Who was the first scientist?

Daniel talkes to Prof. James Poskett about how the history of science has much more nuance and global participation than the standard mythology.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
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

(00:32):
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
sky can reveal answers to some of the universe's deepest mysteries,
how we ask those questions, what questions we ask, and

(00:55):
how we find answers can reveal something about ourselves, how
we think, and our relationship with the whole universe.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
Hi.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
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 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.

(01:39):
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

(02:04):
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

(02:25):
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

(02:48):
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

(03:09):
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

(03:31):
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,

(03:54):
think for a moment, who do you think gets credit
for being the first science? Here's what a bunch of
listeners had to say.

Speaker 3 (04:02):
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.

Speaker 4 (04:21):
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 witch doctors say they are.

Speaker 5 (04:37):
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.

Speaker 6 (04:49):
I imagine who the first scientist is is relative to how
you measure who the first scientist was. But I imagine
the first scientist, 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.

Speaker 1 (05:04):
Undoubtedly weird al Yankovic.

Speaker 6 (05:07):
I don't know, but if I have to guess, I
would say someone from Greece or Egypt.

Speaker 7 (05:13):
I think the first scientists on Earth were Adam and Eve,
because there were the first people on Earth, and also
they had to know how to gather information and all
that stuff to know where to build cities and settlements.

Speaker 8 (05:25):
Probably the very first human or proto human, if you're
talking about the simple act of making science as an
act of observation and learning from nature, but science as
a metadological mean for findings and recordings is probably much
more recent.

Speaker 9 (05:41):
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 our

(06:02):
scholars and whatnot using a more modern approach. I don't
know exact names, but it'd be interested in learning that
science history.

Speaker 7 (06:09):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
Man, probably somebody living in a cave we looked up
at the sky and thought, whoa cool, what are those?
I gotta 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

(06:30):
broader sense, as 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

(06:53):
to it, and what they would have to say if
they were fast forwarded to the future to come and
visit the large Hageon Cliner for example. Well, 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

(07:15):
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 the history of science from the University

(07:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
Thanks very much for having me. It's pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1 (07:51):
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

(08:13):
the perspective of popular culture where people may think science
is and we're sort of like people who get really
nerdy about it. How they define science.

Speaker 10 (08:21):
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
totally 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

(08:41):
how we define science today and how that might 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 falsified, or something that's testable, something

(09:03):
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 on't as testable in the
way that other sciences are, Some aren't predictive in the

(09:23):
same way other sciences are. So I don't think there's
one easy definition of sciences.

Speaker 1 (09:29):
Interrupt then with a meta question, Yeah, which is, how
is it we can have a thing we call science
where the National Science Foundation scientist, we don't even know
what this word means. How do we end up with
in this mess?

Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yeah?

Speaker 10 (09:41):
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 world, and
that's changed over time. So rather than thinking of science

(10:03):
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

(10:26):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
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.

Speaker 10 (10:51):
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 a historian, I'm
reluctant to kind of point at what we think of

(11:12):
as science today, 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

(11:35):
natural world before then.

Speaker 1 (11:36):
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 sciences. Bawn that
everybody who's looking at for the net sky and is
wondering about the universe and trying to figure it out,
even just listening to this podcast, it's 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,

(11:57):
I couldn't agree more. And so one thing I want
to dig in 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

(12:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (12:34):
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 these
individual geniuses often kind of presented as kind of really
riling against forms of authority, particularly religious authorities, people like Galileo,

(13:00):
people like Newton, people like Pernicus, particularly astronomy, and fittingly,
view 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

(13:23):
development of modern science from that point onwards in terms
of European ideas or European society, or economics or politics,
whatever it is.

Speaker 2 (13:32):
Then we miss two important things.

Speaker 10 (13:35):
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

(13:57):
kind of international capitalism, through international warfare.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
Et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 10 (14:03):
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.

Speaker 2 (14:17):
Driver of a lot of this scientific change.

Speaker 10 (14:19):
In a nutshell, that is the argument of the book,
which I cash out in a lot more detail.

Speaker 1 (14:24):
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.

Speaker 10 (14:44):
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.

(15:05):
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 open to about things
like gravity, about the nature of astronomy and such.

Speaker 1 (15:25):
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 Galleo, 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?

Speaker 2 (15:38):
Great question.

Speaker 10 (15:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (15:55):
I was kind of.

Speaker 10 (15:56):
Taught similar things often sort of you know, it's not
front and center, but it's the kind of background were
and you think, well, you know, is this some kind
of conspiracy theory? Is this just all like where did
this come from?

Speaker 2 (16:07):
Them? But it is.

Speaker 10 (16:09):
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

(16:30):
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

(16:53):
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

(17:17):
produced science and there was something unique about them.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
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 Almos, and you know, it was
deeply a Cold War context, and we were doing physics
and Los Almos racing against the threat of you know,
Soviet physics, which would develop other weapons which would demolish ours,

(17:41):
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.

