Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / Who was the first scientist?

Transcript

Who was the first scientist? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: One of the many reasons that it's all inspiring to
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: look up at the night sky, beyond the sheer beauty
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: and grandeur and the cosmic questions that it evokes, is
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: that it's something all humans have in common. There's one
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: night sky that we all stare at that we see
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: different pieces of it. But it's not just across the
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: globe that we have this in common, but across time
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: we have been looking up and asking questions. Basically since
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: people have been able to ask questions. Maybe since we've
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: been people, we understand it so much better than our
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: ancestors do, and we hope future generations will understand it
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: better than we do. But while asking questions about the
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: sky can reveal answers to some of the universe's deepest mysteries,
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: how we ask those questions, what questions we ask, and
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: how we find answers can reveal something about ourselves, how
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: we think, and our relationship with the whole universe.
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: Hi.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: UC Irvine, and I desperately want to understand how we
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: understand the universe. We think about science as sort of
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: a basic inherent natural human activity to be curious about
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: the world, to try to figure out how the world
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: works as a way to filter good ideas from bad ideas.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: But what seems natural to us now, what seems basically
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: true about the way science should happen, turns out to
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: be somewhat cultural and contextual. What we mean by science
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: has changed over decades and centuries, and it continues to change,
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: from cave people staring at the night sky to men
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: of leisure operating in their personal laboratories, to massive international
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: efforts spanning decades. It raises interesting questions. Are all kinds
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: of knowledge gathering something we would consider science is the
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: accumulated wisdom of medicine, men and women in prehistoric tribes
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: scientific knowledge? What would Isaac Newton think about what we
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: are doing? There's so many questions to ask. Is this
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: the only way to figure out how the universe works
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: in the future? Will we still be doing something that
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: we recognize as science? Will future scientists recognize what we're
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: doing as science or brush it off as prehistoric nonsense?
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: And where in the end does science come from? What
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: are its roots in history? How long have we been
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: doing it? What are the major moments in which it's
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: changed and become what we recognize today. So today in
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: the podcast, we'll be asking the question who was the
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: first scientist? And it's not that I want to give
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: anybody particular credit for being the first scientist. Really, I
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: want to know when did we start doing science? Was
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: there a moment in the history of humanity that we
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: can say was before science and after science? Is that
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: even an important distinction? And what is the story we
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: tell about science really say about ourselves. So, as usual,
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: I was curious what folks out there thought about this
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: question about who was the first scientist? So I reached
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: out to my community of volunteers to ask them without
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: any chance for preparation, to opine on this important philosophical
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: and historical question. Thanks to everybody who participates. If you
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: would like to hear your voice speculating basically on the podcast,
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: don't be shy. Everybody's welcome right to me to questions
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: at Danielandjorge dot com. So for you hear these answers,
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: think for a moment, who do you think gets credit
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: for being the first science? Here's what a bunch of
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: listeners had to say.
• 4:02
  Speaker 3: My first inclination might be to say Aristotle, but that's
• 4:06
  Speaker 3: not right because he just made pronouncements and didn't do experiments.
• 4:09
  Speaker 3: So maybe the first scientist was the Greek who figured
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: out that the Earth was round by looking at the
• 4:16
  Speaker 3: difference in the length of shadow at noon in Greece
• 4:20
  Speaker 3: versus Egypt.
• 4:21
  Speaker 4: The first scientist was probably one of our long dead
• 4:24
  Speaker 4: ancestors who looked at fire, or looked up in the
• 4:28
  Speaker 4: sky and saw those points of lights up there and said,
• 4:31
  Speaker 4: I wonder what this stuff is. It's probably not what
• 4:34
  Speaker 4: our shamans or witch doctors say they are.
• 4:37
  Speaker 5: I guess some cave person that was painting a supernova
• 4:42
  Speaker 5: on a wall. The first sort of modern scientists that
• 4:46
  Speaker 5: comes to mind would probably be Aristotle.
• 4:49
  Speaker 6: I imagine who the first scientist is is relative to how
• 4:53
  Speaker 6: you measure who the first scientist was. But I imagine
• 4:57
  Speaker 6: the first scientist, the first true scientist is probably someone
• 5:00
  Speaker 6: that most people on this earth never heard of, because
• 5:02
  Speaker 6: we don't have records from that time.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: Undoubtedly weird al Yankovic.
• 5:07
  Speaker 6: I don't know, but if I have to guess, I
• 5:09
  Speaker 6: would say someone from Greece or Egypt.
• 5:13
  Speaker 7: I think the first scientists on Earth were Adam and Eve,
• 5:15
  Speaker 7: because there were the first people on Earth, and also
• 5:17
  Speaker 7: they had to know how to gather information and all
• 5:21
  Speaker 7: that stuff to know where to build cities and settlements.
• 5:25
  Speaker 8: Probably the very first human or proto human, if you're
• 5:28
  Speaker 8: talking about the simple act of making science as an
• 5:32
  Speaker 8: act of observation and learning from nature, but science as
• 5:36
  Speaker 8: a metadological mean for findings and recordings is probably much
• 5:40
  Speaker 8: more recent.
• 5:41
  Speaker 9: Presumably some distant ancestor who had a stick and poked
• 5:44
  Speaker 9: an ant hill and got some food out of it.
• 5:46
  Speaker 9: The first scientist was probably some unnamed hominid who looked
• 5:50
  Speaker 9: at the world and thought, I wonder why this is
• 5:53
  Speaker 9: the way it is more modern. I know there were
• 5:56
  Speaker 9: astronomers thousands of years ago in China, and then if
• 5:59
  Speaker 9: we're talking the scientific method, I know there were our
• 6:02
  Speaker 9: scholars and whatnot using a more modern approach. I don't
• 6:05
  Speaker 9: know exact names, but it'd be interested in learning that
• 6:08
  Speaker 9: science history.
• 6:09
  Speaker 7: I don't know.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: Man, probably somebody living in a cave we looked up
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: at the sky and thought, whoa cool, what are those?
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: I gotta figure that out. These are some really great answers,
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: and I have to say I'm really impressed. I was
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: expecting a bunch of Galileo or Francis Bacon or Isaac Newton.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: But everybody here is clearly thinking about science in a
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: broader sense, as a way of being curious about the
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: world and figuring out how it works, not just sort
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: of officially doing science as your job. So I think
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: this is really wonderful, and I think this is a
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: really difficult question to think about when science became what
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: we call science, and what we even mean by science,
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: and whether what people were doing thousands of years ago
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: is something we should consider science, and how we relate
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: to it, and what they would have to say if
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: they were fast forwarded to the future to come and
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: visit the large Hageon Cliner for example. Well, since I
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: am not an expert in the history of science, I
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: decided to do some reading and I read a fantastic
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: book called A Global History of Science from an expert
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: in the topic, Professor James Poskett, and then reached out
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: to him to invite him to chat with me about
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: this question on the podcast. So here's my interview with James. Okay,
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: so it's my great pleasure to welcome the program Professor
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: James Poskett. He's an associate professor in the history of
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: Science and Technology at the University of Warwick. He has
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: a PhD in the history of science from the University
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: of Cambridge and has held fellowships at Harvard and other universities.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: He's also the author of a recent book, Horizons, a
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: Global History of Science, that we're going to dig into today. James,
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: thanks very much for joining us today.
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: Thanks very much for having me. It's pleasure to be here.
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: Wonderful. So I want to start off very broad and
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: understand what we're talking about when we talk about science
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: and the history of science and who is doing science
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: and who isn't by doing something very nerdy and philosophical,
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: which is defining the terms. So like when I say
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: to you science, what does that mean to you? What
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: is science? And I'm curious your thoughts sort of from
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: the perspective of popular culture where people may think science
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: is and we're sort of like people who get really
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: nerdy about it. How they define science.
