BOOK REVIEW
Science Across Cultures
Anthony Grafton
Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science—From
the Babylonians to the Maya. x + 453 pp. Dick Teresi. Simon
and Schuster, 2002. $27.
Early in the 1990s, Dick Teresi set out to write an exposé.
Multiculturalism was on the rise in the schools and generating
controversy in legislatures, school boards and the media. No
specimen of it created more heat or less light than the Portland
African-American Baseline Essays. According to this curriculum, the
ancient Egyptians had built flying machines, mastered psychokinesis
and even devised electric batteries. Some of these claims rested on
fragments of archaeological evidence, interpreted with little or no
reference to their original contexts. Others had no basis
whatsoever, except their creators' desire to instill pride in
African-American schoolchildren. Teresi—a skilled and prolific
science writer—accepted a magazine assignment and began to
debunk what looked like bad science and bad history.
The journalist who came to scoff remained to pray. Teresi found the
Baseline Essays as implausible as he had expected. But as he studied
other claims for the scientific achievements of non-Europeans, he
realized that a great many of them were valid. Westerners rejected
them not because they were unfounded but because they undermined
what he calls "the traditional account" of the rise of
Western science. Historians and scientists believed that the Greeks
created science in the first millennium B.C., while non-Westerners
remained mired in "prescientific" ignorance until
Europeans enlightened them. But the more research Teresi did, the
clearer it seemed to him that central achievements of Western
science and technology had in fact been anticipated—sometimes
by centuries—by Mesopotamian diviners and Chinese
philosophers, Islamic astronomers and Mayan priests.
Teresi argues this case in detail in Lost Discoveries. His
fluently written book rests on a great deal of research and offers
the reader a vast amount of information about the sciences, from
physics to geology and beyond. Teresi not only consulted a wide
range of secondary sources, but also assembled a board of
distinguished experts in the various fields the book covers and had
them vet the individual chapters. Their brief comments enliven many
pages, and some of their longer responses appear as lengthy
endnotes. Lost Discoveries, in other words, not only makes
a case, but also lets the reader eavesdrop as some first-rate
scientists and historians of science debate the issues Teresi has
raised.
Teresi himself, moreover, knows a lot about the ways of modern
science and scientists. He appreciates, as scientific insiders
sometimes don't, that unproven assumptions, religious convictions
and even straight superstitions have inspired vital discoveries
about the universe. He shows more than once that astronomy developed
for centuries in response to the desire for information about the
future, which many cultures saw as determined by the stars. Lost
Discoveries seems an attractive, comprehensive revisionist
enterprise—a passionate book, which sprang from the change of
heart that an open-minded author underwent as he discovered new
evidence, and which reflects the energy and range of an open-minded
reporter.
In history as in life, however, good intentions often pave the roads
that lead to bad places. Teresi's new convictions are valid, in a
sense. Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, medieval Islam and the
Meso-American peoples devised astonishing mathematical techniques
and created amazing technologies. But it's ridiculous to say that
modern scholars and teachers have ignored these. For the last
century at least, historians of science have been hard at work,
recreating from cuneiform texts the mathematics and astronomy of
ancient Mesopotamia and retrieving from the massive textual and
archaeological record the science and technology of China.
Teresi himself pays due tribute to pioneers such as Otto Neugebauer
and Joseph Needham, and to the younger scholars who are continuing
their work, such as Noel Swerdlow and George Saliba. He also admits
that monographs, conference volumes and full-scale academic journals
deal with many of the subjects he treats. Yet he assumes the persona
of a daring historical researcher questioning orthodoxy in the
company of a few brave souls. At times, he seems to realize the
weakness of his claim that most scholars have suppressed the
achievements of non-Western science. When he does so, he trots out
outdated books—for example, the old surveys of the history of
mathematics by Rouse Ball and Morris Kline—or cites Martin
Bernal's polemic against classicists in order to show that he's
writing revisionist history. In fact, however, Teresi is writing
something more like sermons than like critical history, and most of
the time he's preaching to the choir. The very historians of science
he attacks have provided the ammunition he fires off.
