359031#p31359031:gh9ux05q said:
I liked Burke's shows, including Connections. He's a gifted presenter, and has solid foundations in the history of science. I guess he's still producing shows, but they haven't made it to the US much, if at all, which is a shame. I wish BBC America would pick some up.
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[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31358707#p31358707:rtkpss6j said:
In my formal education, we mainly covered Western History of Science. Do any of you know of any book that also covers non-European contributions to the development of science?
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To put this in perspective, the "Christian" theology of the time was also against any Christian that disagreed with the Catholic Church. For example, they strangled and burnt William Tyndale who helped translate the Bible into English.
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Mechanical clocks definitely make an appearance in this book. According to Wootton, their introduction into Europe helped ease the way for the sense that Universe goes about its business like a clock, obeying certain rules, and not requiring constant intervention.
The Moors don't in particular make an appearance. Islamic culture in general does, as a source of classical works, either through translation or when the fall of Constantinople led to lots of other texts being brought to Europe. Wootton also spends a tiny bit of text pondering the fact that Islamic culture produced a few people who engaged in something like science quite early, but again, nothing much came of it.
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Actually the Ionian Greek philosophers got the ball rolling in the 5 th century b.c.e. The Ionians banished the gods a demons and attempted to explain nature in terms of principles, laws and primordial substances (the classical 4 elements air, earth, water and fire). It was not quantitative science as we know it, but it was the first attempt to rid our understanding of nature by casting out gods, ghosts, demons and spirits.
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I have recently undertaken the study of Economics. It is a social science, i.e., after a hard day trying to seduce my female students (okay, practically anyone who'll bite) I retire to The Club and discuss plausible theories with my colleagues over a gin and lemon squash. The scientific method never enters into it.
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[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31359061#p31359061:21ogfomz said:
I absolutely loved his show Connections from the 70's. His nonlinear approach to history is great. He showed that the middle ages were full of scientific and technological developments that preceded and made it possible The Renascence and the Scientific and Industrial revolutions.
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YetAnotherAnonymousAppellation
Ars Praefectus
Please identify book reviews as such right at the beginning. It would have saved me from wasting my time as I (for my own reasons) don't read book reviews.
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"To hear David Wootton tell it in his new book The Invention of Science, 16th-century Europe was the last place you'd expect an intellectual revolution. It was a region where witchcraft and unicorns were accepted as real, even by the intellectual classes. They also felt that the Greeks and Romans had already discovered everything worth knowing"
Is this Wooton, or is this your paraphrasing? Because if Wooton, it suggests the book is garbage.
To say that "16th-century Europe was .. a region where witchcraft and unicorns were accepted as real, even by the intellectual classes" is not to say anything useful. That sort of mindset describes EVERYWHERE in the world before the Scientific Revolution.
It's also wrong to say that 16th C Europe "felt that the Greeks and Romans had already discovered everything worth knowing". In fact that was 15th C Europe. The discovery of the Americas dramatically up-ended this viewpoint and was what allowed Europe to move from the usual situation (a conservative world, dominated by the past, to a world that could constantly point to things the past had no idea of).
But even before the discovery of the Americas, Europe was different. Europe, more than any other society, was interested in integrating newly learned material into pre-existing knowledge structures. So even when Alexander was off conquering Asia, he took along a few writers to take note of what was learned along the way; and we see this dramatically expanded when Vasco De Gama, Columbus, Megallan, Cabot, and so on take to the ocean --- a substantial focus of the enterprise is in accurate daily logs of everything learned along the way. Compare with, to take two examples, either the Vikings or Zheng He's expedition's, both of which seem to have led to zero integration of novel facts into existing knowledge structures --- all they left behind was a few stories.
And there is more. Europe was home to a particularly intensive form of intellectual disputation and analysis, even when it was applied to the sterile field of theology. So even during the high middle ages, you have people like Aquinas engaged in genuinely serious thought about issues like theodicy, or the nature of how the world "goes". Some other religions (eg Judaism, Islam) should certainly suffer from the same conceptual problem of theodicy, but they seem never to have engaged in the sort of dramatic intellectual life that animated European universities; the best you got was a century or so of commentary on what the Greeks and Romans had done; with very little novel thinking.