• 8:21
  Speaker 10: Yeah, it's a great question, and the very scientists kind
• 8:24
  Speaker 10: of question. Scientists love to start by defining their terms,
• 8:28
  Speaker 10: and I'd say historians are a bit more reluctant to
• 8:31
  Speaker 10: totally hammer down our terms before we start because it
• 8:35
  Speaker 10: might prejudge a few things which relate to some of
• 8:38
  Speaker 10: the problems. Actually, I think we'll be talking about about
• 8:41
  Speaker 10: how we define science today and how that might make
• 8:43
  Speaker 10: us lose track of some important aspects of science in
• 8:48
  Speaker 10: the past. And people that have contributed so famously philosophers
• 8:52
  Speaker 10: of science have spent one hundred plus years trying to
• 8:55
  Speaker 10: come up with a fool proof definition of science. Maybe
• 8:58
  Speaker 10: science is something that's falsified, or something that's testable, something
• 9:03
  Speaker 10: that's empirical, something that's rational, and science may at times
• 9:07
  Speaker 10: include some of those things, but also famously, none of
• 9:11
  Speaker 10: those definitions encompass all of the things that even today
• 9:15
  Speaker 10: we call science. Some sciences on't as testable in the
• 9:20
  Speaker 10: way that other sciences are, Some aren't predictive in the
• 9:23
  Speaker 10: same way other sciences are. So I don't think there's
• 9:26
  Speaker 10: one easy definition of sciences.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: Interrupt then with a meta question, Yeah, which is, how
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: is it we can have a thing we call science
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: where the National Science Foundation scientist, we don't even know
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: what this word means. How do we end up with
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: in this mess?
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah?
• 9:41
  Speaker 10: So, in fact, you've kind of started answering the question
• 9:44
  Speaker 10: in a way, and that I think one of the
• 9:46
  Speaker 10: things we can think of science as is a set
• 9:50
  Speaker 10: of institutions, of practices around those institutions, a way of
• 9:56
  Speaker 10: structuring how we go about investigating the world world, and
• 10:00
  Speaker 10: that's changed over time. So rather than thinking of science
• 10:03
  Speaker 10: as simply just a method or simply just the content
• 10:07
  Speaker 10: of scientific theories, I think modern science particularly has arisen
• 10:13
  Speaker 10: out of quite specific sets of institutions and structures, and
• 10:18
  Speaker 10: the point of those is the structure the way we
• 10:20
  Speaker 10: investigate the world and to structure knowledge. So science isn't
• 10:26
  Speaker 10: just knowledge. It's not just stuff that I know or
• 10:28
  Speaker 10: someone knows. I would say that the structuring of that
• 10:33
  Speaker 10: knowledge in particular ways is what makes a difference.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: I see. So, is it about the way that we
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: accumulate the knowledge, like the method we use to discover
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: things about the world, or the institutional like the sociological
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: respect we have for that knowledge, or is it sort
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: of a big mess of all of these things.
• 10:51
  Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean kind of a big mess of all
• 10:53
  Speaker 10: of those things. I think those things relate that the
• 10:55
  Speaker 10: institutions ensure that certain kinds of methods are followed within
• 11:01
  Speaker 10: certain kinds of disciplines. But importantly, that's changed quite a
• 11:05
  Speaker 10: lot over time, which is why, particularly a historian, I'm
• 11:08
  Speaker 10: reluctant to kind of point at what we think of
• 11:12
  Speaker 10: as science today, national scientific societies, scientists like yourself conducting
• 11:18
  Speaker 10: research in a university, perhaps in their laboratory or using
• 11:23
  Speaker 10: high tech equipment, when all of that really is a
• 11:26
  Speaker 10: product of the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries.
• 11:31
  Speaker 10: That misses quite a lot of humans seriously investigating the
• 11:35
  Speaker 10: natural world before then.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and something we say on the podcast a lot,
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: which I deeply believe, is that you don't have to
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: be a professional scientist to be doing sciences. Bawn that
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: everybody who's looking at for the net sky and is
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: wondering about the universe and trying to figure it out,
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: even just listening to this podcast, it's you curious about
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: the world, and you guys are all out there are scientists.
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: So everybody get your scientist's badge and put it on yourself. Mentally,
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: I couldn't agree more. And so one thing I want
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: to dig in you with you the genesis of science,
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: where it comes from. And there's this sort of traditional
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: story people learn in elementary school or whatever that science
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: began at some moment, you know, Galileo and empiricism and
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: Francis Bacon and the Enlightenment, and it all just sort
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: of like exploded as this new idea and then we
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: could rapidly accumulate knowledge about the world. But as you
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: exploring your wonderful book and I want to talk about today,
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: is it's more subtle than that, Isn't it's more graduals
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: more nuanced. Give us a picture about how you see
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: the sort of broader history of science coming together as
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: a thing.
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 12:34
  Speaker 10: So, as you say, there's a traditional story, which is
• 12:37
  Speaker 10: something like science originated in fifteenth sixteenth century Europe with
• 12:43
  Speaker 10: something called the scientific Revolution, and we're familiar, as you say,
• 12:46
  Speaker 10: with the kind of people that are associated with these
• 12:50
  Speaker 10: individual geniuses often kind of presented as kind of really
• 12:54
  Speaker 10: riling against forms of authority, particularly religious authorities, people like Galileo,
• 13:00
  Speaker 10: people like Newton, people like Pernicus, particularly astronomy, and fittingly,
• 13:04
  Speaker 10: view is often the center of that story. And it's
• 13:08
  Speaker 10: certainly true that something important was happening at that time,
• 13:12
  Speaker 10: and some important stuff was happening in Europe. But the
• 13:15
  Speaker 10: argument of my book essentially is that if we only
• 13:20
  Speaker 10: look at Europe and we only try and explain the
• 13:23
  Speaker 10: development of modern science from that point onwards in terms
• 13:26
  Speaker 10: of European ideas or European society, or economics or politics,
• 13:31
  Speaker 10: whatever it is.
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: Then we miss two important things.
• 13:35
  Speaker 10: One is how other cultures actually had scientific cultures that
• 13:39
  Speaker 10: were developing in quite significant ways around the same time.
• 13:43
  Speaker 10: And two that that wasn't a coincidence. It's because the
• 13:46
  Speaker 10: world was becoming increasingly connected at that time, initially through
• 13:50
  Speaker 10: things like colonialism, slavery, global trade, religious pilgrimage, later through
• 13:57
  Speaker 10: kind of international capitalism, through international warfare.
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: Et cetera, et cetera.
• 14:03
  Speaker 10: So as the world becomes more connected, from say the
• 14:07
  Speaker 10: fifteen hundreds onwards, that leads to this intermingling of scientific cultures,
• 14:13
  Speaker 10: and that for me is the key kind of.
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: Driver of a lot of this scientific change.
• 14:19
  Speaker 10: In a nutshell, that is the argument of the book,
• 14:21
  Speaker 10: which I cash out in a lot more detail.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: I see. So you're saying that the Western Europe came
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: into contact with the rest of the world and brought
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: together these strands of different kinds of thinking, data, and
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: understanding from around the world, and that's what sparked sort
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: of this revolution in understanding, not some solitary genius in
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: a tower somewhere, a man of leisure who decided let's
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: learn facts about the world in a different way.
• 14:44
  Speaker 10: Great summary, better than I the author in a way.
• 14:47
  Speaker 10: But yeah, it's and I liked your kind of point.
