Intellectual Archeology

In the spring of 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus lay dying. His great work—The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres—was, at the urging of his supporters and despite his own misgivings, now at the printers. According to legend, a copy of the book was rushed from the press to Copernicus’s bedside and placed in his hands before he died.

This was the book that launched the modern world, beginning with the unprecedented transformation of our understanding of the natural world, generally known as the Scientific Revolution.

Just as today, when astronomers and cosmologists use the latest mathematical models to rethink old assumptions and justify radical new theories, so Copernicus based his work on the most advanced mathematics and astronomy of his day. And in the early 16th century, these came from Iraq, where the Maragha School, a group of Arab scholars named for the Maragha observatory in the arid mountains of western Iran, had for centuries produced the most accurate mathematical updates to the standard Ptolemaic model of planetary motion.

This use by Copernicus of the work of scientists from the Islamic world was recognized only some 50 years ago, and was immediately controversial. It was clear that Copernicus could not have used the original Ptolemaic models inherited from the Greeks, or he could not have made his heliocentric system work. But now it appeared that his revolutionary new astronomy depended crucially on Arab scientists and their mathematical models, except where he reversed the relative positions of the earth and the sun.

Of course, the whole point of Copernicus is that he reversed the positions of the earth and sun. He raised our world into the heavens to sit among the stars, initiating what would become modernism’s apotheosis of nature itself. It hardly detracts from the greatness of this achievement that he obviously had precursors. He, as Newton said of himself, “stood on the shoulders of giants.”

But that raises the question addressed by Arun Bala, in this slender and erudite book, The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science. Who exactly were those giants?

What makes this question interesting—and not some 500-year-old game of journalistic gotcha—is the way world history pivots so tightly around Copernicus’s deathbed. The 150 years that followed him were filled with names that even the least scientific of us knows—Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, Newton—brilliant minds at work on a common project to test and measure and analyze the world around us, eventually coming to understand it more systematically than human beings ever had before.

But the effect of this Scientific Revolution was wider still, for it demonstrated the sheer explanatory power of a rational, empirical approach to the natural world. In the 18th century this same approach was applied to the social world, stimulating new and hugely consequential ideas of popular sovereignty and economic freedom. Applied to mechanics, it powered the Industrial Revolution. Out of these arose a new world— military, economic, artistic, philosophical, psychological—that had energy and appetite enough to reproduce itself across the globe.

From the Scientific Revolution, then, the modern world seems to simply unfold, like a flower from its bud. Those who love modernity—for its technological marvels, its spectacular wealth, its personal freedom—as well as those who hate it—for its social breakdown, its vapid consumerism, or the 13,000 children it lets starve to death each day—all agree upon its provenance. The modern world, and modern science which made it possible, began in Europe, spread out from Europe, were a gift or curse from Europe to the rest of the world.

It is this generally agreed-upon provenance that Bala systematically undermines. In doing so, he draws upon and extends a sub-branch of the history of science that, although small and relatively recent, is gathering increasing attention. This is the study of non-western systems of science and scientific thought.

The originator of this study was the brilliant Scottish biochemist Joseph Needham. Following the Second World War, which he spent in China, he began a 50-year project of intellectual archeology, unearthing what was in effect a lost civilization of pre-modern Chinese science: complex theories that accompanied the pioneering invention of, among other things, block printing, the magnetic compass and gunpowder weapons. His discoveries astonished his Chinese colleagues, as much as anyone else, so accustomed had they become to the idea that real science was something that came from the West.

Needham’s rich historical narrative and intellectual rigour, together with the political transformations of the post-war period, ensured that his example would inspire research into other non-western civilizations—those of India and of the Islamic world, as well as that of China.

Students of Islamic science, such as George Saliba at Columbia, or Indian mathematics, such as Manchester’s George Gheverghese Joseph, and others, have redeemed dozens of scientific and pre-scientific discoveries, theories and schools of thought from centuries of obscurity.

Needham’s work also provoked mainstream history of science to respond. The traditional view was that science had begun with the Greeks, lapsed for a millennium of Dark Ages, then was rediscovered in the Renaissance and brought to fulfillment with Newton. It was a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, all snugly situated within the continent of Europe. After Needham, this had to be modified, and the pre-modern scientific work of other civilizations, especially China and Islam, assigned their parts in the pageant.

But they were not speaking parts. As Bala shows in his early chapters, the scientific advances of non-European civilizations, while now acknowledged in the mainstream histories, are consistently treated as marginal or even completely parallel to those of Europe. They are not allowed to dilute the made-in-Europe status of modern science. In the prevailing view, the role of Islamic civilization was confined to preserving the ancient Greek texts through the medieval Dark Ages, perhaps adding a useful commentary or two, while the achievement of China, although remarkable, was properly speaking technological rather than scientific, lacking in theoretical rigour.

Bala describes this view as Eurocentrism and finds it endemic in the history of science, even at its most multicultural. When historians ask what has come to be known as Needham’s Grand Question—“Why did modern science not develop in China (or in Islam, or elsewhere)?”— the answer typically points to some flaw in the basic political, social or ideological culture of the particular civilization. Thus China is diagnosed as having suffered under a conservative Confucian bureaucracy indifferent to knowledge for its own sake, while Islam valued sterile revelation over creative investigation.

Yet we have seen that the mathematics and astronomy imported from the Islamic world were indispensable to Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, which became the launching pad for the Scientific Revolution itself. As for China, the period of the most rapid development of its bureaucracy and Confucian philosophy was also the period of its most creative scientific work, when it brought forth the wealth of inventions that astounded Marco Polo in the 13th century. As Bala observes, so far from being averse to innovation and indifferent to knowledge for its own sake, China’s mandarins kept a running catalogue of scientific achievement and erected statues in honour of their most accomplished scientists—an example we might emulate today.

