Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel talkes to Prof. James Poskett about how the history of science has much more nuance and global participation than the standard mythology.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Have you boosted your business with Lenovo Pro yet. Become a Lenovo Pro member for free today and unlock access to Lenovo's exclusive business store for technology expert advisors and essential products and services designed just for you. Visit Lenovo dot com slash Lenovo Pro to sign up for free. That's Lenovo dot com slash Lenovo.
Pro Lenovo Lenovo.
Unlock new AI experiences with Lenovo's think Pad x one carbon powered by Intel Core ultraprocessors.
If you love iPhone, you'll love Apple Card. It's the credit card designed for iPhone. It gives you unlimited daily cash back that can earn four point four zero percent annual percentage yield. When you open a high Yield savings account through Applecard. Apply for Applecard in the wallet app, subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Applecard owners subject to eligibility. Apple Card and Savings by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch Member, FDIC terms and more at applecard dot com.
Here's a little secret. Most smartphone deals aren't that exciting, to be honest, they're barely worth mentioning. But then there's AT and T and their best deals. Those are quite exciting. They're the kind of deals that are really worth talking about, like their deal in the new Samsung Galaxy Z flip six. With this deal, you can trade in your eligible smartphone, any year, any condition for a new Samsung Galaxy Z flip six. It's so good, in fact, it will.
Have you shouting from the rooftops.
So get yourself down a street level and learn how to snag the new Samsung Galaxy Z flip six on AT and T and maybe grab a ladder on the way home. AT and T connecting changes everything requires trade in of Galaxy s Note or Z series smartphone Limited time offer two hundred and fifty six gigabytes for zero dollars. Additional fees, terms and restrictions apply. See att dot com, slash Samsung, or visit an AT and T store for details.
When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, if you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit us dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more. One of the many reasons that it's all inspiring to look up at the night sky, beyond the sheer beauty and grandeur and the cosmic questions that it evokes, is that it's something all humans have in common. There's one night sky that we all stare at that we see different pieces of it.
But it's not just across.
The globe that we have this in common, but across time we have been looking up and asking questions basically since people have been able to ask questions, maybe since we've been people, we understand it so much better than our ancestors do, and we hope future generations will understand it better than we do. But while asking questions about the guy can reveal answers to some of the universe's deepest mysteries, how we ask those questions, what questions we ask, and how we find answers can reveal something about ourselves, how we think, and our relationship with the whole universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I desperately want to understand how we understand the universe. We think about science as sort of a basic, inherent, natural human apple activity to be curious about the world, to try to figure out how the world works, as a way to filter good ideas from bad ideas. But what seems natural to us now, what seems basically true about the way science should happen, turns out to be somewhat cultural and contextual. What we mean by science has changed over decades and centuries, and it continues to change, from cave people staring at the night sky to men of leisure operating in their personal laboratories, to massive international efforts spanning decades. It raises interesting questions. Are all kinds of knowledge gathering something we would consider science is the accumulated wisdom of medicine, men and women in prehistoric tribes scientific knowledge? What would Isaac Newton think about what we are doing? There's so many questions to ask, Is this the only way to figure out how the universe works? In the future, will we still be doing something that we recognize as science? Will future scientists recognize what we're doing as science or brush it off as prehistoric nonsense. And where in the end does science come from? What are its roots in history? How long have we been doing it? What are the major moments in which it's changed and become what we recognize today. So today in the podcast, we'll be asking the question who was the first scientist? And it's not that I want to give anybody particular credit for being the first scientist. Really, I want to know when did we start doing science? Was there a moment in the history of humanity that we can say was before science and after science? Is that even an important distinction? And what is the story we tell about science really say about ourselves? So, as usual, I was curious what folks out there thought about this question about who was the first scientist? So I reached out to my community of volunteers to ask them without any chance for preparation, to opine on this important philosophical and historical question. Thanks to everybody who participates. If you would like to hear your voice speculating basically on the podcast, don't be shy. Everybody's welcome right to me to questions at Danielandjorge dot com. So for you hear these answers, think for a moment, who do you think gets credit for being the first scientist. Here's what a bunch of listeners had to say.
My first inclination might be to say Aristotle, but that's not right because he just made pronouncements and didn't do experiments. So maybe the first scientist was the Greek who figured out that the Earth was round by looking at the difference in the length of shadow at noon in Greece versus Egypt.
The first scientist was probably one of our long dead ancestors who looked at fire, or looked up in the sky and saw those points of lights up there and said, I wonder what this stuff is. It's probably not what our shamans or which doctors say they are.
I guess some cave person that was painting a supernova on a wall. The first sort of modern scientists that comes to mind would probably be Aristotle.
I imagine who the first scientist is is relative to how you measure who the first scientist was. But I imagine the first scientists. The first true scientist is probably someone that most people on this earth never heard of, because we don't have records from.
That time, undoubtedly weird al Yankovic.
I don't know, but if I have to guess, I would say someone from Greece or Egypt.
I think the.
First scientists on Earth were Adam and Eve because there were the first people on it, and also they had to know how to gather information and all that stuff to know where to build cities and settlements.
Probably the very first human or proto human, if you're talking about the simple act of making science as an act off observating and learning from nature. But science has a metadological me for findings and recordings is probably much more recent.
Presumably some distant ancestor who had a stick and poked an ant hill and got some.
Food out of it.