• 14:50
  Speaker 10: You know, it's about all these different things about data,
• 14:52
  Speaker 10: it's about ideas, it's about ways of approaching the world,
• 14:56
  Speaker 10: and as maybe we'll get on to talk about. But
• 14:58
  Speaker 10: many of these famous figures weren't actually locked in a
• 15:00
  Speaker 10: room disconnected from the world. These famous figures not by coincidence.
• 15:05
  Speaker 10: I argue, people like Isaac Newton in particular, were incredibly
• 15:10
  Speaker 10: well connected. Even if they didn't travel themselves, they were
• 15:13
  Speaker 10: able to amass information in a way that wasn't possible
• 15:17
  Speaker 10: before and make the claims they're open to about things
• 15:21
  Speaker 10: like gravity, about the nature of astronomy and such.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: Right, And I want to dig into that, But first
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: I want to figure out where this story comes from.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: I mean, I've heard this story Galleo, etcetera, etcetera. Where
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: does this myth come from? If it's a story, who
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: wrote this story of modern science? And why do we
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: all believe it's?
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: Great question.
• 15:39
  Speaker 10: I deal with this quite explicitly because I think it's
• 15:42
  Speaker 10: it could be disconcerting in general, but for the reader
• 15:46
  Speaker 10: of a book or when you're hearing this, to kind
• 15:48
  Speaker 10: of be told, oh, this story that you're quite familiar with. You,
• 15:51
  Speaker 10: I was taught this at school. I did a science
• 15:54
  Speaker 10: undergraduate degree.
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: I was kind of.
• 15:56
  Speaker 10: Taught similar things often sort of you know, it's not
• 15:58
  Speaker 10: front and center, but it's the kind of background were
• 16:01
  Speaker 10: and you think, well, you know, is this some kind
• 16:04
  Speaker 10: of conspiracy theory? Is this just all like where did
• 16:07
  Speaker 10: this come from?
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: Them? But it is.
• 16:09
  Speaker 10: You know, the narratives we tell about the past, including
• 16:12
  Speaker 10: the scientific past, they're not carefully crafted by some kind
• 16:15
  Speaker 10: of propaganda department, but they are reflective of the attitudes
• 16:19
  Speaker 10: of the time. And it was in the twentieth century
• 16:22
  Speaker 10: in particular, that the history of science became a professional thing,
• 16:26
  Speaker 10: that people started writing lots of histories of science, and
• 16:30
  Speaker 10: people professional historians, often actually professional scientists in places like
• 16:36
  Speaker 10: Britain the United States, began to present this very particular
• 16:41
  Speaker 10: view of science, which actually would have seemed quite alien
• 16:44
  Speaker 10: to anyone in say the eighteenth or the seventeenth century,
• 16:48
  Speaker 10: in which there was a special kind of Western culture
• 16:53
  Speaker 10: that produced scientific advances, and as I argue, in the book.
• 16:58
  Speaker 10: This is basically linked to the struggle between capitalism and
• 17:01
  Speaker 10: communism in the twentieth century that it became very important
• 17:06
  Speaker 10: for both the United States and on the other side
• 17:08
  Speaker 10: of the Soviet Union to present themselves as the future
• 17:13
  Speaker 10: of scientific advance and that their social and economic systems
• 17:17
  Speaker 10: produced science and there was something unique about them.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: Does that mean that those folks who were embedded in
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: the Cold War in the sixties and seventies didn't see
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: the Soviets, for example, as doing science. I mean, I
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: grew up in Los Almos, and you know, it was
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: deeply a Cold War context, and we were doing physics
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: and Los Almos racing against the threat of you know,
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: Soviet physics, which would develop other weapons which would demolish ours,
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: Wasn't there sort of also at the same time, a
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: deep fear motivating the Soviets as doing science as well
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: in order to justify their fear and that expenditure.
• 17:49
  Speaker 10: Absolutely so, Yeah, it's partly out of a kind of
• 17:52
  Speaker 10: anxiety either in the early Cold War, particularly with things
• 17:56
  Speaker 10: like the launch of SPOTNK, there is a real anxiety
• 17:59
  Speaker 10: in the US that the Soviets might be ahead. Of course,
• 18:02
  Speaker 10: the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite SPOTNEK. They get
• 18:05
  Speaker 10: the first human into space for your a Gagarin. So
• 18:10
  Speaker 10: this kind of question about what is the relationship between
• 18:16
  Speaker 10: Western society and progress in science is really charged and
• 18:20
  Speaker 10: really really important, as you received quite a lot of
• 18:23
  Speaker 10: funding in the nineteen fifties nineteen sixties. As you say,
• 18:29
  Speaker 10: so it's less that the Americans or the Western world
• 18:33
  Speaker 10: thinks that the Soviets aren't doing science. Of course they
• 18:35
  Speaker 10: know they are, but they ultimately develop a narrative which
• 18:40
  Speaker 10: is actually quite explicitly introduced into high school and kind
• 18:45
  Speaker 10: of history one oh one curricula in the United States
• 18:49
  Speaker 10: in particular, that tells a longer history about why, yes,
• 18:53
  Speaker 10: the Soviets might have achieved something in the short term,
• 18:57
  Speaker 10: but in the long run of human history, the West
• 19:00
  Speaker 10: will prevail. So the superstition over irrationality over authoritarian isn't
• 19:07
  Speaker 10: And really Galileo becomes a kind of parable you're supposed
• 19:10
  Speaker 10: to read much like Star Wars, you know, like The
• 19:13
  Speaker 10: Empire Darth Vader is, the Soviet Union slash the Nazis.
• 19:17
  Speaker 10: You're supposed to read the Catholic Church in the kind
• 19:20
  Speaker 10: of Galileo versus the Church as a liberal fighting against
• 19:26
  Speaker 10: the authoritarian rule of the pope slash Stalin. So there's
• 19:31
  Speaker 10: this kind of mixing of the narrative. It's not that bluntly,
• 19:34
  Speaker 10: but that's the sort of the ethos that that narrative.
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: Is trying to develop.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: So you're saying the pope is basically the emperor.
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah exactly, Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good way.
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: Well, he basically is the last Holy Roman Emperor.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: Oh that's fascinating. Well, it's interesting to me. It sounds
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: to me like you're saying that, you know, we're being
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: positioned to believe that our science is sort of like
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: the true descendant of pure science from history, that it's
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: we invented it and it's you know, it's our birthright
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: is sort of and not something from the East.
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, is that separation.
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's fascinating from also from the context of the
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: fall of the Soviet Union, because there's a lot of
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: like excellent Soviet physics going on and a lot of
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: that has just been lost, you know, alternative directions that
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: this community was following. We saw some of that this
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: summer with the excitement about l K ninety nine, the
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: room temperat superconductor, which was supposed to be a remnant
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: of Soviet physics. And I just had the sense that
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: there's all these jewels from really smart people working in
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: a different culture that has been essentially dismissed.
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: Absolutely agree, very much.
• 20:34
  Speaker 10: And I talk quite a lot about Soviet physics in
• 20:36
  Speaker 10: the late part of my book, and then back one
• 20:39
  Speaker 10: of my colleagues, doctor Claire Shaw, writes quite a lot.
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: About how many of the kind of exciting things in
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: the future of science.
• 20:46
  Speaker 10: Things like AI, things like low temperature superconductors, all of
• 20:51
  Speaker 10: this is coming out of the sort of lost world.
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: Of Soviet physics. Yeah, and I want to give some
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: credit to our listeners. I asked them who they thought
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: was the first scientist, and frankly, I expected to hear
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: a lot of Galileo, Bacon, et cetera. But I got
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: a lot of answers of things like a long dead
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: ancestor who looked up at the sky, or you know,
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: a cave person painting a supernova on a wall. I mean,
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: there was one guy who said weird Al Yankovic, which
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: is probably not accurate.