And even the claims that Europe was a backwater (technological or economic) are nonsense. Europe (again unlike anywhere else in the world) took clockwork seriously from the high middle ages onward; it took glass more seriously than anywhere else (hence windows, then eyeglasses, then telescopes and microscopes). Likewise European per capita GDP has already pulled ahead of the rest of the world by 1500, in fact probably by 1300~1400.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... t_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Is this Wooton, or is this your paraphrasing? Because if Wooton, it suggests the book is garbage.
To say that "16th-century Europe was .. a region where witchcraft and unicorns were accepted as real, even by the intellectual classes" is not to say anything useful. That sort of mindset describes EVERYWHERE in the world before the Scientific Revolution.
It's also wrong to say that 16th C Europe "felt that the Greeks and Romans had already discovered everything worth knowing". In fact that was 15th C Europe. The discovery of the Americas dramatically up-ended this viewpoint and was what allowed Europe to move from the usual situation (a conservative world, dominated by the past, to a world that could constantly point to things the past had no idea of).
But even before the discovery of the Americas, Europe was different. Europe, more than any other society, was interested in integrating newly learned material into pre-existing knowledge structures. So even when Alexander was off conquering Asia, he took along a few writers to take note of what was learned along the way; and we see this dramatically expanded when Vasco De Gama, Columbus, Megallan, Cabot, and so on take to the ocean --- a substantial focus of the enterprise is in accurate daily logs of everything learned along the way. Compare with, to take two examples, either the Vikings or Zheng He's expedition's, both of which seem to have led to zero integration of novel facts into existing knowledge structures --- all they left behind was a few stories.
And there is more. Europe was home to a particularly intensive form of intellectual disputation and analysis, even when it was applied to the sterile field of theology. So even during the high middle ages, you have people like Aquinas engaged in genuinely serious thought about issues like theodicy, or the nature of how the world "goes". Some other religions (eg Judaism, Islam) should certainly suffer from the same conceptual problem of theodicy, but they seem never to have engaged in the sort of dramatic intellectual life that animated European universities; the best you got was a century or so of commentary on what the Greeks and Romans had done; with very little novel thinking.
And even the claims that Europe was a backwater (technological or economic) are nonsense. Europe (again unlike anywhere else in the world) took clockwork seriously from the high middle ages onward; it took glass more seriously than anywhere else (hence windows, then eyeglasses, then telescopes and microscopes). Likewise European per capita GDP has already pulled ahead of the rest of the world by 1500, in fact probably by 1300~1400.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... t_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
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James Hannam in The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution goes over how there were scientific experiments before Galileo, Bacon and Newton. Ballistics and optics were investigated for generations before Galileo. Even the experiment of dropping different size/weight balls from a height was done before Galileo. This was done under the name "natural philosophy" not "science" and the lack of the printing press did slow down dissemination of ideas.
The whole boo to Aristotle and Galileo as rebel against the (Catholic) church was a narrative promoted later by protestant writers trying to detail how Catholics held back progress and free thought. In fact the 12th century re-discovery of Aristotle was a step forward because before that philosophy was focused on Plato and the neo-platonists who disdained the physical world in favor of a spiritual "greater reality". That started before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Aristotle fell into obscurity because he had been more focused on physics and natural history (categorizing biology). Of course both Plato and Aristotle thought you could come to truth through logic and argument. Science did not make progress until people got their hands dirty and created repeatable experiments with results that their peers could confirm. This started before Galileo. He just had the advantages of the printing press to spread his findings.
The whole boo to Aristotle and Galileo as rebel against the (Catholic) church was a narrative promoted later by protestant writers trying to detail how Catholics held back progress and free thought. In fact the 12th century re-discovery of Aristotle was a step forward because before that philosophy was focused on Plato and the neo-platonists who disdained the physical world in favor of a spiritual "greater reality". That started before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Aristotle fell into obscurity because he had been more focused on physics and natural history (categorizing biology). Of course both Plato and Aristotle thought you could come to truth through logic and argument. Science did not make progress until people got their hands dirty and created repeatable experiments with results that their peers could confirm. This started before Galileo. He just had the advantages of the printing press to spread his findings.
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Interesting, but apart from stressing the scientific revolution it sounds like the history of science I was taught in early school grades.