The first scientist was probably some unnamed hominid who looked at the world and thought, I wonder why this is the way it is more modern. I know there were astronomers thousands of years ago in China, and then if we're talking the scientific method, I know there were Arab scholars and whatnot using a more modern approach. I don't know exact names, but it'd be interested in learning that science history.
I don't know.
Man, probably somebody living in a cave who looked up at the sky and thought.
Whoa cool, what are those? I got to figure that out.
These are some really great answers, and I have to say I'm really impressed. I was expecting a bunch of Galileo or Francis Bacon or Isaac Newton, but everybody here is clearly thinking about science in a broader sense, is a way of being curious about the world and figuring out how it works, not just sort of officially doing science as your job. So I think this is really wonderful, and I think this is a really difficult question to think about when science became what we call science, and what we even mean by science, and whether what people were doing thousands of years ago is something we should consider science, and how we relate to it, and what they would have to say if they were fast forwarded to the future to come and visit the Large Hagon Collider, for example. Since I am not an expert in the history of science, I decided to do some reading and I read a fantastic book called A Global History of Science from an expert in the topic, Professor James Poskett, and then reached out to him to invite him to chat with me about this question on the podcast. So here's my interview with James. Okay, So it's my great pleasure to welcome the program Professor James Poskett. He's an associate professor in the History of science and Technology at the University of Warwick. He has a PhD in history of science from the University of Cambridge and has held fellowships at Harvard and other universities. He's also the author of a recent book, Horizons, a Global History of Science, that we're going to dig into today. James, thanks very much for joining us today.
Thanks very much for having me. It's pleasure to be here.
Wonderful. So I want to start off very broad and understand what we're talking about when we talk about science and the history of science and who is doing science and who isn't by doing something very nerdy and philosophical, which is defining the terms. So like when I say to you science, what does that mean to you? What is science? And I'm curious your thoughts sort of from the perspective of popular culture where people might think science is and what's sort of like people get really nerdy about it, how they define science.
Yeah, it's a great question and the very scientists kind of question. Scientists love to start by defining their terms, and I'd say historians are a bit more reluctant to total hammer down our terms before we start, because it might prejudge a few things which relate to some of the problems. Actually, I think we'll be talking about about how we define science today and how that may make us lose track of some important aspects of science in the past. And people that have contributed so famously philosophers of science have spent one hundred plus years trying to come up with a fool proof definition of science. Maybe science is something that's falsifiable, something that's testable, something that's empirical, something that's rational, and science may at times include some of those things, but also famously, none of those definitions encompass all of the things that even today we call science. Some sciences aren't as testable in the way that other sciences are. Some aren't predictive in the same way other sciences are. So I don't think there's one easy definition of science.
It's interrupt then with a meta question, yeah, which is, how is it we can have a thing we call science where a national science foundation scientist. We don't even know what this word means. How do we end up with in this mess?
Yeah?
So, in fact, you've kind of started answering the question in a way, and that I think one of the things we can think of science as is a set of institutions, of practices around those institutions, a way of structuring how we go about investigating the world.
And that's changed over time. So rather than.
Thinking of science as simply just a method or simply just the content of scientific theories, I think modern science particularly has arisen out of quite specific sets of institutions and structures, and the point of those is the structure the way we investigate the world and to structure knowledge. So science isn't just knowledge. It's not just stuff that I know or someone knows. I would say that the structuring of that knowledge in particular ways is what makes a difference.
I see.
So, is it about the way that we accumulate the knowledge, like the method we use to discover things about the world, or the institutional like the sociological respect we have for that knowledge, or is it sort of a big mess of all of these things?
Yeah, I mean kind of a big mess of all of those things. I think those things relate that the institutions ensure that certain kinds of methods are followed within certain kinds of disciplines. But importantly, that's changed quite a lot over time, which is why, particularly as a historian, I'm reluctant to kind of point at what we think of as science today. You know, national scientific societies, scientists like yourself conducting research in a university, perhaps in their laboratory or using high tech equipment, when all of that really is a product of the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries. That misses quite a lot of humans seriously investigating the natural world before then.
Yeah, and something we say on the podcast a lot, which I deeply believe, is that you don't have to be a professional scientist to be doing science.
That everybody who's.
Looking at for the night sky and is wondering about the universe and trying to figure it out. Even just listening to this podcast makes you curious about the world. And you guys are all out there are scientists. So everybody get your scientist's badge and put it on yourself.
Mentally, I couldn't agree more.
And so one thing I want to dig into you with you the genesis of science, where it comes from. And there's this sort of traditional story people learn in elementary school or whatever that science began at some moment, you know, Galileo and empiricism and Francis Bacon and the Enlightenment and it all just sort of like exploded as this new idea and then we could rapidly accumulate knowledge.
About the world.
But as you exploring your wonderful book and I want to talk about today, is it's more subtle than that, Isn't it's more graduals more nuanced. Give us a picture about how you see the sort of broader history of science coming together as a thing.
Yeah.
So, as you say, there's a traditional story, which is something like science originated in fifteenth sixteenth century Europe with something called the scientific Revolution, and we're familiar, as you say, with the kind of people that are associated with it. These individual geniuses often kind of presented as kind of really riling against forms of authority, particularly religious authorities, people like Galileo, people like Newton, people like Copernicus, particularly astronomy, and fittingly for you, is often the center of that story. And it's certainly true that something important was happening at that time, and some important stuff was happening in Europe. But the argument of my book essentially is that if we only look at Europe and we only try and explain the development of modern science from that point onwards in terms of European ideas or European society, or economics or politics, whatever is, then.
We miss two important things.