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: You said anyone could be a scientist.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: I'm not saying weird Al's not a scientist. I mean,
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: it's definitely a creative dude. But the general sense was that,
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: you know, people have been doing science for a long time.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: It's not just something that happened in Western Europe. So
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: you know, kudos to their teachers or to our listeners
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: from being more broadly educated. But I was wondering if
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: you could help us and paint the picture of how
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: these threats came together. You were telling us about how
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: this moment, the scientific revolution was more of a coagulation
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: of these ideas. Tell us about, for example, how Newton
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: relied on knowledge from around the world to build his theories.
• 21:56
  Speaker 10: Yes, a fascinating kind of classic. So Newton famously develops
• 22:03
  Speaker 10: his laws of motion, including identifying the laws for acceleration
• 22:07
  Speaker 10: of gravity. And Newton is not someone who is locked
• 22:11
  Speaker 10: in a room disconnected from the world. He doesn't travel
• 22:14
  Speaker 10: around the world. But particularly because he works as Master
• 22:16
  Speaker 10: of the Mint in the effectively the Bank of England,
• 22:20
  Speaker 10: the early version in England at the time, he's able
• 22:24
  Speaker 10: to collect information from around the world, information from East
• 22:29
  Speaker 10: India company officers who are sailing through the Bay of Bengal, even.
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: As far as Vietnam.
• 22:35
  Speaker 10: Some of the East India company officers are sailing, collecting
• 22:39
  Speaker 10: astronomical observations made by those.
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: Officers at sea or on land.
• 22:44
  Speaker 10: He collects information taken by astronomers, particularly French astronomers. He
• 22:49
  Speaker 10: traveled to West Africa and the Caribbean on slave ships,
• 22:54
  Speaker 10: and in fact, an important part of the story I
• 22:56
  Speaker 10: tell about Newton is how he was personally invested in
• 23:01
  Speaker 10: the slave trade and colonial trade, and that world in
• 23:06
  Speaker 10: which he was invested was also the world in which
• 23:08
  Speaker 10: he got his information from. The upshot of this is
• 23:11
  Speaker 10: by collecting astronomical observations, particularly of things like comets, but
• 23:17
  Speaker 10: also crucially observations of things like the tides and the
• 23:23
  Speaker 10: length of a pendulum to swing for a second, he's
• 23:26
  Speaker 10: able to figure out and really that is the empirical
• 23:30
  Speaker 10: evidence for his theory of universal gravitation, because his theory
• 23:35
  Speaker 10: of gravitation implies something that's at the time quite counterintuitive
• 23:40
  Speaker 10: and controversial, that the Earth isn't a perfect sphere, and
• 23:44
  Speaker 10: therefore the force the acceleration of gravity is different at
• 23:50
  Speaker 10: different points of the Earth. That nearer the equator, gravity
• 23:55
  Speaker 10: is effectively less because you're further away from the center
• 23:59
  Speaker 10: of the mass than at the pulse. And so this
• 24:03
  Speaker 10: ability to collect information from around the world, which is
• 24:07
  Speaker 10: linked to things like the slave trade, colonial trade, is
• 24:12
  Speaker 10: the really necessary conditions for someone like Newton to be
• 24:16
  Speaker 10: able to develop his theory. So that's more about data
• 24:18
  Speaker 10: from around the world than necessarily other cultures. But he's
• 24:22
  Speaker 10: a real, I think, smoking gun for this world of interconnection.
• 24:27
  Speaker 10: Being at the heart of the scientific revolution fascinating.
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: I was also enjoying the passage in your book about
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: Darwin and how he relied on data as well from
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: disparate sources. Tell us a little bit about Darwin's story.
• 24:40
  Speaker 10: Yeah, so Charles Darwin famously did travel around the world,
• 24:43
  Speaker 10: and that was a very important part of his theorizing
• 24:46
  Speaker 10: of evolution. Because that's rather well known, I don't cover
• 24:49
  Speaker 10: that in detail in the book. Instead, I focus a
• 24:52
  Speaker 10: lot more on the fact that Darwin was well aware
• 24:56
  Speaker 10: that other cultures already had an idea about evolution. So
• 25:02
  Speaker 10: whilst Darwin, it's true, develops the theory of evolution by
• 25:06
  Speaker 10: natural selections of the specific mechanism, the idea that the
• 25:11
  Speaker 10: nature species had originated from some kind of natural process
• 25:16
  Speaker 10: that was common in many cultures.
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: In fact, I often say Europe was the odd one out.
• 25:22
  Speaker 10: It was weird, and it was one of the few
• 25:24
  Speaker 10: cultures that didn't believe in evolution prior to the nineteenth century.
• 25:27
  Speaker 10: I mean, the idea that there's a natural kind of
• 25:30
  Speaker 10: evolutionary origin of not just plants and animals, but humans
• 25:34
  Speaker 10: is like part of the course in say Hinduism or Buddhism.
• 25:37
  Speaker 10: And because darn was aware of that, he sought out
• 25:41
  Speaker 10: information from not just other places that are the cultures.
• 25:45
  Speaker 10: And one of the great examples I use in my
• 25:47
  Speaker 10: book is that on the Origin of Species, Darwin Well
• 25:52
  Speaker 10: cites a sixteenth century Chinese encyclopedia of natural history, and
• 25:58
  Speaker 10: he's particularly interested in how animals have changed over time
• 26:02
  Speaker 10: and the documentation of that in both recent and ancient sources,
• 26:07
  Speaker 10: because then he can kind of try and chart there's
• 26:09
  Speaker 10: an interesting charting whether evolution has happened over relatively what
• 26:13
  Speaker 10: we now would think of as relatively small time scales,
• 26:16
  Speaker 10: which we now know is unlikely. That he was interested
• 26:19
  Speaker 10: in that, and so he cites this Ming dynasty very
• 26:23
  Speaker 10: in fact important encyclopedia of natural history by a Chinese
• 26:27
  Speaker 10: physician called alishu Zen. And Darlin can't read Chinese, so
• 26:30
  Speaker 10: he has to get someone at the British Museum to
• 26:33
  Speaker 10: translate portions of it for him. And that's just one example.
• 26:37
  Speaker 10: He uses French translations of other Chinese works on agriculture
• 26:42
  Speaker 10: to get an idea about the development of.
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: Plants in China. He's interested in Russian accounts.
• 26:48
  Speaker 10: Of geology and natural history from places like Siberia, so
• 26:53
  Speaker 10: he's really not just a collector of specimens famously on
• 26:56
  Speaker 10: the Beagle Voyage, but rather like Newton, he's a collector
• 26:59
  Speaker 10: of information, including from other cultures.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: Fascinating. Okay, I have a lot more questions about this
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: fascinating topic, but first let's take a quick break. Okay,
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: we're back and I'm chatting with Professor James Poskett about
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: the thorny questions of what is science, when did it begin?
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: And what it says about how we think. I also
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: thought your story about the Islamic world was really important.
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: We often hear about their role as sort of capturing
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: and reproducing and propagating the works of the Greeks, but
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: I love if you tell our listeners a little bit about,
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: you know, their critique and their elaboration on the work
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: of the Greeks, rather than just as being vessels for it.
