Letters to the Editor
rkr327
Published Letters: 43 Editor's Choice: 5
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China and the Scientific Revolution
[Read the article: The China syndrome]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I posit the inception of scientific revolution with the implantation, of what I term ‘Newton’s idea’ into the ‘fertile soil’ of post Renaissance Europe. [See below] Other factors have been proposed as ‘responsible’ for ‘modern science’, e.g. the printing press which allowed the rapid dissemination of thought and information upon which one thinker after another could expand and pass on. To my mind all of these are critical enablers, but without the seed (‘the idea’ itself) you don’t get to the modern world, only to an environment congenial to its advent Many, likely most, who have attempted to puzzle this question through hold to a ‘bias’ born out of their association more with the Liberal Arts side of C. P. Snow’s two cultures than with the Scientific side. Another thought on Cultural lines would be that Europe plausibly has what could be describe as a 'schizophrenic. heritage. One part is the polarizing Judeo/Christian view of life as a strugle between good and evil, God and the Devil, right and wrong, angels and devils; while the other is a 'view' derived from Classical civilization in which life is envisioned as the struggle to ovrecome obsticals, with a 'triumph' over obsticals as a 'heroic' path to transendence. This latter idea could be seen to cultivate the importance of the individual.
From
Science and Modernity
posted at my blog site: R. K. Rodebaugh's Radio Weblog http://blogs.salon.com/0001185/.
It was Newton’s idea. It may not have been entirely original with him, and aspects of it are certainly apparent in thought, and trends of thought leading far back into recorded history, but it is incontestably Newton’s formulation of the idea (in the Principia of 1687) that leads to its implantation in the fertile soil of post Renaissance Europe. Its subsequent rooting and exfoliation leads directly to modern science and technology, and on to the modern world.
Newton does not simply set forth that there is a gravitational attraction between bodies, but formulates it as a precise mathematical relationship. The force is directly proportional to the product of masses of the attracting bodies, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them. The force is calculable! Precisely and exactly calculable! And a like conceptualism might be thought to extend to all of physical reality. The natural world is encompassed by a regime of mathematical rigor. Material reality can be described by universal, discoverable, mathematically exact expressions of causality.
After Newton, the Physicist Bernoulli, observing that the flow of air over a surface curved on top and flat on the bottom produces an uplift, can calculate what flow of air, over what surface of wing, will produce exactly what lift per unit area of wing. You can build a plane and know that it will fly! A child can observe steam displace a heavy iron lid from a pot. The grown James Watt can, after Newton, calculate precisely what pressure of steam against what piston head can, when translated through the mechanical apparatus of the piston, produce exactly what turning force on a wheel or crankshaft: the steam engine.
With Newton, science transforms from a cottage industry of inspired eccentrics into an ever broadening, ever deepening, universal human endeavor. Over the next three hundred years, the constant and rigorous pursuit of scientific knowledge has yielded up a cornucopia of opportunity for human creativity as both invention and enterpriseto feast upon. And feast it has.
Of the many reasons that may be proposed for China's failure, or that of South Asian, or that Islam c.a. 1000 - 1300AD, would be no Newton. No one to pull it all together, including the invention of the Calculus, into 'Newton's Idea'.