One is how other cultures actually had scientific cultures that were developing in quite significant ways around the same time. And two that that wasn't a coincidence. It's because the world was becoming increasingly connected at that time, initially through things like colonialism, slavery, global trade, religious pilgrimage, later through kind of international capitalism, through international warfare, et cetera, et cetera. So as the world becomes more connected, from say the fifteen hundreds onwards, that leads to this intermingling of scientific cultures, and that for me is the key kind of.
Driver of a lot of this scientific change.
In a nutshell, that is the argument of the book, which I cash out in a lot more detail.
I see. So you're saying that the Western Europe came into contact with the rest of the world and brought together these strands of different kinds of thinking data and understanding from around the world. And that's what sparked sort of this revolution in understanding, not some solitary genius in a tower somewhere, a man of leisure who decided, let's learn facts about the world in a different way.
Great summary, better than I the author, in a way. But yeah, it's and I liked your kind of point. You know, it's about all these different things about data, it's about ideas, it's about ways of approaching the world, and as maybe we'll get on to talk about. But many of these famous figures weren't actually locked in a room disconnected from the world. These famous figures not by coincidence. I argue, people like Isaac Newton in particular, were incredibly well connected.
Even if they didn't travel themselves.
They were able to amass information in a way that wasn't possible before and make the claims they're opened to about things like gravity, about the nature of astronomy and such.
Right, And I want to dig into that, But first I want to figure out where this story comes from. I mean, I've heard this story Lau etcetera, etcetera. Where does this myth come from. If it's a story, who wrote this story of modern science? And why do we all believe?
It's a great question.
I deal with this quite explicitly because I think it's it could be disconcerting in general, but for the reader of a book or when you're hearing this to kind of be told, oh, this story that you're quite familiar with.
You.
I was taught this at school. I did a science undergraduate degree.
I was kind of.
Taught similar things often sort of you know, it's not front and center, but it's the kind of background where and you think, well, you know, is this some kind of conspiracy theory? Is this just all like, where did this come from?
Them?
But it is, you know, the narratives we tell about the past, including the scientific past, they're not carefully crafted by some kind of propaganda department, but they are reflective of the attitudes of the time. And it was in the twentieth century, in particular, that the history of science became a professional thing. That people started writing lots of histories of science, and people professional historians, often actually professional scientists in places like Britain the United States began to present this very particular view of science which actually would have seemed quite alien to anyone in say the eighteenth or the seventeenth century, in which there was a special kind of Western culture that produced scientific advances. And as I argue in the book, this is basically linked to the struggle between capitalism and communism in the twentieth century that it became very important for both the United States and on the other side of the Soviet Union to present themselves as the future of scientific advance and that their social and economic systems produced science and there was something unique about them.
Does that mean that those folks who were embedded in the Cold War in the sixties and seventies didn't see the Soviets, for example, as doing science. I mean, I grew up in Los Almas, and you know, it was deeply a World War context, and we were doing physics and Los Amos racing against the threat of Soviet physics which would develop other weapons which would demolish ours. Wasn't there sort of also at the same time, a deep fear motivating the Soviets as doing science as well in order to justify their fear, and that expenditure.
Absolutely, so, Yeah, it's partly out of a kind of anxiety that in the early Cold War, particularly with things like the launch of Spotnik, there is a real anxiety in the US that the Soviets might be ahead. Of course, the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite, Spotnik, that get the first human into space for.
Your a Gigarin.
So this kind of question about what is the relationship between Western society and progress in science is really charged and really really important, as you received quite a lot funding in the nineteen fifties nineteen sixties, as you say, so it's less that the Americans or the Western world thinks that the Soviets aren't doing science. Of course they know they are, But they ultimately develop a narrative which is actually quite explicitly introduced into high school and kind of history one oh one curricula in the United States in particular, that tells a longer history about why, yes, the Soviets might have achieved something in the short term, but in the long run of human history, the West will prevail over superstition, over irrationality, over authoritarianism, and really Galileo becomes a kind of parable you're supposed to read much like Star Wars, you know, like The Empire Darth Vader is the Soviet Union slash the Nazis.
You're supposed to read the Catholic.
Church in the kind of Galileo versus the Church as a liberal fighting against the authoritarian rule of the pope slash Stalin. So there's this kind of mixing of the narrative. It's not that bluntly, but that's the sort of the ethos that that narrative is trying to develop.
So you're saying the Pope is basically the emperor.
Yeah exactly, Yeah, yeah, Yeah, that's a good way.
Well he basically is the last Holy Roman emperor, right, yeah. Oh, that's fascinating. Well, it's interesting to me. It sounds to me like you're saying that, you know, we're being positioned to believe that our science is sort of like the true descendant of pure science from history, that it's we invented it and it's you know, it's our birthright is sort of and not something from the east.
Yeah, is that separation.
Yeah, it's fascinating from also from the context of the fall of the Soviet Union, because there's a lot of like excellent Soviet physics going on, and a lot of that has just been lost, you know, alternative directions that this community was following. We saw some of that this summer with the excitement about L. Kane ninety nine, the room tempered superconductor, which was supposed to be a remnant of Soviet physics. And I just have the sense that there's all these jewels from really smart people working in a different culture that has been acentually dismissed.
Absolutely agree, very much.
And I talk quite a lot about Soviet physics in the late part of my book, and then back one of my colleagues, doctor Claire Schaw, writes quite a lot about how many of the kind of exciting things in the future of science, things like AI, things like low temperature superconductors, all of this is coming out of the sort of lost world of Soviet physics.