• 27:48
  Speaker 10: Absolutely, and your analogy that we often think of Islamic
• 27:53
  Speaker 10: science as simply the sort of vessels or you know,
• 27:56
  Speaker 10: like guardians of Greek science, they just holding on to
• 27:58
  Speaker 10: it to pass it on to European science later. But
• 28:02
  Speaker 10: the evidence for that that Islamic thinkers in both the
• 28:07
  Speaker 10: medieval period but including much later in the fourteenth fifteenth,
• 28:10
  Speaker 10: sixteenth century, they weren't just copying out Greek texts, they
• 28:15
  Speaker 10: were translating them into Arabic or Persian and then writing
• 28:21
  Speaker 10: detailed commentaries critiquing these earlier Greek astronomers and mathematicians in particular,
• 28:29
  Speaker 10: So someone like Ptolemy, the famous Greek astronomer that forms
• 28:33
  Speaker 10: the basis of sort of lots of European astronomy. Well,
• 28:37
  Speaker 10: Islamic astronomers recognized what was powerful about Ptolemy, but also
• 28:41
  Speaker 10: recognized that Ptolemy's ancient Greek astronomy, some of its assumptions
• 28:45
  Speaker 10: created massive problems. Particularly, Ptolemy insisted that everything in the
• 28:52
  Speaker 10: universe outside of the Earth had to move in perfect circles,
• 28:56
  Speaker 10: and this created a problem because if you insist that
• 28:59
  Speaker 10: all the planet to moving imperfect circles, I mean it's
• 29:02
  Speaker 10: impossible to perfectly model the movement of the planets around
• 29:07
  Speaker 10: the Sun or even around the Earth, if you think
• 29:10
  Speaker 10: there's a At the time, obviously people believe that the Earth,
• 29:13
  Speaker 10: by and Lodge, was at the center of the universe,
• 29:16
  Speaker 10: and in particular, a Persian astronomer in the thirteenth century,
• 29:21
  Speaker 10: nase aldn Altusi, who was working in what's now modern Iran,
• 29:29
  Speaker 10: wrote a very detailed account of how you would have
• 29:32
  Speaker 10: to change astronomy and ancient Greek astronomy, keeping some of
• 29:38
  Speaker 10: the good bits. But Tusi develops new techniques, new mathematical
• 29:44
  Speaker 10: and really geometric techniques to better model the movement of
• 29:49
  Speaker 10: the planets. So he basically has like a circle inside
• 29:52
  Speaker 10: another circle. It's called the Tusi couple, which allows you
• 29:55
  Speaker 10: to create linear motion from circular motion, which to come
• 29:59
  Speaker 10: long stories or allows you to kind of get the
• 30:01
  Speaker 10: planets to sort of wabble around a bit more as
• 30:03
  Speaker 10: they go. So it's not perfect, it's not you know,
• 30:06
  Speaker 10: the proper elliptical laws that Keptler comes up with, but
• 30:10
  Speaker 10: it's a lot closer, and Copernicus actually uses Nasa al
• 30:15
  Speaker 10: din Altusi's work later during the scientific of revolution, so That's.
• 30:21
  Speaker 2: Just one example.
• 30:21
  Speaker 10: But the point is as you say that the Islamic
• 30:24
  Speaker 10: Golden Age, for one, didn't suddenly end in like the
• 30:28
  Speaker 10: twelfth century, and two they weren't just copying out Greek texts.
• 30:32
  Speaker 2: They were seriously.
• 30:34
  Speaker 10: Engaging with them, building on them, and then later European
• 30:37
  Speaker 10: astronomers as well as chemists, mathematicians and so forth built
• 30:42
  Speaker 10: on that as well.
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: Wonderful now that we have a more sort of nuanced
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: picture of who is doing what, I want to trace
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: it back and try to answer the question of like,
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: when is its science and when is it just sort
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: of like thinking and wondering, And is there a meaningful difference?
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: I mean, if we talk about how we do science
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: day and imagine that we just looked back at what
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: Galleo and Newton and Bacon were doing, would we recognize
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: what they were doing as science or flip it around
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: if they showed up today, would they recognize what we're
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: doing as science or would they think it's totally alien?
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: You know, how is science today different in institution and
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: practice and theory than even just what we consider the
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: beginning of the scientific revolution. Before we go back and
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: talk about whether you know, the Chinese, we're doing science
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: or not? What about you know, could we lift up
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: as the grandfathers of science? How much has it changed
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: even in those few hundred years.
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot.
• 31:35
  Speaker 10: It's a great question, and you're right, it's a good
• 31:37
  Speaker 10: way to maybe get to what science is and it's not.
• 31:40
  Speaker 10: I think if we look at people like Newton, Francis Bacon, Galileo,
• 31:45
  Speaker 10: if we look at them with today's standards, many of
• 31:51
  Speaker 10: the things they do do not look like science. For
• 31:54
  Speaker 10: a number of reasons. They're not embedded in the kind
• 31:57
  Speaker 10: of scientific institutions we think of. So Newton was president
• 32:01
  Speaker 10: of the Royal Society, which is of course a national
• 32:04
  Speaker 10: scientific institution today in England in the UK, but that
• 32:09
  Speaker 10: wasn't like a national scientific academy. That was a gentleman's club.
• 32:13
  Speaker 10: And a lot of what Newton did was really sort
• 32:15
  Speaker 10: of tinkering with stuff, writing very long books, I mean
• 32:19
  Speaker 10: in Latin, but doesn't look like science. He's not sitting
• 32:22
  Speaker 10: in a laboratory. And also, I think, to turn it round,
• 32:27
  Speaker 10: if they looked at today, I think the thing that
• 32:29
  Speaker 10: people like Newton and Bacon and Galileo would find odd
• 32:33
  Speaker 10: is how by and large we think of or at
• 32:36
  Speaker 10: least present science as totally separate from things like the
• 32:41
  Speaker 10: arts and philosophy, religion, politics, even history. And for all
• 32:47
  Speaker 10: of them, particularly someone like Isaac Newton, science was part
• 32:52
  Speaker 10: and parcel with doing philosophy.
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: It was part and parcel of religious thought, and it
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: was also part of the parcel of history.
• 33:01
  Speaker 10: So Newton spent much of his life searching for secret
• 33:06
  Speaker 10: meanings using kind of almost like the techniques of calculus
• 33:10
  Speaker 10: in the Bible. He also spent a lot of time
• 33:13
  Speaker 10: doing weird at chemical experiments in the hope of finding
• 33:17
  Speaker 10: the philosopher's stone. And he wrote long histories as well
• 33:21
  Speaker 10: about the kind of development of civilization and the kind
• 33:25
  Speaker 10: of future, made predictions about the end of the world.
• 33:27
  Speaker 10: Newton thought the world would end in twenty sixty and
• 33:30
  Speaker 10: you know, he might turn out to be right. But Newton,
• 33:33
  Speaker 10: and for anyone of his era in Europe or elsewhere,
• 33:36
  Speaker 10: that wasn't weird. That was part and parcel of thinking
• 33:40
  Speaker 10: about the nature of the universe, but therefore also the
• 33:44
  Speaker 10: nature of bigger things like society and got and I
• 33:46
  Speaker 10: think the way in which in the twentieth century in particular,
• 33:50
  Speaker 10: and it's part of actually the story we're talking about
• 33:53
  Speaker 10: at the same time as in the West we start saying, well,
• 33:57
  Speaker 10: Western science is very different from Eastern science.
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: That's exactly the.
• 34:01
  Speaker 10: Same time that we start saying, well, science is completely
• 34:06
  Speaker 10: separate from philosophy, from religion, from arts, from history.
• 34:10
  Speaker 2: So I think that's the big, big difference.
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: But is there a moment we can identify where there's
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: crucial elements added to the process of science to make
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: it more like what we considered today. I mean, could
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: we argue that empiricism is what brings Galleo and those
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: folks and makes them different from Aristotle and people who
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: just thought about the world and didn't explore it experimentally.
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: Is there really an inflection point there or is that
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: also a mythology.
