Episode 37: November 21st 2010 : Progress of Science through the Ages

On November 3rd this year, Professor Jim Al-khalili was to give
three lectures in Liverpool on the same day (Quantum Physics,
Advances in Mathematics in Medieval Islam and On the Shoulders of
Eastern Giants: the Forgotten Contribution of the Medieval
Physicists). I did feel a bit of a stalker, I attended all three,
but fortunately I was not alone. It is not often that I get to
witness the scientific method in real life personally. The most
illuminating part of the day of the three lectures was the Q&A
following the second lecture. A questioner put her hand up and
stated clearly that she had a correction, not a question. She had
heard the professor discuss the concept and symbol of the number
zero. During his lecture, the professor had recalled the
contributions from the Babylonians, Mayans and Indian
mathematicians. The questioner had been researching the substantial
Egyptian contribution to this area, which the professor had not
mentioned. What happened next was an affirmation of the scientific
method. The professor could have been defensive, confrontational or
dismissive. Instead, he listened to her argument and asked her to
stay behind to so he could learn details of her research. That is
the power of the scientific idea. It stands only on the edifice of
evidence and not the economic wealth, social position or academic
reputation of those who hold it. The progress of scientific
knowledge is not continuous and linear but evolves through a series
of stops and starts. Thomas Kuhn, in his 1962 book “The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions” described the progress of science as
periodic “paradigm shifts”. He was referring to the fundamental
differences in thinking that have led to leaps in scientific
understanding. Could that stop-and-start concept describe how
science develops through the ages, too? Scientific discoveries are
frequently lost, forgotten or deliberately suppressed. So the story
of scientific discovery is frequently a story of rediscovery.
William Harvey 's discovery in 1628 of the human heart and
circulation of blood though the human body had much in common with
that of Ibn al-Nafis 400 years earlier. Nicolas Copernicus is
credited in the 16th century with introducing the heliocentric
system (placing the Sun not the Earth, in the centre of the solar
system) but this idea had been propounded by Aristarchus in the
third century BC. The omissions are not just in science. One
example of technological development lost for over a thousand years
that sticks out like a sore thumb is the Antikythera mechanism, a
device for calculating and displaying relative positions of the
Sun, Moon and planets. The precision of the internal mechanism
would not be repeated for over a thousand years. Why these
omissions occur is unclear. History, like science, is always a work
in progress. Reflecting on why the ancient Greek tradition of
scientific method stalled, Carl Sagan, in his celebrated work,
Cosmos, concluded that their society was elitist and self-serving.
Key figures like Plato were hostile to experiment and perpetuated
the idea that human thought alone was sufficient to explain the
physical world. This intellectually corrupt approach sustained
their slave, unjust society. Search for truth was not their goal.
In his new book “Pathfinders” Professor Al-Khalili attempts to fill
“a” gap in the history of science by revisiting the work done by
the Arabic scholars during the period known in Europe as the dark
ages. It is not a story of Islamic science but of science conducted
in the Arabic language which has its roots in Islam. For around 600
years (from 9th to the 15th century), sandwiched between Greek and
Latin, the international language of science was Arabic. A
professor of theoretical nuclear physics in the University of
Surrey, he was born in Baghdad to a Christian mother and a Muslim
father. As an atheist, Jim Al-Khalili emphasises the role of
Islamic, Persian, Christian and Jewish scholars who not only
translated the work of the ancient Greeks but also enhanced and
developed it. Just as the ancient Greeks took the concept of an
alphabet from the earlier Phoenician civilisation and developed the
written language, the scientific (re)discoveries we traditionally
associate with the European Renaissance were built in turn on the
progress during this golden age of Arabic science. Professor Jim
Al-Khalili has his own podcast, but here is a recording we
made for this one just prior to the start of his three-lecture
session. To start off with, I asked about his personal
interest in astronomy. _________________________ The quote for this
episode is from the Prophet Mohammed and is in chapter 2
of Pathfinders. “The ink of the scholar is more sacred than
the blood of the martyr”