Yeah, and I want to give some credit to our listeners. I asked them who they thought was the first scientist, and frankly, I expected to hear a lot of Galileo, Bacon, et cetera. But I got a lot of answers of things like a long dead ancestor who looked up at the sky or you know, a cave person painting a supernova on a wall. I mean, there was one guy who said weird al yankab, which is probably not accurate.
You said anyone could be a scientist.
True, I'm not saying weird ass not a scientist. I mean, it's definitely a creative dude. But the general sense was that, you know, people have been doing science for a long time. It's just something that happened in Western Europe. So you know, kudos to their teachers or to our listeners from being more broadly educated. But I was wondering if you could help us and paint the picture of how these threads came together. You were telling us about how this moment, the scientific revolution was more of a coagulation of these ideas.
Tell us about, for.
Example, how Newton relied on knowledge from around the world to build his theories.
Yes, Newton's are a fascinating and kind of classic examples. So Newton famously develops his laws of motion, including identifying the laws for acceleration of gravity. And Newton is not someone who is locked in a room disconnected from the world. He doesn't travel around the world, but particularly because he works as Master of the Mint in the effectively the.
Bank of England.
The early version in England at the time, he's able to collect information from around the world, information from East India Company officers who are sailing through the Bay of Bengal, even.
As far as Vietnam.
Some of the East India Company officers are sailing collecting astronomical observations made by those.
Officers at sea or on land.
He collects information taken by astronomers, particularly French astronomers. He traveled to West Africa and the Caribbean on slave ships, and in fact, an important part of the story I tell about Newton is how he was personally invested in the slave trade and colonial trade, and that world in which he was invested was also the world in which he got his information from. The upshot of this is by collecting astronomical observations, particularly of things like comets, but also crucially observations of things like the tides and the length of a pendulum to swing for a second, he's able to figure out and really that is the empirical evidence for his theory of universal gravitation, because his theory of gravitation implies something that's at the time quite counterintuitive and controversial, that the Earth isn't a perfect sphere and Therefore the force the acceleration of gravity is different at different points of the Earth.
That nearer the equator, gravity is.
Effectively less because you're further away from the center of the mass than at the pulse. And so this ability to collect information from around the world, which is linked to things like the slave trade colonial trade, is the really necessary conditions for someone like Newton to be able to develop its theory. So that's more about data from around the world than necessarily other cultures. But he's a real, I think, smoking gun for this world of interconnection, being at the heart of the scientific revolution fascinating.
I was also enjoying the passage in your book about Darwin and how he relied on data as well from disparate sources. Tell us a little bit about Darwin's story.
Yeah, so, Charles Darwin famously did travel around the world, and that was a very important part of his theorizing of evolution. Because that's rather well known, I don't cover that in detail in the book. Instead, I focus a lot more on the fact that Darwin was well aware that other cultures already had an idea about evolution. So whilst Darwin, it's true, develops the theory of evolution by natural selections of the specific mechanism. The idea that the nature species had originated from some kind of natural process that was common in many cultures. In fact, I often say Europe was the odd one out. It was weird, and it was one of the few cultures that didn't believe in evolution prior to.
The nineteenth century.
I mean, the idea that there's a natural kind of evolutionary origin of not just plants and animals, but humans is like part of the course in say.
Hinduism or Buddhism.
And because Darren was aware of that, he sought out information from not just other places, but are the cultures. And one of the great examples I use in my book is that on the Origin of Species, Darwin cites a sixteenth century Chinese Encyclopedia of Natural History, and he's particularly interested in how animals have changed over time and the documentation of that in both recent and ancient sources, because then he can kind of try and chart there's an interesting charting whether evolution has happened over relatively what we now would think of as relatively small time scales, which we now know is unlikely. That he was interested in that, and so he cites this Ming dynasty very in fact important encyclopedia of natural history by a Chinese position called Alishusen, and Darlin can't read Chinese, so he has to get someone the British Museum to translate portions of it for him.
And that's just one example.
He uses French translations of other Chinese works on agriculture to get an idea about the development of plants in China. He's interested in Russian accounts of geology and natural history from places like Siberia, so he's really not just a collector of specimens famously on the Beagle voids, but rather like Newton, he's a collector of information, including from other cultures.
Fascinating. Okay, I have a lot more questions about this fascinating topic, but first let's take a quick break. With big wireless providers, what you see is never what you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill, the price you thought you were paying magically skyrockets. With Mintmobile, You'll never have to worry about gotcha's ever again. When mint Mobile says fifteen dollars a month for a three month plan, they really mean it. I've used Mintmobile and the car quality is always so crisp and so clear I can recommend it to you. So say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. You can use your own phone with any mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with your existing contacts. So dit your overpriced wireless with mint Mobiles deal and get three months a premium wireless service for fifteen bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month, go to mintmobile dot com slash universe. That's mintmobile dot com slash universe. Cut your wireless bill to fifteen bucks a month. At mintmobile dot com slash universe, forty five dollars upfront payment required equivalent to fifteen dollars per month. New customers on first three month plan only speeds slower about forty gigabytes On unlimited plan. Additional taxi spees and restrictions apply. See mint mobile for details.
AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power, So how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control. It's time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI. OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds, offers one consistent price instead of variable regional pricing, and of course nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less, like Uber eight by eight and Data Bricks Mosaic, take a free test drive of OCI at Oracle dot com slash Strategic. That's Oracle dot com slash Strategic Oracle dot com slash Strategic.