Speaker 10 (17:49):
Absolutely so, Yeah, it's partly out of a kind of
anxiety either in the early Cold War, particularly with things
like the launch of SPOTNK, there is a real anxiety
in the US that the Soviets might be ahead. Of course,
the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite SPOTNEK. They get
the first human into space for your a Gagarin. So

(18:10):
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 of
funding in the nineteen fifties nineteen sixties. As you say,
so it's less that the Americans or the Western world

(18:33):
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,

(18:57):
but in the long run of human history, the West
will prevail. So the superstition over irrationality over authoritarian isn't
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.

(19:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:36):
Is trying to develop.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
So you're saying the pope is basically the emperor.

Speaker 2 (19:40):
Yeah exactly, Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good way.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
Well, he basically is the last Holy Roman Emperor.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (20:03):
Yeah, is that separation.

Speaker 1 (20:04):
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 K ninety nine, the
room temperat superconductor, which was supposed to be a remnant
of Soviet physics. And I just had the sense that

(20:26):
there's all these jewels from really smart people working in
a different culture that has been essentially dismissed.

Speaker 2 (20:32):
Absolutely agree, very much.

Speaker 10 (20:34):
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 Shaw, writes quite a lot.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
About how many of the kind of exciting things in
the future of science.

Speaker 10 (20:46):
Things like AI, things like low temperature superconductors, all of
this is coming out of the sort of lost world.

Speaker 1 (20:53):
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 Yankovic, which

(21:15):
is probably not accurate.

Speaker 2 (21:20):
You said anyone could be a scientist.

Speaker 1 (21:23):
I'm not saying weird Al's 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 not 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 threats came together. You were telling us about how

(21:45):
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.

Speaker 10 (21:56):
Yes, a fascinating kind of classic. 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

(22:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:33):
As far as Vietnam.

Speaker 10 (22:35):
Some of the East India company officers are sailing, collecting
astronomical observations made by those.

Speaker 2 (22:41):
Officers at sea or on land.

Speaker 10 (22:44):
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

(23:06):
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

(23:26):
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

(23:50):
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

(24:12):
the really necessary conditions for someone like Newton to be
able to develop his 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.

Speaker 1 (24:30):
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.

Speaker 10 (24:40):
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

(25:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (25:18):
In fact, I often say Europe was the odd one out.

Speaker 10 (25:22):
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 darn was aware of that, he sought out
information from not just other places that are the cultures.

(25:45):
And one of the great examples I use in my
book is that on the Origin of Species, Darwin Well
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,

(26:07):
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
physician called alishu Zen. And Darlin can't read Chinese, so

(26:30):
he has to get someone at 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.

Speaker 2 (26:44):
Plants in China. He's interested in Russian accounts.

Speaker 10 (26:48):
Of geology and natural history from places like Siberia, so
he's really not just a collector of specimens famously on
the Beagle Voyage, but rather like Newton, he's a collector
of information, including from other cultures.

Speaker 1 (27:03):
Fascinating. Okay, I have a lot more questions about this
fascinating topic, but first let's take a quick break. Okay,
we're back and I'm chatting with Professor James Poskett about

(27:24):
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

(27:45):
of the Greeks, rather than just as being vessels for it.

Speaker 10 (27:48):
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,

(28:10):
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

(28:33):
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,

(28:56):
and this created a problem because if you insist that
all the planet to moving imperfect circles, I mean it's
impossible 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,

(29:16):
and in particular, a Persian astronomer in the thirteenth century,
nase aldn 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

(29:38):
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

(29:59):
long stories or allows you to kind of get the
planets to sort of wabble around a bit 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 of revolution, so That's.

Speaker 2 (30:21):
Just one example.

Speaker 10 (30:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (30:32):
They were seriously.

Speaker 10 (30:34):
Engaging with them, building on them, and then later European
astronomers as well as chemists, mathematicians and so forth built
on that as well.

Speaker 1 (30:43):
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
day and imagine that we just looked back at what
Galleo and Newton and Bacon were doing, would we recognize

(31:07):
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

(31:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
Yeah, a lot.

Speaker 10 (31:35):
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

(31:57):
of scientific institutions 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

(32:19):
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

(32:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (32:54):
It was part and parcel of religious thought, and it
was also part of the parcel of history.

Speaker 10 (33:01):
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

(33:21):
about the kind of development of civilization and the kind
of 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

(33:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
That's exactly the.

Speaker 10 (34:01):
Same time that we start saying, well, science is completely
separate from philosophy, from religion, from arts, from history.

Speaker 2 (34:10):
So I think that's the big, big difference.

Speaker 1 (34:12):
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.

(34:32):
Is there really an inflection point there or is that
also a mythology.

Speaker 10 (34:36):
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

(35:00):
kind of a priori reasoning thinking 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

(35:24):
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 you know, 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

(35:46):
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 themselves a
scientist because there.