Islam, China and other civilizations were far ahead of Europe in their observations, discoveries and theoretical development for a thousand years or more before the 16th century. The only useful (and historical) way to put Needham’s question, then, is to ask “What happened then? What changed?”

Bala’s answer is to break Europe out of its historical isolation. Far from being cut off from the rest of the world, as Eurocentric history implicitly imagines, its true position is revealed in his vivid image of a sandwich of civilizations—a Europe pressed between the Mongol empire, stretching east from the Danube to Beijing, and Islamic civilization across the south from Spain to Anatolia. Surrounding late-medieval Europe was a world in a ferment of investigation and discovery, and Bala traces out numerous lines of influence, both specific discoveries and wider intellectual concepts.

For what made Copernicus unique? It was one thing to propose a heliocentric system as an intellectual exercise, as had been done before, but quite another to take it seriously, and to be taken seriously, as providing a real description of the natural world. Copernicus and his successors did both, but Bala argues that without a number of key fundamental concepts, such as mathematical realism and a mechanistic universe, it is unlikely they could have done either.

In this context, “mathematical realism” means the principle that the material world in its structure and operations follows precise mathematical relationships. The ancient Greeks rejected this. Plato thought the material world too coarse to adhere to the beautiful geometry of ideas, while Aristotle generally confined his attention to what he or others could directly observe. Likewise, the medieval scientists who took up their ideas held that the sub-lunar material world, corrupted perhaps by original sin, could not be expected to follow anything so manifestly divine as the mathematical order governing celestial motion.

Islamic science came to see things differently (maybe because Islam has no doctrine of original sin). Bala devotes considerable attention to the work of the tenth-century scientist Alhazen, who revolutionized optical theory with his description of rays that follow mathematically precise paths from every point of an object into the eye. Bala finds Alhazen’s influence in the development of perspective in European painting, and in his example of the power of experimentation (Alhazen was the first person to describe the pinhole camera, and compared it to the function of the eye) for European philosophers such as the 13th-century Franciscan Roger Bacon. For Alhazen, mathematics perfectly described real phenomena in the natural world, and this became the prevailing view of Islamic scientists, as later Islamic theologians and philosophers, like al-Ghazali in the eleventh century, successfully overthrew the authority of Aristotle and the Greek canon.

As for the Chinese, they had been diligently producing mechanical inventions for 1500 years in complete isolation from Europe, when sud- denly the conquests of Genghis Khan opened up communication from the Baltic to the Sea of Japan. A flood of technological wonders now flowed into Europe from the east, all within a few generations, and presented Europeans with physical proofs of the mechanical possibilities of the natural world. Chinese medicine, for instance, had developed a model of the circulation of the blood, based on a system of bamboo tubes, with a bellows taking the place of the heart.

Bala suggests that Europe blended these two visions of the world—the mechanical one inspired by Chinese technology, and the mathematical one of Islam—into the spectacularly fruitful conceptual synthesis that led from Copernicus to Descartes to Newton and beyond.

Here the problem of “transmission” arises— the insistence that it is not enough to show that ideas prevalent in one place became current in another, following an increase in contact between the two places. One must show how, exactly, those ideas were transmitted. Are they mentioned in the reports of scientifically inclined Jesuit missionaries, like Matteo Ricci? If not, well then—in the opinion of mainstream historians of science—it all remains pretty speculative.

Yet it seems speculative largely because of the prevailing image of European civilization as a tight little island, surrounded by some impermeable intellectual barrier. If we cease to defend this—and instead assume the more plausible view that ideas could cover great distances at least as easily as merchandise, and that artisans and philosophers and scientists in Europe would be eagerly curious about the work of other people in other lands—then the onus of proof is almost, if not quite, reversed. Why wouldn’t there be transmission?

The question of how that transmission occurred remains open, and is likely to generate growing debate. Yet what Bala has conclusively demonstrated is that the Scientific Revolution could not have been accomplished in early modern Europe on the basis of ancient Greek ideas alone. You can’t get here from there. What happened in the run-up to the 16th century, which enabled the Scientific Revolution to occur, was a great inflow of new ideas, observations and theories from across the world, pouring into a Europe that had gradually become ready to receive them. Europe’s achievement, in Bala’s view, was the brilliantly creative synthesis of the work of the greatest scientists of the known world (many of whom were in Europe)—a synthesis that would become modern science.

Thus, the world we live in today—the wild child of the Scientific Revolution—grew out of a great collaboration of civilizations, a centuries-long conversation among the greatest minds of many lands and many cultures. We can no longer imagine the modern world springing fully grown from the forehead of Europe. Modernity—love it or hate it—is neither the exclusive creation nor property of the West.

It is a cliché to say the world is getting smaller. It is also inaccurate. The world is getting bigger. There are more people, for one thing. And they come from more places than they used to, places that a generation ago seemed exotic, mysterious, even mythical. But there they have lives and cultures and histories and ideas, and it turns out they always have had. The modern world is a great river, gathering tributaries from every direction as it rises and spreads.

From where we are today, the history Bala describes seems curiously prophetic. For if the modern world began as the common, if unconscious, enterprise of people across the known world, the problems it just as unconsciously created—from global warming to nuclear weapons—now pose a common challenge to people across an even wider world. And it seems unlikely that those problems will be solved without a new and entirely conscious common enterprise, which draws upon the ideas and cultures and histories of us all. Bala and his colleagues show that humanity has done this sort of thing before, even if we weren’t aware of it at the time. But whether we’re capable of doing it again intentionally and systematically—on a much grander scale, in a much shorter time-span—remains to be seen.

It is another cliché to say that history repeats itself. But if it does not, in our current situation, we may not have a whole lot of history left.