Difference between revisions of "Science Since Babylon"

Science Since Babylon (view source)

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Added summary for chapter 2

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 == 2. Celestial Clockwork in Greece and China ==
 ===Summary===
+# Science is not a linear endeavour. It’s not even something we can truly plan. It just happens.
+## “We would often like to think that our voyages of exploration in the world of learning were precisely navigated or that they followed prevailing winds of scholarship. As often as not, however, it is the chance storm that drives us to unsuspected places and makes us discover America when looking for the Indies.”
+# The progression of scientific tools does not go in a straight line, or even an apparent upwards direction.
+## For example, consider time keeping and clocks. The two are not the same thing.
+### Time keeping has been getting progressively more complicated and precise.
+### But clocks seem to appear fully formed; in reality, they trace their ancestry back to machines for tracking the movement of the starts and planets.
+### “If one begins the history of the clock with this specimen [Giovanni de Dondi’s “clock” in Padua], it is plain that the art declines for a long time thereafter, and that a glorious machine that simulates the design of the Creator by making a model of His astronomical universe is eventually simplified into a device that merely tells the time.”
+# Most scientific tools were originally created as curiosities and toys, not for scientific endeavours; it took years or decades before they found their use as tools.
+## Retrospectively, they are a good measure of a society’s technology level.
+### “It bears emphasizing that since the existence of such clockwork is the most sensitive barometer we have for the strength of the high scientific technology in a society, we must say that at this period in the Sung, the Chinese had reached a very remarkable level in the ratio of high technology to pure science. In East and West the technology must have been at much the same level, insofar as one can compare them at all. In the East, pure science was certainly not inconsiderable; the Chinese had done many things not yet achieved at that time in Europe. The West, on the other hand, had that special glory of high-powered mathematical astronomy that eventually dominated our scientific destiny.”
+# The knowledge we have of past societies is limited by the information that reaches us.
+## We create wrong impressions of what they were like based on what does and more important what does not get passed down.
+## Take for example the Greeks; we know them for their math, philosophy, democracy, plays, and statues/buildings. Only one of those are physical. One would get the impression that they are great with ideas and art, but lacking in the practical department.
+## After discovering and uncovering the meaning of the Antikythera mechanism, Price says: “the sophistication of those gear trains […] requires us to completely rethink our attitudes toward ancient Greek technology. Men who could build this could have built almost any mechanical device they wanted to. The Greeks cannot now be regarded as great brains who disdained manual labor or rejected technology because of their slave society. The technology was there, and it has just not survived like the great marble buildings, statuary, and the constantly recopied literary works of high culture.” And “We no longer need believe the expressions of a distaste for manual labor but may regard them merely as a very human personal preference of those philosophers whose tastes were otherwise inclined.”
 ===Further Reading===
 *[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_Museum_of_the_History_of_Science Whipple Museum of the History of Science]