But this I have learned later:
Same as science is ever improving, what Newton did wasn't what we understand as science in its modern meaning. His Principia and Opticks is using experimentation in the form of exploration (and deduction) instead of testing. It is first in the latter we can see an early form of proposing hypotheses. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opticks#The_Queries ]
There is a definitive quashing of the science that outside trade stimulated and replacement with mystic Sufism [Wikipedia], same as it once grew in early Greece before the mystics with Plato as household name participated in quashing it there [according to Sagan's Cosmos].
EDIT: Spotted an editor replacement/my own embarrassing mistake.
But this I have learned later:
Same as science is ever improving, what Newton did wasn't what we understand as science in its modern meaning. His Principia and Opticks is using experimentation in the form of exploration (and deduction) instead of testing. It is first in the latter we can see an early form of proposing hypotheses. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opticks#The_Queries ]
[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31359265#p31359265:1cawoexm said:
There is a definitive quashing of the science that outside trade stimulated and replacement with mystic Sufism [Wikipedia], same as it once grew in early Greece before the mystics with Plato as household name participated in quashing it there [according to Sagan's Cosmos].
EDIT: Spotted an editor replacement/my own embarrassing mistake.
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Any book recommendation on this topic would be incomplete without Karoly Simonyi's epic work "A Cultural History of Physics". It traces the history of science from earliest river valley civilizations to modern era.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/133 ... of-physics
You can decide on your own about the quality of the books from excerpts available online.
https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/simony ... xcerpt.pdf
The one key takeaway from this book is that there is no single era in which science happened. Rather it is a cultural lineage where one era builds on top of works from previous era. There would be no Newton's laws without prevalence of cartesian philosophy, which wouldn't have developed had Descartes not tried to expand Euclid's geometric methods to rest of science.
Europe may be the epicenter of the science as we know it today but that was not always the case. Throughout the history scientific revolutions were going on in India, China and even medieval Islam at different eras. But Europe is lucky to have its cultural renaissance happen at a time when collective maturity of human knowledge was conducive to explosive growth (advent of lenses to see astronomical & microscopical realities unknown to naked eye, translation of literature from all corners by islamic scholars, advent of printing etc.,). And none of these developments happened in a vacuum.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/133 ... of-physics
You can decide on your own about the quality of the books from excerpts available online.
https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/simony ... xcerpt.pdf
The one key takeaway from this book is that there is no single era in which science happened. Rather it is a cultural lineage where one era builds on top of works from previous era. There would be no Newton's laws without prevalence of cartesian philosophy, which wouldn't have developed had Descartes not tried to expand Euclid's geometric methods to rest of science.
Europe may be the epicenter of the science as we know it today but that was not always the case. Throughout the history scientific revolutions were going on in India, China and even medieval Islam at different eras. But Europe is lucky to have its cultural renaissance happen at a time when collective maturity of human knowledge was conducive to explosive growth (advent of lenses to see astronomical & microscopical realities unknown to naked eye, translation of literature from all corners by islamic scholars, advent of printing etc.,). And none of these developments happened in a vacuum.
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[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31358485#p31358485:r55f8m9z said:
I don't see how there can be anything else, apart from sociologists that *also* confuses philosophy with science. According to modern science of philosophy, religion and pseudoscience, they have no means to assert knowledge. They speak with many voices instead of one.
And "philosophy of science"? Please, that is either pitiful or gut wrenching. The very arrogance of the chosen label, to try to be a lazy man's way to riches.
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<i>how do we know that science knows what it knows if science is simply a construct subject to the human condition</i>
Of course science is a construct. The 'world' we experience comes into our brain via our senses, and the brain constructs a model of the world based on that information.
Scientists make a community model of the world which agrees with countless observations. Such a model is called a 'theory', meaning that it can never be proven. These models allow us to predict, given sufficient knowledge of the variables, what will occur.
The technological benefits of these models ... cars, computers, medical cures ... surround us in our daily lives. The construction of science is a human endeavor, based not in bias or belief but in the common observations of humanity which anyone can test.
Of course science is a construct. The 'world' we experience comes into our brain via our senses, and the brain constructs a model of the world based on that information.
Scientists make a community model of the world which agrees with countless observations. Such a model is called a 'theory', meaning that it can never be proven. These models allow us to predict, given sufficient knowledge of the variables, what will occur.