If you love iPhone, you'll love Apple Card. It's the credit card designed for iPhone. It gives you unlimited daily cash back that can earn four point four zero percent annual percentage yield. When you open a high Yield savings account through Applecard, apply for Applecard in the wallet app. Subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple card owners subject to eligibility Apple Card and Savings by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch Member, FDIC terms and more at applecar dot com. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty.
That's why they're.
Working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneuver into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and pross around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit usdairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more. Okay, we're back and I'm chatting with Professor James Poskett about the thorny questions of what is science, when did it begin, and what it says about how we think. I also thought your story about the Islamic world was really important. We often hear about their role as sort of capturing and reproducing and propagating the works of the Greeks, but I love if you tell our listeners a little bit about, you know, their critique and their elaboration on the work of the Greeks, rather than just as being vessels for it.
Absolutely, and your analogy that we often think of Islamic science as simply the sort of vessels or you know, like guardians of Greek science, they just holding on to it to pass it on to European science later. But the evidence for that that Islamic thinkers in both the medieval period but including much later in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth century, they weren't just copying out Greek texts, they were translating them into Arabic or Persian and then writing detailed commentaries critiquing these earlier Greek astronomers and mathematicians. In particular, so someone like Ptolemy, the famous Greek astronomer that forms the basis of sort of lots of European astronomy. Well, Islamic astronomers recognized what was powerful about Ptolemy, but also recognized that Ptolemy's ancient Greek astronomy, some of its assumptions created massive problems. Particularly, Ptolemy insisted that everything in the universe outside of the Earth had to move in perfect circles, and this created a problem because if you insist that all the planets are moving in perfect circles, I mean, it's possible to perfectly model the movement of the planets around the Sun or even around the Earth, if you think there's a At the time, obviously people believe that the Earth, by and lodge, was at the center of the universe, and in particular, a Persian astronomer in the thirteenth century, nase Al din ALTUSI, who was working in what's now modern Iran, wrote a very detailed account of how you would have to change astronomy and ancient Greek astronomy, keeping some of the good bits. But Tusi develops new techniques, new mathematical and really geometric techniques to better model the movement of the planets. So he basically has like a circle inside another circle. It's called the Tusi couple, which allows you to create linear motion from circular motion, which, to come a long story short, allows you to kind of get the planets to sort of wabble around the more as they go. So it's not perfect, it's not you know, the proper elliptical laws that Keptler comes up with, but it's a lot closer. And Copernicus actually uses Nasa al din Altusi's work later during the Scientific Revolution.
So that's just one example.
But the point is, as you say that the Islamic Golden Age, for one, didn't suddenly end in like the twelfth century, and two, they weren't just copying out Greek texts.
They were seriously.
Engaging with them, building on them, and then later European astronomers as well as chemists, mathematicians and so forth built on that as well.
Wonderful.
Now that we have a more sort of nuanced picture of who is doing what I want to trace it back and try to answer the question of like, when is its science and when is it just sort of like thinking and wondering and is there a meaningful difference? I mean, if we talk about how we do science today and imagine that we just looked at at what Galleo and Newton and Bacon were doing, would we recognize what they were doing as science or flip it around if they showed up today, would they recognize what we're doing as science or would they think it's totally alien? You know, how is science today different in institution and practice and theory than even just what we consider the beginning of the scientific revolution? Before we go back and talk about whether you know, the Chinese we're doing science or not? What about you know, could we lift up as the grandfathers of science? How much has it changed even in those few hundred years.
Yeah, a lot.
It's a great question, and you're right, it's a good way to maybe get to what science is and it's not. I think if we look at people like Newton, Francis Bacon, Galileo, if we look at them with today's standards. Many of the things they do do not look like science for a number of reasons. They're not embedded in the kind of scientific institutions that we think of. So Newton was president of the Royal Society, which is of course a national scientific institution today in England in the UK, but that wasn't like a national scientific academy. That was a gentleman's club. And a lot of what Newton did was really sort of tinkering with stuff, writing very long books, I mean in Latin, but doesn't look like science.
He's not sitting in a laboratory. And also, I think, to turn it round.
If they looked at today, I think the thing that people like Newton and Bacon and Galileo would find odd is how by and large we think of, or at least present science as totally separate from things like the arts and philosophy, religion, politics, even history. And for all of them, particularly someone like Isaac Newton, science was part and parcel with doing philosophy, It was part and parcel of religious thought, and there was also part and parcel of history. So Newton spent much of his life searching for secret meanings using kind of almost like the techniques of calculus in the Bible. He also spent a lot of time doing weird at chemical experiments in the hope of finding the philosopher's stone. And he wrote long histories as well about the kind of development of civilization and the future, made predictions about the end of the world. Newton thought the world would end in twenty sixty and you know, he might turn out to be right. But Newton, and for anyone of his era in Europe or elsewhere, that wasn't weird. That was part and parcel of thinking about the nature of the universe, but therefore also the nature of bigger things like society and got and I think the way in which in the twentieth century in particular, and it's part of actually the story we're talking about. At the same time as in the West we start saying, well, Western science is very.
Different from Eastern science.
That's exactly the same time that we start saying, well, science is completely separate from philosophy, from religion, from arts, from history. So I think that's the big difference.
But is there a moment we can identify where there's crucial elements added to the process of science to make it more like what we considered today. I mean, could we argue that empiricism is what brings Galleo and those folks and makes them different from Aristotle and people who just thought about the world and didn't explore it experimentally. Is there really an inflection point there or is that also a mythology.
