A Clear Line of Progress?

	Book review on Science: A Four Thousand Year History by Fara, Patricia (2009) Reviewed by Max Payne, 2009 published in Network Review No 99
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In Patricia Fara's words, 'traditional histories of science depict it as an Olympic relay race in which the great geniuses of science hand on the flaming torch of abstract truth from one to the next in a pure quest for absolute knowledge'. In this book she sets out to show that this is only one way of ordering the facts: there is another perspective, and she suggests it. For most of its history science as we conceive it today did not exist. Indeed the word in its modern usage dates only from the 19th century. Science and technology are intrinsically intertwined, yet there has always been a snobbish distinction between the pursuit of pure knowledge, which has been the privilege of a leisured elite, and the practice of mere craft skills. Yet many advances which we now regard as scientific were made by artisans who did not want to attain knowledge for its own sake so much as to perfect their own trade. What we now regard as science was once inextricably mixed up with activities now regarded as unscientific: magic, religion and philosophy. It had its beginnings in many different cultures, Babylonian, Chinese, Hindu, Greek and Islamic, and the people we might today define as scientists were pursuing knowledge in an integrated world view in which their understanding of physical processes meshed in with their metaphysical theories and religious beliefs. On their own terms all these different cultures and systems had their own validity.

As late as the 17th century Isaac Newton thought his alchemy and studies in the numerology of the Bible were as important as his mechanics, and the mechanics themselves were partly the consequence of a belief in a Deistic clockmaker God. In her subsequent history of Western science Patricia Fara delights in pointing out the complexities, confusions and blind alleys which were the reality on the ground: all of which have been retrospectively portrayed as the straight line of scientific progress. At the turn of the 20th century some scientists were investigating mysterious rays while others sceptically denied their existence. X rays were finally confirmed, but N rays were shown to be non-existent. Crookes, the discoverer of cathode rays - later discovered to be electrons - also declared that the evidence for spiritualism was just as good.  Fara regards this as an obvious mistake. She also points out that apparently pure science often has a hidden agenda behind it. Darwinian evolution contained hidden assumptions about the cultural superiority of 19th century European civilisation. Pasteur's disproof of the spontaneous creation of life was inspired by his Roman Catholic belief that life has to be the creation of God. This history of science ends with the atomic bomb and the space race. Science has become entangled with politics and the military/industrial complex, and the disinterested and open pursuit of truth seems in our time to have become somewhat overlaid.

No history of science can ignore the perspective Patricia Fara depicts, yet she tends to skip lightly over the reasons for the triumph of Western European science over its rivals. In the 20th century alone scientific knowledge has advanced many, many magnitudes beyond immediate experience. The Milky Way has become just one galaxy amongst billions in a vast universe, the atom has been split into protons, neutrons and electrons, and protons and neutrons have been further subdivided into quarks. Molecular biology has revealed the inner workings of life, death and reproduction. These achievements can be traced back in linear succession back to Francis Bacon's injunction to seek knowledge through experiment and induction. The true legend of Galileo dropping weights from the leaning tower of Pisa symbolises the birth of the modern age. An entrenched belief system was refuted by an experiment, and science as we know it now, began then. Chinese science, Hindu and Islamic science never had such a moment, and so became blind alleys. It is legitimate retrospectively to validate all the ideas which led up to Galileo and onward to the present day. With the hindsight of history there is a straight line from Democritus to the quark. We strive to eliminate the personal equation from our experiments, and in the same way we eliminate the cultural equation from the history of science. The Babylonians are important because they were the first to observe the motion of the planets accurately and to predict their movements. The fact that they used their astronomy for astrology, and were more interested in irrigation works, and the worship of Ishtar is irrelevant. It is therefore correct to read the history of science in terms of those steps which led to its contemporary triumph.

Unless the mystics are right, and the material world is but a crystallisation at the lowest level of a spiritual reality that stretches far beyond it. In which case the holistic Hindu and Chinese ideologies were pointing in the right direction after all.

Max Payne is a Vice-President of the Network.

 

 

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