The technological benefits of these models ... cars, computers, medical cures ... surround us in our daily lives. The construction of science is a human endeavor, based not in bias or belief but in the common observations of humanity which anyone can test.
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One should also not overlook the political motives that triggered the renaissance. European powers were fighting among themselves and they took upon technological advancement as another game of upmanship. For instance, the clockwork mechanism was perfected in due course of perfecting the measurement of longitude while travelling in ship, which gave significant maritime advantage.[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31359767#p31359767:2hp9asoq said:
It is also naive to assume that Europe is the only civilization that took clockwork seriously. The time measuring equipment in the east were far better than that in west during first millennia. They also had better understanding of the skies than a earthcentered model of the west. Then why does only European excellence lead to the science as we know it today? Because of the time we live in. Now the information is so globalized I don't see any single culture being the epicenter of scientific growth in future.
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[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31359755#p31359755:3ki0p3wa said:
Yes, that whole... paragraph before you were told that the article was about a book. That must have taken an eternity to read.
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[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31358851#p31358851:1o3s6z49 said:
Maaaaybe? It's an attractive idea, but movable type presses and metal type-casting were invented in China and Korea several centuries before Gutenberg, and nobody ever complains about the relentless Asia-centrism of the history of science.
That might partly be due to the terribleness of the Hanzi writing system, which makes attaining literacy a far larger task (and therefore frequently limited to a smaller proportion of people) compared to alphabets or even syllabaries. The Koreans eventually largely ditched it in favour of their own far superior Hangul system, but not till the mid fifteenth century (coincidentally, about the same time as Gutenberg). That still didn't cause the scientific revolution to happen in Korea.
So I think while the press was definitely an important factor in the scientific revolution (and also the Protestant Reformation) it's only one factor among several.
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[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31359887#p31359887:351sywvv said:
What a bizarre post. Yes, philosophizing is a well-known path to lazy riches, to be sure...
The book I referenced talks about logical positivism and empiricism, Karl Popper, etc. and then some of the logical and philosophical challenges to that approach that resulted in the debates that lead people to write books like the one presently being reviewed. Honestly it's been a number of years since I read it, but I remember enjoying it and that it showed a new angle on the scientific enterprise - and some of the assumptions behind it - that I hadn't considered. It's not an endorsement of "anti-science" views by any means, and my post was simply a recommendation in case people wanted to expand their knowledge of the issue at hand.
So, the good news is that if you really "don't see how there can be anything else," you can read a book and evaluate the claims for yourself rather than just assuming them to be whatever you imagine.
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[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31358303#p31358303:1b773ipq said:
This sort of attack is a good example of what CAGW supporters would call "scientific discussion". There are a LOT of very serious scientists and engineers and technical people who deal with fluid dynamic systems every day. I happen to be one of them. They develop thermal-hydraulic models of systems that are orders of magnitude smaller than the atmosphere and hydrosphere of an entire planet, and they have a hell of a time predicting the temperature and flow rate in those systems with very well defined initial and boundary conditions. They are not religious nuts who deny science - they accept evolution, vaccinate their children, don't practice ANY religion, and they use science all day, every day. They don't understand how CAGW supporters can claim to be able to calculate the average temperature of an entire planet, to the tenth of a degree C, 100 years from now. Hell, the meteorlogists cannot do predictions with that sort of accuracy for tommorrow morning's weather!
CAGW supporters continue to use ad-hominem attacks to cast aspersions on the technical competence of "skeptics" who have any enormous amount of experience in thermal-hydraulic analyses, and they refuse to engage the doubters on the technical issues where the debate must occur. They refuse to publish the data that they use for the modeling ("Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it… -Phil Jones email Feb. 21, 2005), they have corrupted the process of peer review ("...I think that the community should, as Mike H has previously suggested in this eventuality, terminate its involvement with this journal at all levels–reviewing, editing, and submitting, and leave it to wither way into oblivion and disrepute.-Michael Mann email Jul. 3, 2003", "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" - From Phil Jones To: Michael Mann (Pennsylvania State University). July 8, 2004).
And then there are all the "social scientists", who write papers on the subject without showing the details of the various "surveys" that they purport to do. In some cases, they cannot even read the data properly! (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 12216/epdf)
Science has been hijacked by non-scientists. People who have learned a little bit of math, maybe some statitistics even, and want the same stature as those people who invented new elements in the periodic table. Well, I think they only deserve to be ridiculed for the rubbish that they "publish".