If the book's main thesis is all too simple, its content is
variegated, to the point of incoherence. Sometimes Teresi argues
that Western achievements actually derive from non-Western ones. He
follows Saliba and others, for example, in pointing out that the
technical achievements of Muslim geometers and astronomers played a
vital role in Copernicus's De revolutionibus. But sometimes
he simply notes that non-Western thinkers anticipated a theory or a
practice usually seen as part of modern Western science—as if
an ancient myth or a philosophical speculation has the same status
as a modern hypothesis derived from and eventually to be checked
against data. Sometimes Teresi draws carefully on up-to-date
research and illustrates his arguments with precise examples. But
often he takes his scissors and paste to books of pop science and
pop history. When the hypotheses he draws from them are obviously
wild, he quotes them anyhow, along with the doubts expressed by one
of his advisers. Parts of the book take the form of coherent
historical narrative. But other parts are little more than a
multiculturalist scorecard: a list of every non-Western idea Teresi
could find that seems to anticipate or adumbrate a modern scientific
theory.
Historians of science take little interest, these days, in whether
their subjects were right or wrong in a modern sense. Rather, they
try to contextualize. They want to understand the intellectual,
cultural and institutional conditions within which a past thinker
worked and to see how these determined the direction his or her work
took. Teresi, by contrast, grades past theories as correct or
incorrect and shows little interest in the contexts they came from.
He points out, for example, that Ptolemy's equant mechanism for
planetary motion was physically implausible, as some ancient and
medieval readers of the Almagest also noted. True, it's
hard—perhaps impossible—to imagine how a sphere or
circle could rotate uniformly with respect to a point that is not
its own center, and these objections helped Copernicus begin the
assault on the Almagest. But Ptolemy was not trying, when
he devised the equant, to offer a mechanical account of why the
planets moved as they did. He was trying to represent, with the
geometrical tools at hand, the paths that the planets followed. As
Johannes Kepler showed, the planets move in elliptical paths, with
the sun at one focus, and the line that joins each planet to the sun
sweeps out an area that is proportional to time. Ptolemy devised a
clever kinematic approximation to this, one good enough that it
enabled him to provide tables and formulas that astronomers used for
centuries to predict, if not to explain, the motions of the planets.
Some of his most expert readers found the equant not silly but
provocative. Could its radical violation of uniform circular motion
offer a hint as to the real causes of planetary motion? Hence
17th-century astronomers like Kepler still regularly started from
Ptolemy's model. Ptolemy's achievement was considerable—even
if, like other considerable achievements in the history of science,
it was also faulty and provisional.
Historians of world science also pose and grapple with larger
questions: how cultures develop and fail to develop, how labile
their borders are, how they learn from and teach other cultures with
which they are in dialogue. Teresi doesn't deal with issues like
these. Instead, he cheers on the non-Western good guys. He
enumerates the triumphs of traditional Chinese astronomy and
cartography, and points out that the Chinese accomplishments in
these realms preceded Western ones. All quite true. But he does not
mention the Jesuit missionaries Matteo Ricci and Johann Adam Schall
von Bell. When they arrived in China, they won immense prestige from
their ability to predict eclipses, draw maps and regulate calendars
more accurately than the Chinese could. Cultural balances of trade
shift over time, and accurate accounts of them need to include both
sides of the balance sheet.
The millennial conversations between Mesopotamian and Greek, Islamic
and European, Chinese and Western, literate and nonliterate cultures
have often been complex. Ideas, information and techniques have not
moved in only one direction. And the historical impact of a given
idea or device may become clear only long after its invention, when
it plays a new role in a new cultural and technical environment. To
appreciate the subtleties of these exchanges the historian needs
patience, an open mind and a mastery of disciplines that range from
traditional philology to cutting-edge ethnohistory. Teresi lacks
this equipment, and his passionate simplifications reduce the many
dimensions of the history of science to one. What began as a polemic
against multiculturalism has become a polemic for it, rather than an
informative and critical work of popular history.