I don't think the big difference between modern science and pre modern science is sudden interest in empiricism. It's similarly a myth that the Greeks were totally uninterested in observing the world, including Aristotle. Yes, they had a philosophy that relied some of them, like Aristotle, that relies more on kind of a priori reasoning about the nature of things first, but it's not true that they didn't investigate the world. And similarly, it's not true that even people like Newton were straightforwardly empiricist. I mean, yes, he collected data, but Newton is as much particularly in the development of things like laws, that's a particular philosophical position on the relationship between entities in the universe. So I don't think there's this big shift to empiricism. My argument in the book, which obviously people can debate, is that the shift is more to do with how the world becomes connected, which, as I've discussed, produces new forms of data, but also new ways of thinking. The modern science thing, though, I think the kind of science we do today is more of a product of the late nineteenth and twentieth century. That's what people think of when they think of science. They think of scientists, and the word scientists was only coined in the eighteen thirties, so there was nobody who called themselves a scientist. Newton wouldn't have called himselves a scientist because there wasn't a word. It was only coined in the eighteen thirties.
We think of.
Scientists doing science, which by which we mean professional science is a job. I mean Newson wasn't employed as a scientist either. He was relatively independently wealthy by his later life. Most scientific people in the past, including how the cultures were gentlemen, literaty, etc. Science investigating the world was something you did alongside everything else. So the idea of having a job of being a scientist in a laboratory in a university funded by the nation state and or private business, that's I think what we think of when we think of science today. But that's only really happens, I mean really in the twentieth century. It starts happening in Germany in the late nineteenth century, and then in places like Britain and America they start copying that and and realizing that actually they need to get businesses involved with science, they need to get the government to fund science. But that's only happens around the kind of First World War and then even more the Second World War.
So then if there isn't a moment when science as we know it came to be, but sort of this gradual evolution of philosophy and institutions, then that makes me want to like dive deep into the history of humanity and understand where these threads originate. And I've been reading about, for example, ancient Sumerian astronomers, and of course astronomy is something that we have in common with the ancient folks, because you know, we've been looking up at the sky and it's sort of one of the earliest investigations of the natural world. And you know, the Sumerians famously kept a very good celestial charts and developed the calendar. It's very clear that they were systematizing their knowledge about the world. And one thing I always wonder about is how much they were sort of mentally doing what we are doing, where you know, as a modern physicist, I'm developing a model of the universe in my head and I'm sort of separating myself from nature and saying, here's how nature works. These are the rules of nature. And I wonder if for the Samerians, if it was just like, well, look, this is useful because I like to predict when it's going to rain and when it's not, and when my harvest is going to happen, and when there's an eclipse, or if they were like building mental models about the world in a way that we would recognize, It's.
A great question.
And I think again the reason astronomy is a great example because it's it's also institutionalized to.
Some of the other things.
Humans have looked at plants for presumably as long as there were humans, and used them for medical purposes and ate them, but that was rarely until much.
Later institutionalized, whereas astronomy. What's astronomy? Even in ancient Samaria.
Or in the Mayan court or an ancient Babylon, these were things that the court paid people to do, And so you're right, they had practical uses organizing festivals, religious festivals, harvests, making astrological predictions, So that sort of had a link to political power, if you like, in political decision making. Your question, were they building a model of the universe? I think the short answer is yes, just not like you are. Astronomy wasn't just a tool for ancient people. Astronomy I think was almost always linked to quite detailed conceptions of the nature of the universe and the relationship between humans and nature, and also humans and gods. Often so if you think of something like in the Maya and astronomical tradition, Well, part of the reason that many pre Columbian cultures are so interested in astronomy is because the sun plays such a central role in their conception of the origins of the universe, of the origins of themselves. And so yeah, they're not building a kind of detailed high physics model of the nature of the Big Bang. But if we abstract that slightly, they aren't just making tools. They are trying to link not necessarily always through the mathematics, but certainly through quite elaborate formulations about what is the relationship between this event and my ability to predict this event like an eclipse, like a solar or lunar eclipse, and how the universe must be structured and what humanity's place is within it. And they might come to the conclusion, well, the universe is structured in such a way that the Sun god provides the Emperor with power which allows him to perform all.
These miraculous events.
And we today might think, well that's ridiculous, but I think if we just take a step back and think, well, structurally, what are they doing, they are doing a similar thing.
All right, this is a fat, fascinating discussion, but let's take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are US. Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times. The same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneuver into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovation to provide the nutrient intents dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit usdairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
There are children, friends, and families walking, riding on passing the roads every day. Remember they're real people with loved ones who need them to.
Get home safely.
Protect our cyclists and pedestrians because they're people too, Go safely. California From the California Office of Traffic Safety and Caltrans.
This episode is brought to you by Navy Federal Credit Union. Buying a home in today's market can be overwhelming. Luckily, Navy Federal Credit Union's new home Buying center has everything you need to keep you sane while you shop. With services like Verified Preapproval, which show sellers your serious buyer, you have a competitive advantage when making an offer, and Lock and Shop lets you lock in your interest rate for up to sixty days while you hunt for a home from start to finish. Navy Federal's new home Buying center has everything you'll need to buy a home. Navy Federal Credit Union. Our members are the mission. Learn more at Navyfederal dot org. Navy Federal is ensured by NCU way Equal Housing Lender Membership.
Required terms and conditions apply loan subject to approval.
Call one eight at eight eight four two sixty three two eight for details about credit costs.