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I actually read this book (not something I'd normally do, but saw it over spring break and it caught my eye for some reason).
First, it is remarkably well written.
Second, for those of you assuming what is said, relax, it is well written and deeply thought out. Wotton reviews the primary texts of early science writing in 7 languages. A review of a 600 page book just *might* gloss over some of the ideas. Just sayin' — you're yelling at the internet again.
What I found most interesting was how he traced the introduction of ideas by how words changed meanings, and how the new usage moved through the European languages. My favorite example was the meaning of the word 'fact'. Prior to ~1652 (IIRC) the word fact in English meant a 'criminal deed.' When someone says 'an accessory after the fact,' they are using the word in its original meaning. The word fact was used exclusively this way prior to 1652, but was appropriated by English scientists to mean a piece of (reproduced) observational knowledge, and with the rise of science and technology this gradually became the dominant meaning. There wasn't a word for the idea they had, so they appropriated another word.
Wotton does this again and again showing how different words were either invented or appropriated to describe the new ideas, and uses the rise of new words and usages to trace the rise of the associated ideas. Fascinating way of looking for changes in how people think.
The point is also made that you can't naively read a 500 year old text, even in a language you know, because the meanings of the words has evolved — old English texts (my native language) are effectively written in a foreign language.
First, it is remarkably well written.
Second, for those of you assuming what is said, relax, it is well written and deeply thought out. Wotton reviews the primary texts of early science writing in 7 languages. A review of a 600 page book just *might* gloss over some of the ideas. Just sayin' — you're yelling at the internet again.
What I found most interesting was how he traced the introduction of ideas by how words changed meanings, and how the new usage moved through the European languages. My favorite example was the meaning of the word 'fact'. Prior to ~1652 (IIRC) the word fact in English meant a 'criminal deed.' When someone says 'an accessory after the fact,' they are using the word in its original meaning. The word fact was used exclusively this way prior to 1652, but was appropriated by English scientists to mean a piece of (reproduced) observational knowledge, and with the rise of science and technology this gradually became the dominant meaning. There wasn't a word for the idea they had, so they appropriated another word.
Wotton does this again and again showing how different words were either invented or appropriated to describe the new ideas, and uses the rise of new words and usages to trace the rise of the associated ideas. Fascinating way of looking for changes in how people think.
The point is also made that you can't naively read a 500 year old text, even in a language you know, because the meanings of the words has evolved — old English texts (my native language) are effectively written in a foreign language.
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[url=http://arstechnica.co.uk/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31358377#p31358377:2a9c9vtn said:
I think you're mixing up your time frames.
The "Dark Ages" is generally placed between the 5th and 14h century, give or take a century.
Although modern historians prefer to avoid the term, this was indeed a period where knowledge in Europe dropped below what had been available in the Roman empire and was available still available in other parts of the world.
For example, you speak of the compass but the earliest recorded uses of a compass in Europe were in the 13th century, thus to the end of the "Dark Ages".
Portuguese discovery voyages didn't start until the 15th century. Columbus crossing of the Atlantic was in the 16th century, thus after the end of the "Dark Ages".
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[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31360581#p31360581:1vtqd4l0 said:
It's a strange style to identify one's self as a member of a group and then constantly refer to the group as "they" or "them" instead of "we" or "us."
Also, your incredulity does not a compelling argument make.
Now you have to answer: Why, in your mind, are climatologists working so diligently to lie to the general public?
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"CAGW supporters," (i.e., climate scientists) don't make that claim in the first place. This is NOT weather forecasting, despite your naive association of the two. If your confusion is representative of the rest of your supposed colleagues, then it's no wonder they don't have a clue.[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31360581#p31360581:300tvumr said:
And your use of "CAGW supporters" is reminiscent of how Creationists use the word "Darwinists" instead of biologists. Why can't you just call climate scientists what they are?
Since you claim to be a technically competent skeptic, it's very telling that you can't even characterize what you're "skeptical" of accurately. That's probably why you get the impression that you're being wrongfully ignored: you actually are not competent to criticize the field.