Speaker 2 (36:05):
Wasn't a word. It was only coined in the eighteen thirties.
We think of.

Speaker 10 (36:09):
Scientists doing science, which by which we mean professional science
is a job. I mean Newton 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

(36:34):
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

(36:55):
in the late nineteenth century, and then in places like
Britain in America they start copying that and relatedly 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.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
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

(37:33):
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

(37:55):
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

(38:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (38:25):
It's a great question.

Speaker 10 (38:26):
And I think again, the reason astronomy is a great example,
because it's also institutionalized to.

Speaker 2 (38:33):
Some of the other things.

Speaker 10 (38:34):
Humans have looked at plants for presumably as long as
there were humans and used them for medical purposes and
hate them, but that was rarely until much later institutionalized,
whereas astronomy. What 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,

(38:56):
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.

(39:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:41):
Often so if you think of.

Speaker 10 (39:43):
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

(40:07):
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,

(40:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (40:50):
These miraculous events.

Speaker 10 (40:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (41:01):
All right, this is a fascinating discussion, but let's take
any quick break to hear from our sponsors. We're back
and we're diving deep into the philosophical and historical foundations

(41:24):
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 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

(41:45):
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?

(42:06):
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

(42:28):
it's sort of three D and Okay, the Sun is
going over here and the moon is over there, and
that's 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

(42:50):
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, 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 in the week for all of us,

(43:12):
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?

Speaker 10 (43:20):
Yeah, I think they did think about it in a
fundamentally different way, and they're supposed to get slightly more
philosophical about this. There's an area of philosophy called structural realism,
which is essentially that the universe might have a structure,
but there could be multiple ways in which you could

(43:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (43:59):
I think I don't get too.

Speaker 10 (44:00):
Deep into the bossy 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

(44:23):
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.

(44:44):
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 Islami and Christian astronomy, it's a lot about the
rising and setting of stars, so it's about the ecliptic,

(45:06):
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

(45:28):
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

(45:50):
of force that is provided through the structure of the universe.
Through the emperor and is reflected in the sky above.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
You're right.

Speaker 10 (46:02):
Also, what we find when we study other cultures is
a lot of particularly say in the Chinese case. And
this is what more technical historians of science have looked at.

Speaker 2 (46:12):
Is that they're expressing.

Speaker 10 (46:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (46:29):
How many apples do they have together?

Speaker 10 (46:32):
There's a lot 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 we express that.

Speaker 1 (46:49):
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 why 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

(47:09):
about science itself, like do you imagine, say we ran
the Earth from the year ten thousand BC 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

(47:31):
it something which will inevitably bubble up as a human endeavor,
or is it 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.

Speaker 10 (47:44):
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

(48:06):
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,

(48:30):
both institutionally and at the kind of level of just
doing it together.

Speaker 2 (48:34):
So I don't think there's.

Speaker 10 (48:34):
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,

(48:57):
but by and large there was being done in the
Soviet Union was really different to what was being ws.
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.

Speaker 2 (49:14):
We've got left.

Speaker 1 (49:15):
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

(49:36):
do at ancient ways of knowledge.

Speaker 10 (49:40):
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
and any meaningful form is going to be.

Speaker 2 (49:50):
Around in five thousand years.

Speaker 10 (49:52):
But we'll be questioning it 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 in culture do
fundamentally matter to what we think counter science and how

(50:14):
we organize it.

Speaker 2 (50:15):
So it's your way.

Speaker 10 (50:16):
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 counterfactory
could run different thought experiments. If we turn towards a

(50:37):
kind of right wing populism and the world is run
by authoritarian rulers, well you'll get a different kind of
science that will probably be negative for society.

Speaker 2 (50:48):
Maybe it's not as.

Speaker 10 (50:50):
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

(51:11):
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 prim or don't like

(51:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (51:52):
I guess I'm probably maybe the latter.

Speaker 1 (51:55):
Yeah, 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.
I think going along with that, we have to recognize
that the way we're going to do science could also change,

(52:16):
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 Galileo, etcetera
invented empiricism, which obviously is overly simplified, that there wouldn't
be future inventions and modifications to the way that we

(52:37):
do science, that people in the future would recognize this. Oh,
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 those 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.

Speaker 10 (52:55):
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. Two 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,

(53:17):
is the question.

Speaker 1 (53:18):
Right. Well, I hope that we continue to get to
do science. Yeah, 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.

Speaker 10 (53:31):
It's called Horizons, the Global Origins of Modern Science, and
you can get it from all good book resellers or
less ethical booksellers.

Speaker 1 (53:40):
But all right, well, thanks again James for joining me
today with pleasure.

Speaker 2 (53:46):
No real pleasure, Daniel, thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (53:48):
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 some 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

(54:10):
build knowledge about the world, and we should be careful
about deed keeping 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 for accumulating knowledge.
But I think we have a lot to learn in
both contexts. So thanks very much everybody out there who

(54:33):
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, Instant, and now TikTok.

(54:55):
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