• 34:36
  Speaker 10: I don't think the big difference between modern science and
• 34:41
  Speaker 10: pre modern science is sudden interest in empiricism. It's similarly
• 34:46
  Speaker 10: a myth that the Greeks were totally uninterested in observing
• 34:51
  Speaker 10: the world, including Aristotle. Yes, they had a philosophy that
• 34:56
  Speaker 10: relied some of them, like Aristotle, that relies more on
• 35:00
  Speaker 10: kind of a priori reasoning thinking about the nature of
• 35:03
  Speaker 10: things first, But it's not true that they didn't investigate
• 35:06
  Speaker 10: the world. And similarly, it's not true that even people
• 35:10
  Speaker 10: like Newton were straightforwardly empiricist. I mean, yes, he collected data,
• 35:14
  Speaker 10: but Newton is as much particularly in the development of
• 35:18
  Speaker 10: things like laws, that's a particular philosophical position on the
• 35:24
  Speaker 10: relationship between entities in the universe. So I don't think
• 35:27
  Speaker 10: there's this big shift to empiricism. My argument in the book,
• 35:30
  Speaker 10: which obviously you know, people can debate, is that the
• 35:34
  Speaker 10: shift is more to do with how the world becomes connected, which,
• 35:37
  Speaker 10: as I've discussed, produces new forms of data, but also
• 35:40
  Speaker 10: new ways of thinking. The modern science thing, though, I
• 35:43
  Speaker 10: think the kind of science we do today is more
• 35:46
  Speaker 10: of a product of the late nineteenth and twentieth century.
• 35:48
  Speaker 10: That's what people think of when they think of science.
• 35:52
  Speaker 10: They think of scientists, and the word scientists was only
• 35:56
  Speaker 10: coined in the eighteen thirties, so there was nobody who
• 35:59
  Speaker 10: called themselves a scientist. Newton wouldn't have called themselves a
• 36:03
  Speaker 10: scientist because there.
• 36:05
  Speaker 2: Wasn't a word. It was only coined in the eighteen thirties.
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: We think of.
• 36:09
  Speaker 10: Scientists doing science, which by which we mean professional science
• 36:14
  Speaker 10: is a job. I mean Newton wasn't employed as a
• 36:17
  Speaker 10: scientist either he was relatively independently wealthy by his later life.
• 36:23
  Speaker 10: Most scientific people in the past, including how the cultures
• 36:27
  Speaker 10: were gentlemen, literaty, etc. Science investigating the world was something
• 36:34
  Speaker 10: you did alongside everything else. So the idea of having
• 36:37
  Speaker 10: a job of being a scientist in a laboratory, in
• 36:40
  Speaker 10: a university funded by the nation state and or private business,
• 36:47
  Speaker 10: that's I think what we think of when we think
• 36:49
  Speaker 10: of science today. But that's only really happens, I mean
• 36:52
  Speaker 10: really in the twentieth century. It starts happening in Germany
• 36:55
  Speaker 10: in the late nineteenth century, and then in places like
• 36:59
  Speaker 10: Britain in America they start copying that and relatedly and
• 37:03
  Speaker 10: realizing that actually they need to get businesses involved with science,
• 37:07
  Speaker 10: they need to get the government to fund science. But
• 37:09
  Speaker 10: that's only happens around the kind of First World War
• 37:11
  Speaker 10: and then even more the Second World War.
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: So then if there isn't a moment when science as
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: we know it came to be, but sort of this
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: gradual evolution of philosophy and institutions, then that makes me
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: want to like dive deep into the history of humanity
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: and understand where these threads originate. And I've been reading about,
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: for example, ancient Sumerian astronomers, and of course astronomy is
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: something that we have in common with the ancient folks,
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: because you know, we've been looking up at the sky
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: and it's sort of one of the earliest investigations of
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: the natural world. And you know, the Sumerians famously kept
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: a very good celestial charts and developed the calendar. It's
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: very clear that they were systematizing their knowledge about the world.
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: And one thing I always wonder about is how much
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: they were sort of mentally doing what we are doing,
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: where you know, as a modern physicist, I'm developing a
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: model of the universe in my head and I'm sort
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: of separating myself from nature and saying, here's how nature works.
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: These are the rules of nature. And I wonder if
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: for the Samerians, if it was just like, well, look,
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: this is useful because I like to predict when it's
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: going to rain and when it's not, and when my
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: harvest is going to happen, and when there's an eclipse,
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: or if they were like building mental models about the
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: world in a way that we would recognize.
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: It's a great question.
• 38:26
  Speaker 10: And I think again, the reason astronomy is a great example,
• 38:30
  Speaker 10: because it's also institutionalized to.
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: Some of the other things.
• 38:34
  Speaker 10: Humans have looked at plants for presumably as long as
• 38:37
  Speaker 10: there were humans and used them for medical purposes and
• 38:41
  Speaker 10: hate them, but that was rarely until much later institutionalized,
• 38:44
  Speaker 10: whereas astronomy. What astronomy Even in ancient Samaria or in
• 38:49
  Speaker 10: the Mayan court or an ancient Babylon, these were things
• 38:52
  Speaker 10: that the court paid people to do, and so you're right,
• 38:56
  Speaker 10: they had practical uses organizing festivals, religious festivals, harvests, making
• 39:03
  Speaker 10: astrological predictions, so that sort of had a link to
• 39:07
  Speaker 10: political power, if you like, in political decision making. Your question,
• 39:12
  Speaker 10: were they building a model of the universe? I think
• 39:15
  Speaker 10: the short answer is yes, just not like you are.
• 39:19
  Speaker 10: Astronomy wasn't just a tool for ancient people. Astronomy, I
• 39:24
  Speaker 10: think was almost always linked to quite detailed conceptions of
• 39:31
  Speaker 10: the nature of the universe and the relationship between humans
• 39:36
  Speaker 10: and nature and also humans and gods.
• 39:41
  Speaker 2: Often so if you think of.
• 39:43
  Speaker 10: Something like in the Maya and astronomical tradition, well, part
• 39:48
  Speaker 10: of the reason that many pre Columbian cultures are so
• 39:51
  Speaker 10: interested in astronomy is because the sun plays such a
• 39:53
  Speaker 10: central role in their conception of the origins of the universe,
• 39:59
  Speaker 10: of the origins of themselves. And so yeah, they're not
• 40:02
  Speaker 10: building a kind of detailed high physics model of the
• 40:07
  Speaker 10: nature of the Big Bang. But if we abstract that slightly,
• 40:11
  Speaker 10: they aren't just making tools. They are trying to link
• 40:15
  Speaker 10: not necessarily always through the mathematics, but certainly through quite
• 40:19
  Speaker 10: elaborate formulations about what is the relationship between this event
• 40:25
  Speaker 10: and my ability to predict this event like an eclipse,
• 40:28
  Speaker 10: like a solar or lunar eclipse, and how the universe
• 40:33
  Speaker 10: must be structured, and what humanity's place is within it.
• 40:38
  Speaker 10: And they might come to the conclusion, well, the universe
• 40:41
  Speaker 10: is structured in such a way that the Sun God
• 40:44
  Speaker 10: provides the Emperor with power which allows him to perform all.
• 40:50
  Speaker 2: These miraculous events.
• 40:52
  Speaker 10: And we today might think, well, that's ridiculous, but I
• 40:55
  Speaker 10: think if we just take a step back and think, well, structurally,
• 40:58
  Speaker 10: what are they doing, they are doing a similar thing.
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: All right, this is a fascinating discussion, but let's take
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: any quick break to hear from our sponsors. We're back
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: and we're diving deep into the philosophical and historical foundations
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: of what science is and when it began. Something I
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: think is really fascinating about that mental model is how
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: in modern times we implicitly separate ourselves from nature. We like,
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: we're subjective humans, but we're trying to build a model
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: of objective nature. And I was reading this fascinating book
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: about Sumerian astronomy by Francesca Rushberg, and she was commenting
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: that they don't even have a word for nature, that
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: this concept of nature as a separate entity doesn't even exist.