Will you now include yourself in that category, having clearly demonstrated your utterly embarrassing lack of scientific rigor in your skepticism of climate science? I mean, you seriously just outed yourself as seriously misinformed with the first paragraph. Isn't your first step supposed to be familiarizing yourself with the topic before declaring your sticking points as genuine problems rather than personal ones?
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[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31359767#p31359767:34zy7neu said:
No, that's emphatically not true. There were extensive intellectual discussions -- including discussions of Greek philosophy and science -- in other civilizations, particular Islamic civilization. When people like Aquinas argued about how to reconcile Aristotle's philosophy with Christian theology, they drew heavily on prior commentaries and elaborations by Islamic writers like al-Farabi (9th/10th Century), Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 11th Century) and Averrhoes (Ibn Rushd, 12th Century). (And also on Jewish thinkers like Moses Maimonides.)
This page is devoted primarily to philosphical issue rather than science and mathematics, but it's a useful introduction to how much Arabic/Islamic philosophy influenced later medieval Europan philosophy and theology:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabi ... influence/
This is a more general page devoted to Islamic philosphizing (again, excluding most science and mathematics):
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabi ... c-natural/
And, of course, Islamic civilization made major advances in mathematics, optics, and medicine over what the Greeks had achieved. Much of this was then taken up by Europeans in the 12th Century and later centuries; Latin versions of Alhazen's (Ibn al-Haytham) work on optics and Avicenna's on medicine were standard textbooks in European universities into the 16th Century, for example.
(I agree with your general argument that 16th Century Europe was not some unimaginative backwater.)
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This is mentioned in the book; the author suggests (over a couple of chapters) that the early voyages of discovery in the 14th/15th centuries were an important precursor to the scientific revolution, precisely because they:[url=http://arstechnica.co.uk/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31358377#p31358377:2rpxqgjm said:
- Disproved the idea that the Ancients knew everything and knowledge could only be rediscovered.
- Showed that you could directly test a theory (equatorial regions are impassably hot? Separate spheres of earth and water?) by counterexample rather than philosophical reasoning.
- Used new, purpose-built instruments.
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[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31359265#p31359265:wy93psk9 said:
That's... disappointing. The whole "Islamic civilization just preserved classical Greek works so they could be translated by Europeans" trope is deeply ignorant. And the idea that "nothing much came of" Islamic science is also rather ignorant, given how much Islamic developments in mathematics, optics, medicine, etc., -- beyond what the Greeks had already done -- contributed to the foundations of the scientific revolution.
This doesn't necessarily undermine things he might say about the actual scientific revolution of the 17th Century, but it's not a good sign.
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In a way I agree. Just a few things I would like to point them out.
No, no, science itself is technology.
There would be no telescope without Galileo. Galileo was already well-known to others and was a scientist at that time before he invented telescope.
Please tell me science and religions are inseparable: There is this moment when some human scientists exhausted on their science works they need god's shoulder to lean on.
And I meant for "some" scientists in many cultures around the world, though, not all of them.
"Please help me God. How do we discover more hidden particles? My children's future and my Noble Prize depends on your guiding light."
"Go figure it out yourself if you believe all priests are child molesters."
Sighs..
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I think you may be overreacting. It's not that he wasn't impressed by what Islamic thinkers were doing, or recognize their importance for European knowledge. And he recognizes that we can label some of those activities science after the fact. But science as we now know it didn't come out of that, so they're not the subject of this book, although they make some appearances for obvious reasons.
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[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31361237#p31361237:ctksqzp5 said:
Are you suggesting that the deity in which you believe punishes scientists with career and personal failure if they're prejudicial enough to wrongly categorize all priests as child molesters? That's what it looks like to me.
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[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31361083#p31361083:4c0y3126 said:
Maybe you are confusing Islamic with Arabic. Arabs indeed made great advances in mathematics and science. Under the Islamic rule, however, those advances greatly stopped and in some cases banned. Thier only major contribution was the spread of Arabic knowledge but they weren't particularly productive. And that's not surprising since Islam is just a religion.
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I haven't read this book, so I'll withhold judgement on the author and its arguments, etc.