California has millions of homes that could be damaged in a strong earthquake. Older homes are especially vulnerable to quake damage, so you may need to take steps to strengthen yours. Does it Strengthen your House dot com to learn how to strengthen your home and help protect it from damage. The work may cost less than you think and can often be done in just a few days. Strengthen your home and help protect your family, get prepared today and worry less tomorrow. Does it strengthen your house?
Dot com we're back and we're diving deep into the philosophical and historical foundations of what science is and when it began.
Something I think is really fascinating about that mental model is how in modern times we implicitly separate ourselves from nature. We say like we're subjective humans, but we're trying to build a model of objective nature. And I was reading this fascinating book about Sumerian astronomy by Francesca Rushberg, and she was commenting that they don't even have a word for nature, that this concept of nature as a separate entity doesn't even exist. She writes, quote, there's no lexical counterpart to nature in Cuneiform language, nor consequently was there a conceptual counterpart. So if you went back and asked, like the top Sumerian astronomer, like what is your model of nature, you know they'd be like model of what? What are you talking about? Like we are part of it all, this is all the universe. It's it's fascinating how many of these implicit assumptions there are in our modern view of science. And I want to ask you about something you just said about the structure of the world, because I think we tend to think of the universe sort of very geometrically. Like if I want to understand how does the solar system work, I build a model in my mind and it's sort of three D and Okay, the sun is going over here and the moon is over there. Why I have an eclipse? And to me, the three D geometrical picture is the answer to the question of like why are there eclipses? But I was reading about ancient Chinese astronomy, and you know, the Chinese famously weren't as developed in geometry as the Greeks were, though their astronomy was very accurate, right, they relied more on algebra and arithmetic, And these days we know that there's an equivalence between algebra and geometry. But I wonder in the minds of those ancient Chinese astronomers, did they have a geometric picture in their minds, like why this was happening? Or did they just think about it in a fundamentally different way, because you know, geometry wasn't taught to them in third grade the way it was for all of us. And it's impossible for us to like mentally get outside of the geometric box. How do you think a Chinese astronomer thought about the Solar system?
Yeah, I think they did think about it in a fundamentally different way.
And I'm supposed to get slightly more philosophical about this. There's an area of.
Philosophy called structural rea, which is essentially that the universe might have a structure, but there could be multiple ways in which you could understand that structure, so there is not necessarily a one to one equivalence between the structure of the universe and a theory you might have. And actually you gave a good example about how that's literally true in basic mathematical terms, between like algebraic and geometric forms of understanding. I think I don't get too deep into the possy of science, although I did study it as part of my training. But that's sort of how I think about how say, ancient Chinese astronomers would have thought about the universe, or even Greek astronomers who Ptolemy thought what was happening on Earth was fundamentally different from what was happening in the heavens, that the rules that applied on Earth were not the same kind of rules. There weren't just different rules, there were different kinds of rules, and that you can conceptualize accurately the universe in different ways. So for ancient Chinese astronomers, there's various aspects of Chinese astronomy. One is this kind of technical aspect which is equatorial, which you can explain better than I, but using fixed polar stars, so keeping the kind of background of the universe much more fixed, whereas in sort of Greek and later Islamic and Christian astronomy, it's a lot about the rising and setting of stars, so it's about the ecliptic, and so there's this technical difference, but there's also a philosophical difference about what they think is happening there. For Chinese astronomers, the universe is relatively flat but also circular, but also there's a sort of a force of nature. There's something called the mandate of Heaven, which much as we were talking about this separation between nature and humanity, again, there's not that quite a strict separation as a kind of separation, but the way in which the universe is structured. What's happening when an eclipse happens feeds into the flow of this mandate. So it's not that there's like a god, it's that there is this almost kind of force that is provided through the structure of the universe, through the Emperor, and is reflected in the sky above.
You're right.
Also, what we find when we study other cultures is a lot of particularly saying the Chinese case. And this is what more technical historians of science have looked at.
Is that they're expressing.
Complex mathematical ideas, but often through language.
And this is sort of thing you know, we think about at school.
The difference between saying two plus three is five versus Jack has two apples, Amy has three apples.
How many apples do they have together?
There's a lot more more kind of verbal, concrete expression of mathematics and astronomy and many other cultures. But there's more than one way to add up five apples, not just literally, but also in terms of how you express that.
It's fascinating to think about the sort of history of science and how it all came together. And I think often about how our knowledge itself is a bit random. That we've discovered x and then Y and then Z, and if you ran the universe, or if you ran science again a thousand times, we might discover things in different order and think about things differently. I wonder also about science itself, like do you imagine say we ran the Earth from the year ten thousand BC and ran that experiment ten thousand times. Do you think we would have arrived at science in roughly the same way every time? Or we would have totally different cultural institutions and we would argue bitterly with scientists in air quotes from the other earths about who's really doing science or not. Is it something which you will inevitably bubble up as a human endeavor, or is just something peculiar to our history.
Do you think that's a great question.
I suppose it's unanswerable, of course, like many good questions.
I think it's probably an unpopular answer amongst scientists. But I do think it would look nothing like it does now. So I don't think that the particular form of science we have today is a kind of natural consequence of humans becoming better at understanding the world. I think that doesn't look like how science has developed exactly as you say. In fact, humans across the world over the last ten thousand years have thought up all different kinds of ways, some more accurate, some less accurate, some better for society, some worse for society to organize and structure their knowledge, both institutionally and at the kind of level of just doing it together.
So I don't think there's.