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: She writes, quote, there's no lexical counterpart to nature in
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: Cuneiform language, nor consequently, was there a conceptual counterpart. So
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: if you went back and asked, like the top Sumerian astronomer,
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: like what is your model of nature, you know, they'd
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: be like model of what? What are you talking about?
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: Like we are part of it all? This is all
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: the universe. It's it's fascinating how many of these implicit
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: assumptions there are in our modern view of science. And
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: I want to ask you about something you just said
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: about the structure of the world, because I think we
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: tend to think of the universe sort of very geometrically,
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: Like if I want to understand how does the solar
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: system work. I build a model in my mind and
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: it's sort of three D and Okay, the Sun is
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: going over here and the moon is over there, and
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: that's why I have an eclipse. And to me, the
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: three D geometrical picture is the answer to the question
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: of like why are there eclipses? But I was reading
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: about ancient Chinese astronomy, and you know, the Chinese famously
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: weren't as developed in geometry as the Greeks were, though
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: their astronomy was very accurate, right, they relied more on
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: algebra and arithmetic. And these days we know that there's
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: an equivalence between algebra and geometry. But I wonder in
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: the minds of those ancient Chinese astronomers, they have a
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: geometric picture in their minds, like why this was happening?
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: Or did they just think about it in a fundamentally
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: different way, because you know, geometry wasn't taught to them
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: in third grade in the week for all of us,
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: and it's impossible for us to like mentally get outside
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: of the geometric box. How do you think a Chinese
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: astronomer thought about the solar system?
• 43:20
  Speaker 10: Yeah, I think they did think about it in a
• 43:23
  Speaker 10: fundamentally different way, and they're supposed to get slightly more
• 43:27
  Speaker 10: philosophical about this. There's an area of philosophy called structural realism,
• 43:33
  Speaker 10: which is essentially that the universe might have a structure,
• 43:37
  Speaker 10: but there could be multiple ways in which you could
• 43:41
  Speaker 10: understand that structure, so there is not necessarily a one
• 43:44
  Speaker 10: to one equivalence between the structure of the universe and
• 43:47
  Speaker 10: a theory you might have. And actually you gave a
• 43:50
  Speaker 10: good example about how that's literally true in basic mathematical terms,
• 43:54
  Speaker 10: between like algebraic and geometric forms of understanding.
• 43:59
  Speaker 2: I think I don't get too.
• 44:00
  Speaker 10: Deep into the bossy of science, although I did study
• 44:02
  Speaker 10: it as part of my training, but that's sort of
• 44:06
  Speaker 10: how I think about how, say ancient Chinese astronomers would
• 44:11
  Speaker 10: have thought about the universe, or even Greek astronomers who Ptolemy,
• 44:16
  Speaker 10: thought what was happening on Earth was fundamentally different from
• 44:20
  Speaker 10: what was happening in the heavens, that the rules that
• 44:23
  Speaker 10: applied on Earth were not the same kind of rules.
• 44:27
  Speaker 10: There weren't just different rules, there were different kinds of rules,
• 44:31
  Speaker 10: and that you can conceptualize accurately the universe in different ways.
• 44:40
  Speaker 10: So for ancient Chinese astronomers. There's various aspects of Chinese astronomy.
• 44:44
  Speaker 10: One is this kind of technical aspect which is equatorial,
• 44:48
  Speaker 10: which you can explain better than I, but using fixed
• 44:51
  Speaker 10: polar stars, so keeping the kind of background of the
• 44:55
  Speaker 10: universe much more fixed, whereas in sort of Greek and
• 44:59
  Speaker 10: later Islami and Christian astronomy, it's a lot about the
• 45:02
  Speaker 10: rising and setting of stars, so it's about the ecliptic,
• 45:06
  Speaker 10: and so there's this technical difference, but there's also a
• 45:08
  Speaker 10: philosophical difference about what they think is happening there. For
• 45:12
  Speaker 10: Chinese astronomers, the universe is relatively flat but also circular,
• 45:20
  Speaker 10: but also there's a sort of a force of nature.
• 45:23
  Speaker 10: There's something called the Mandate of Heaven, which much as
• 45:28
  Speaker 10: we were talking about this separation between nature and humanity.
• 45:32
  Speaker 10: Again there's not that quite a strict separation as a
• 45:34
  Speaker 10: kind of separation, but the way in which the universe
• 45:38
  Speaker 10: is structured, what's happening when an eclipse happens, feeds into
• 45:43
  Speaker 10: the flow of this mandate. So it's not that there's
• 45:47
  Speaker 10: like a god, it's that there is this almost kind
• 45:50
  Speaker 10: of force that is provided through the structure of the universe.
• 45:56
  Speaker 10: Through the emperor and is reflected in the sky above.
• 46:01
  Speaker 2: You're right.
• 46:02
  Speaker 10: Also, what we find when we study other cultures is
• 46:04
  Speaker 10: a lot of particularly say in the Chinese case. And
• 46:07
  Speaker 10: this is what more technical historians of science have looked at.
• 46:12
  Speaker 2: Is that they're expressing.
• 46:16
  Speaker 10: Complex mathematical ideas but often through language. And this is
• 46:21
  Speaker 10: sort of thing you know, we think about at school,
• 46:22
  Speaker 10: the difference between saying two plus three is five versus
• 46:26
  Speaker 10: Jack has two apples, Amy has three apples.
• 46:29
  Speaker 2: How many apples do they have together?
• 46:32
  Speaker 10: There's a lot more kind of verbal, concrete expression of
• 46:39
  Speaker 10: mathematics and astronomy and many other cultures. But there's more
• 46:43
  Speaker 10: than one way to add up five apples, not just literally,
• 46:46
  Speaker 10: but also in terms of how we express that.
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: It's fascinating to think about the sort of history of
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: science and how it all came together. And I think
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: often about how our knowledge itself is a bit random.
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: That we've discovered X, and then why and then Z,
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: and if you ran the universe or if you ran
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: science again a thousand times, we might discover things in
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: different order and think about things differently. I wonder also
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: about science itself, like do you imagine, say we ran
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: the Earth from the year ten thousand BC ran that
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: experiment ten thousand times. Do you think we would have
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: arrived at science in roughly the same way every time?
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: Or we would have totally different cultural institutions and we
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: would argue bitterly with scientists in air quotes from the
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: other earths about who's really doing science or not? Is
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: it something which will inevitably bubble up as a human endeavor,
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: or is it just something peculiar to our history. Do
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: you think that's a great question. I suppose it's unanswerable,
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: of course, like many good questions.
• 47:44
  Speaker 10: I think it's probably an unpopular answer amongst scientists. But
• 47:48
  Speaker 10: I do think it would look nothing like it does now.
• 47:53
  Speaker 10: So I don't think that the particular form of science
• 47:58
  Speaker 10: we have today is a kind of natural consequence of
• 48:02
  Speaker 10: humans becoming better at understanding the world. I think that
• 48:06
  Speaker 10: doesn't look like how science has developed exactly as you say.
• 48:11
  Speaker 10: In fact, humans across the world over the last ten
• 48:14
  Speaker 10: thousand years have thought up all different kinds of ways,
• 48:18
  Speaker 10: some more accurate, some less accurate, some better for society,
• 48:23
  Speaker 10: some worse for society, to organize and structure their knowledge,
• 48:30
  Speaker 10: both institutionally and at the kind of level of just
• 48:33
  Speaker 10: doing it together.
• 48:34
  Speaker 2: So I don't think there's.