I do think it's worth pointing out that one of the reasons why the scientific revolution took a while to get going was that building stable bodies of knowledge on sets of inductive reasoning, in the way that science proceeds isn't trivial. The knowledge gained through inductive methods is inherently subject to any new discovery / additional evidence. Because of this, Medieval scholars were long entranced instead by the deductive reasoning and certainty, such as the way that the discipline of math works. When you think about the immense success of mathematics as a discipline of knowledge in terms of how iron clad its conclusions tend to be and its usefulness in engineering etc, its no surprise that intelligent scholars would try to replicate that when investigating the natural world and trying to come up with conclusions.
Obviously, in hindsight this is a harebrained way of trying to reason about the natural world, but I don't think the right conclusion to draw is that all of a sudden out of nowhere we have a scientific revolution from the dark ages. It does a disservice to all the other knowledge that the ancient world did build.
Reading the works of the enlightenment (philosophers, scientists, etc), you'll notice that there is a huge preoccupation with methodology--both in what we consider philosphy and science. It doesn't get much attention, but Francis Bacon's Novum Organum is an explicit example of a scholar rethinking the methods by which we gain knowledge. The scientific revolution really came down to getting our methods of gaining knowledge about the natural world down correctly, and it was this era's insistence on getting the methodology correct that really paid dividends.
I do think it's worth pointing out that one of the reasons why the scientific revolution took a while to get going was that building stable bodies of knowledge on sets of inductive reasoning, in the way that science proceeds isn't trivial. The knowledge gained through inductive methods is inherently subject to any new discovery / additional evidence. Because of this, Medieval scholars were long entranced instead by the deductive reasoning and certainty, such as the way that the discipline of math works. When you think about the immense success of mathematics as a discipline of knowledge in terms of how iron clad its conclusions tend to be and its usefulness in engineering etc, its no surprise that intelligent scholars would try to replicate that when investigating the natural world and trying to come up with conclusions.
Obviously, in hindsight this is a harebrained way of trying to reason about the natural world, but I don't think the right conclusion to draw is that all of a sudden out of nowhere we have a scientific revolution from the dark ages. It does a disservice to all the other knowledge that the ancient world did build.
Reading the works of the enlightenment (philosophers, scientists, etc), you'll notice that there is a huge preoccupation with methodology--both in what we consider philosphy and science. It doesn't get much attention, but Francis Bacon's Novum Organum is an explicit example of a scholar rethinking the methods by which we gain knowledge. The scientific revolution really came down to getting our methods of gaining knowledge about the natural world down correctly, and it was this era's insistence on getting the methodology correct that really paid dividends.
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[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31362105#p31362105:g4s8wjy5 said:
No, I'm not. (Though perhaps you may be.)
"Islamic" is frequently used in historical studies to refer to the trans-national culture and civilization which developed after the Arab conquests of the 7th Century. The purpose is to avoid confusion with specifically Arabic culture and ethnicity, since although the language of Islamic culture and science was usually Arabic (but was, particular in later periods, often Persian), many of the people involved were not Arabs.
I'd be curious to hear what you think the specific achievements in science, mathematics, and philosophy of pre-Islamic Arabia actually were. All of the Arab thinkers responsible for the "great advances" (e.g., al-Kindi, Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn al-Nafis, Ibn Tufail, Ibn Rushd) were Muslims living under Islamic rule. (Most of the other great thinkers from the Islamic "golden ages" -- e.g., al-Khwarizimi, Ibn Sina, al-Biruni, al-Razi, Umar Khayyam, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi -- were Muslim Persians.)
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[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31361083#p31361083:19g6t03n said:
Thanks for the references; I'll read them over the next few days when I have time.
However neither of them seem to refer to the issue of theodicy which was my starting point.
I consider this an important point not because I care about religion or theology, but because it seems to me THE sticking point that reveals the fundamental incompatibility of the monotheistic religions with actually experienced life. A society that constantly worries about theodicy is a society that is prepared for changes when something appropriate (like the discovery of the New World) comes along; whereas a society whose response to the problem of theodicy is to say "Well, who the hell knows, God's ways are mysterious", ie the Book of Job solution, is a society with its head in the sand.
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[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31361293#p31361293:2b1bah7l said:
For people who want to understand the Islam/China issue (ie
- why did modern science not arise there
- why are some of us in these comments somewhat dismissive of the Islamic and Chinese supposed contributions)
a good place to start is "The Rise of Modern Science Explained"
https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Modern-Scie ... entries*=0
Summarizing the argument very quickly (this is my paraphrasing, the author may disagree with me) the West provided two DISTINCT traditions
- a theoretical tradition and
- an empirical tradition (not just "craftsman" style empiricism, but a somewhat respected philosophical style empiricism --- the obvious synecdoche would be "Plato AND Aristotle")
and the Scientific revolution grew out of these two fused together.