Any good reason to think that if you changed a few of the variables at the start, or you just accept there's a level of randomness in the starting conditions of the experiment or bits that go along the way, that we would end up in the same place today, because I mean, you just see that in history and even in contemporary science, like if you think in the Cold War, the kind of science that was still good science, but by and large that was being done in the Soviet Union was really different to what was being WUS. But that's because the kind of starting conditions were different. So I don't think you'd end up with the same thing. I think you'd end up with something else. And I think we will end up with something else in the next however long we've.
Got left, right, So that's my last question for you, which is equally unanswerable. Is project forward five hundred years or a thousand years or ten thousand years in human society. Do you think future historians of science will look back and say, oh, yeah, back then that was science, that was modern science. Or do you think they will sort of like, you know, chuckle behind their hands, the way a lot of modernists do at ancient ways of knowledge.
That's a great I mean, I think in the let's say this short term of quote unquote five hundred years. I mean, to be blunt, I don't think human civilization in any meaningful form is going to be around in five thousand years, But we'll be pushing it at five hundred to be honest. But let's say five hundred, we might survive that long. Would they think what we're doing is science?
So at its.
Core, I'm a social cultural political historian that thinks that the thing structures of society, ideas, and culture do fundamentally matter to what we think counter science and how we organize it.
So it's your way.
It's hard to answer that question because what I want to know is, well, what society going to look like? What's culture going to look like? I assume it's not going to look the same as it does now, but what it will look like is hard to guess. I guess you could run different counter and not even and factory could run different thought experiments. If we turn towards a kind of right wing popularism and the world is run by authoritarian rulers, well you'll get a different kind of science that will probably be negative for society. Maybe it's not as simple as a kind of political future between authoritarianism or not. Maybe it's more about how climate change is going to fundamentally change in the end humanity's conception of its place in nature. So you talked about separating humans from nature. Climate change obviously literally confronts us with the idea that humans.
Are not separate from nature.
And in the end, whether people like it or not, they won't have to kind of believe the evidence from the scientists, because they'll be believing the evidence of, you know, the climate catastrophe in their face in five hundred years time. So maybe that will change how people approach science in a way which is more in a way pre model like you were suggesting, where human agency and non human agency are wrapped up a lot more in how scientists are thinking that it wouldn't be possible to kind of be this astrophysicist where you say, well, I'm just going to sit in my office and I'm just going to think about what the structure of the universe is and work it out mathematically. And my humanity is a relevant to that. I guess I'm probably maybe the latter.
Well.
I like to imagine that even though we think we've understood so much about the world, that in the longest sweep of knowledge gathering, we're just in the beginning stages, you know, the foothills of climbing that mountain. And I think going along with that, we have to recognize that the way we're going to do science could also change, and that it's really very narrow and sort of hubristic to imagine like, oh, we have some final method that this is the way science is going to happen for the next ten thousand years.
It seems to me it.
Must evolve, Like even if you imagined that Galleo, etcetera invented empiricism, which obviously is overly simplified, that there wouldn't be future inventions and modifications to the way that we do science, that people in the future would recognize this well, everything before that is basically a waste of time. I look forward to seeing some of those revolutions in the future, and I hope we get to see some of the changes, though I do have a slightly more optimistic view than you do, although you're a historian, so maybe you know, maybe I should take note of that.
I mean, my optimist tat on is that humanity has survived many catastrophes, so I don't think that humanity will disappear anytime soon.
I mean, five thousand years is a long time. Thousands a long time.
I think even in the worst case climate scenarios, there will be humans around them five hundred years.
It's just what society looks like, is the question. Right.
Well, I hope that we continue to get to do science. Well, thanks very much for this fascinating conversation. I learned so much and encourage everybody out there to get your book. Tell us again the name of the book and where people can get it.
It's called Horizons, The Global Origins of Modern Science, and you can get it from all good book resellers or less ethical booksellers.
But all right, well, thanks again James for joining me. Today's pleasure, no.
Real pleasure, Daniel, thank you so much.
All right, many thanks to James for that fascinating conversation. I think that really helps us understand the more nuanced and subtle history of science. There isn't really one inflection point where you can give somebody credit for being the first scientist. I think that the listeners were mostly correct that science is something we've been doing for a long time, as long as we've been asking questions and trying to build knowledge about the world. And we should be careful about dekeeping and saying who is a scientist and who isn't a scientist, what kinds of knowledge gathering are valid and which kinds are not valid. Some of them are more effective than others, surely, and we're making progress, not just in our knowledge but in our methods. We're accumulating knowledge. But I think we have a lot to learn in booth contexts. So thanks very much everybody out there who is doing science, even if your job is not officially to be a scientist, And thanks very much for listening.
Tune in next time.
For more science and curiosity. Come find us on social media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord instance, and now TikTok. And remember that Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Have you boosted your business with Lenovo Pro yet? Become a Lenovo Pro member for free today and unlock access to Lenovo's exclusive business store for technology expert advisors and essential products and services designed just for you. Visit Lenovo dot com slash Lenovo Pro to sign up for free. That's Lenovo dot com Slash Lenovo Pro. Unlock new AI experiences with Lenovo's think Pad x one carbon powered by Intel Core ultraprocessors.
When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as Dairy dot COM's last sustainability to learn more.
There are children, friends, and families walking, riding on passing the roads every day. Remember they're real people with loved ones who need them to get home safely. Protect our cyclists and pedestrians because they're people too. Go safely, California From the California Office of Traffic Safety and Caltrans