• 48:34
  Speaker 10: Any good reason to think that if you changed a
• 48:38
  Speaker 10: few of the variables at the start, or you just
• 48:40
  Speaker 10: accept there's a level of randomness in the starting conditions
• 48:45
  Speaker 10: of the experiment or bits that go along the way,
• 48:47
  Speaker 10: that we would end up in the same place today,
• 48:50
  Speaker 10: because I mean, you just see that in history and
• 48:52
  Speaker 10: even in contemporary science, like if you think in the
• 48:54
  Speaker 10: Cold War, the kind of science that was still good science,
• 48:57
  Speaker 10: but by and large there was being done in the
• 49:00
  Speaker 10: Soviet Union was really different to what was being ws.
• 49:03
  Speaker 10: But that's because the kind of starting conditions were different.
• 49:06
  Speaker 10: So I don't think you'd end up with the same thing.
• 49:09
  Speaker 10: I think you'd end up with something else. And I
• 49:10
  Speaker 10: think we will end up with something else in the
• 49:13
  Speaker 10: next however long.
• 49:14
  Speaker 2: We've got left.
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: Right, So that's my last question for you, which is
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: equally unanswerable. Is project forward five hundred years or a
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: thousand years or ten thousand years in human society. Do
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: you think future historians of science will look back and say, oh, yeah,
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: back then that was science, that was modern science, or
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: do you think they will sort of like, you know,
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: chuckle behind their hands. The way a lot of modernists
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: do at ancient ways of knowledge.
• 49:40
  Speaker 10: That's a great I mean, I think in the let's
• 49:42
  Speaker 10: say this short term of quote unquote five hundred years.
• 49:45
  Speaker 10: I mean, to be blunt, I don't think human civilization
• 49:49
  Speaker 10: and any meaningful form is going to be.
• 49:50
  Speaker 2: Around in five thousand years.
• 49:52
  Speaker 10: But we'll be questioning it five hundred to be honest,
• 49:54
  Speaker 10: but let's say five hundred, we might survive that long?
• 49:59
  Speaker 10: Would they think what we're doing is science? So at
• 50:02
  Speaker 10: its core, I'm a social cultural political historian that thinks
• 50:06
  Speaker 10: that the thing structures of society, ideas in culture do
• 50:10
  Speaker 10: fundamentally matter to what we think counter science and how
• 50:14
  Speaker 10: we organize it.
• 50:15
  Speaker 2: So it's your way.
• 50:16
  Speaker 10: It's hard to answer that question because what I want
• 50:19
  Speaker 10: to know is, well, what society going to look like?
• 50:21
  Speaker 10: What's culture going to look like? I assume it's not
• 50:24
  Speaker 10: going to look the same as it does now, but
• 50:27
  Speaker 10: what it will look like is hard to guess. I
• 50:30
  Speaker 10: guess you could run different counter and not even counterfactory
• 50:33
  Speaker 10: could run different thought experiments. If we turn towards a
• 50:37
  Speaker 10: kind of right wing populism and the world is run
• 50:40
  Speaker 10: by authoritarian rulers, well you'll get a different kind of
• 50:44
  Speaker 10: science that will probably be negative for society.
• 50:48
  Speaker 2: Maybe it's not as.
• 50:50
  Speaker 10: Simple as a kind of political future between authoritarianism or not.
• 50:54
  Speaker 10: Maybe it's more about how climate change is going to
• 50:57
  Speaker 10: fundamentally change in the end humanity's conception of its place
• 51:02
  Speaker 10: in nature. So you talked about separating humans from nature.
• 51:06
  Speaker 10: Climate change obviously literally confronts us with the idea that
• 51:11
  Speaker 10: humans are not separate from nature, and in the end,
• 51:13
  Speaker 10: whether people like it or not, they won't have to
• 51:16
  Speaker 10: kind of believe the evidence from the scientists because they'll
• 51:19
  Speaker 10: be believing the evidence of, you know, the climate catastrophe
• 51:23
  Speaker 10: in their face in five hundred years time. So maybe
• 51:26
  Speaker 10: that will change how people approach science in a way
• 51:30
  Speaker 10: which is more in a way prim or don't like
• 51:33
  Speaker 10: you were suggesting, where human agency and non human agency
• 51:37
  Speaker 10: are wrapped up a lot more in how scientists are
• 51:39
  Speaker 10: thinking that it wouldn't be possible to kind of be
• 51:43
  Speaker 10: this astrophysicist where you say, well, I'm just going to
• 51:45
  Speaker 10: sit in my office and I'm just going to think
• 51:47
  Speaker 10: about what the structure of the universe is and work
• 51:49
  Speaker 10: it out mathematically, and my humanity is a relevant to that.
• 51:52
  Speaker 2: I guess I'm probably maybe the latter.
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I like to imagine that even though we
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: think we've understood so much about the world that in
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: the longest sweep of knowledge gathering, we're just in the
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: beginning stages, you know, the foothills of climbing that mountain.
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: I think going along with that, we have to recognize
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: that the way we're going to do science could also change,
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: and that it's really very narrow and sort of hubristic
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: to imagine like, oh, we have some final method that
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: this is the way science is going to happen for
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: the next ten thousand years. It seems to me it
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: must evolve, Like even if you imagined that Galileo, etcetera
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: invented empiricism, which obviously is overly simplified, that there wouldn't
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: be future inventions and modifications to the way that we
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: do science, that people in the future would recognize this. Oh,
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: everything before that is basically a waste of time. I
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: look forward to seeing some of those revolutions in the future,
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: and I hope we get to see some of those changes,
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: though I do have a slightly more optimistic view than
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: you do. Although you're a historian, so maybe you know
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: maybe I should take note of that.
• 52:55
  Speaker 10: I mean, my optimist tat on is that humanity has
• 52:59
  Speaker 10: survived many catastrophes, so I don't think that humanity will
• 53:05
  Speaker 10: disappear anytime soon. I mean, five thousand years is a
• 53:08
  Speaker 10: long time. Two thousands a long time. I think even
• 53:10
  Speaker 10: in the worst case climate scenarios, there will be humans
• 53:13
  Speaker 10: around them five hundred years. It's just what society looks like,
• 53:17
  Speaker 10: is the question.
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: Right. Well, I hope that we continue to get to
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: do science. Yeah, well, thanks very much for this fascinating conversation.
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: I learned so much and encourage everybody out there to
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: get your book. Tell us again the name of the
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: book and where people can get it.
• 53:31
  Speaker 10: It's called Horizons, the Global Origins of Modern Science, and
• 53:36
  Speaker 10: you can get it from all good book resellers or
• 53:39
  Speaker 10: less ethical booksellers.
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: But all right, well, thanks again James for joining me
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: today with pleasure.
• 53:46
  Speaker 2: No real pleasure, Daniel, thank you so much.
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: All right, many thanks to James for that fascinating conversation.
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: I think that really helps us understand the more nuanced
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: and subtle history of science. There isn't really one inflection
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: point where you can give some credit for being the
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: first scientist. I think that the listeners were mostly correct
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: that science is something we've been doing for a long time,
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: as long as we've been asking questions and trying to
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: build knowledge about the world, and we should be careful
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: about deed keeping and saying who is a scientist and
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: who isn't a scientist, what kinds of knowledge gathering are valid,
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: and which kinds are not valid. Some of them are
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: more effective than others, surely, and we're making progress not
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: just in our knowledge but in our methods for accumulating knowledge.
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: But I think we have a lot to learn in
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: both contexts. So thanks very much everybody out there who
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: is doing science, even if your job is not officially
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: to be a scientist, And thanks very much for listening.
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: Tune in next time for more science and curiosity. Come
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: find us on social media where we answer questions and
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Instant, and now TikTok.
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: a production of iHeartRadio. More podcasts from iHeartRadio visit the
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: favorite shows.