In both Islam and China the theoretical tradition had no serious connection with the empirical real-world tradition, and so basically went nowhere.
Personally I think the argument omits some important points about the nature of the "theoretical tradition" in the West, the way in which issues were argued and new knowledge was slotted into older knowledge (as I've alluded to in various of my comments above); but if you want a fairly modern well-argued and researched book (by an academic; this book is a popularization of his long serious book on the subject) this is about the best place to start.
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I'm surprised to hear this too.[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31358223#p31358223:b1iwvlm7 said:
I grew up in creationism - my church, private school, family - everybody believed science was a lie. Biology, definitely. Even geology, astronomy - the whole lot of it, anything that defied 'Young Earth Creationism' (YEC).
Went to college, unlearned a lot of stupid... but looking back on it, those YECs did not deny the scientific method. Likewise, I don't think today's climate science deniers or their ilk deny the utility and supremacy of the scientific method either. After all, it's a very simple and stripped down way to understand reality. If an idea is destroyed by the scientific method, you have an idea that's not based in reality - if that much isn't self-evident, then in my opinion, whoever you're speaking with is a waste of your time and energy - just move on.
YECs, climate science deniers, etc, may use the scientific method "improperly" or "poorly", but in my experience, they at least have a semblance of utilizing it. Granted they always start with a non-science based premise (like the Earth MUST be 6000 years old)... then proceed to make hypotheses from that... then proceed to ignore evidence that defies the premise... and round and round forever in this manner. A lot of flailing about and talking in circles is all it is.
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9[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31364937#p31364937:2hcmpa9z said:
Anybody who systematically ignores evidence that denies the premise is not practising the scientific method in any way, shape or form. Climate change deniers aren't even at the level of being wrong in regards to the scientific method. They are so far beyond wrong that it's difficult for me to even develop an appropriate analogy. They are like somebody standing on a billiards table swinging a driver to hit the balls and claiming they are golfing. Not are they using the wrong tool to hit the pool balls, they aren't even using the right club for the distances found on a pool table.
The science revolution involved developing new methods for gaining greater understanding of the natural world and new language to communicate this new knowledge. AGW deniers are engaged in a project that has nothing in common with what people like Galileo were doing.
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[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31361497#p31361497:2y48kwch said:
For the god's believers who would always thinking it is his god punishing him for his guilt. As for me I would say god don't punish him or anyone, it is he himself doing the punishment to himself. But he doesn't know that his punishment was not coming from his god. It was coming from within himself.
I am an atheist. This is how I see them.
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[url=http://arstechnica.co.uk/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31364195#p31364195:2ngia3zf said:
I think you got the order wrong since the changes such as discovery of new world, discovery of micro-organisms accelerated the discussions over theodicy (a word although coined in medieval Europe, was practiced since ancient times). If you are referring to the discussions by Aquinas, Boethius etc., which predates scientific revolution, you should also read up Avicenna & Averroes who influenced Aquinas, or read up on Nyaya & Advaita schools of Indian philosophy, you will find that the many other societies were grappling with this issue before Europe. One should see the development of theodicy in Europe as a natural progression of philosophic traditions established elsewhere in the world.
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[url=http://arstechnica.co.uk/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31363183#p31363183:2seddsx1 said:
So eloquently put. Along with Francis Bacon, we should also remember Rene Descartes who tried to apply so called geometric methods to scientific pursuit (in an attempt to replicate the rigor of Euclidean geometry). And this rethinking of methodology & epistemology continues even in 20th century (Karl Popper's work on scientific method & Godel's theorem). I don't think there is a definitive end to it.
So to summarize, we can't say our current science didn't come out of medieval science in middle east or far east. It is like saying Einstein's relativity didn't come from Newtonian or that Newtonian physics owes nothing to Galileo. Modern day science wasn't born in a vacuum, all the science & technology of those ages are the building blocks of science as we know it today. To understand their impact, one has to read the original works during the medieval ages and see how their effort & motivation were influenced by the science that preceded them.
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