Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Who was the first scientist?

Episode Date: November 21, 2023

Daniel 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.

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Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 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 sky 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 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 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, 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 does 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. And thanks to everybody who participates. If you would like to hear your voice speculating baselessly on the podcast, don't be shy. Everybody's welcome right to me to Questions at Danielanhorpe.com. So before 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 witch 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 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. Undoubtedly, we heard 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 they 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. Probably the very first human, or proto-human, if you are talking about the simple act of making science is an act of observation and learning from nature. But science as a methodological meaning 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 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 to it and what they would have to say if they were fast forwarded to the future to come and visit the large H-on Collider, for example. Since I am not an expert,

In 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 Poskitt, 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 Poskitt. 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 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, you know, popular culture,

what people might think science is and what sort of like people who get really nerdy about it, how they define science. Yeah, it's a great question. And a very scientist's kind of question. Scientists love to start by defining their terms. And I'd say historians are a little 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 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 100-plus years trying to come up with a full-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. To interrupt then with a meta question, which is how is that we can have a thing we call science? We have a national science foundation. I call you a scientist. We don't even know what this word means. How do we end up with this mess? Yeah, very good. So in fact, you kind of started answering the question in a way.

And 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 to 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 a laboratory or using high-tech. equipment, when all of that really is a product of the late 19th and early to mid-20th centuries that misses quite a lot of humans seriously investigating the natural world before them. 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. Spawn.

That everybody who's looking up in 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 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

And as you exploring your wonderful book and I want to talk about today's, it's more subtle than that, isn't it's more gradual, it's 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 15th, 16th 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, fittingly for you, is often at the centre 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 to, and explain the development of modern science from that point onwards in terms of European ideas or European society or economics or politics, whatever it 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 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, etc., etc. So as the world becomes more connected

from, say, the 1500s 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. Spot on, 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 your world. And as Mabel will 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 able 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, Galileo, et cetera, et cetera. 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? Yeah, 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 know, 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. 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 at the time. And it was in the 20th 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 18th or the 17th 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 20th century, that it became very important for both the United

States and on the other side, the Soviet Union, to present themselves as, you know, 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 60s and 70s didn't see the Soviets, for example, as doing science? I mean, I grew up in Los Alamos and, you know, it was deeply a Cold War context. And we were doing physics in Los Alamos racing against the threat of, you know, Soviet physics, which would develop other weapons, which would demolish ours.

Wasn't there also at the same time a deep fear motivating the Soviets as doing science as well in order to justify that 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 Sputnik, there is a real anxiety in the U.S. that the Soviets might be ahead. Of course, the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, they get the first human into space for Uriga Gagarin. So this kind of question about what is the relationship between Western society and progress in science is really charged and really, really important. I actually received quite a lot of funding in the 1950s, 1960s, 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 101 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. Not that bluntly, but that's the sort of 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? 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 the 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, it's that separation. Yeah, it's fascinating 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 that community was following. We saw some of that this summer with the excitement about LK99, the room temperature 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 essentially dismissed. Absolutely agree very much. I talk quite a lot about Soviet physics in the later part of my book. And in fact, one of my colleagues, Dr. Claire Shaw, 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 ask them who they thought was the first scientist. And frankly, I expected to hear a lot of Galeo, 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 is probably not accurate. You said anyone could be a scientist. That's true. I'm not saying Weird Al's not a scientist. I mean, he's definitely a creative dude. But the general sense was that, you know, people have been. 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 for being more broadly educated. But I was

wondering if you could help us and paint a 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, as Newton's a fascinating and kind of classic example. 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 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 offices are sailing, collecting astronomical observations made by those officers at sea or not land. He collects information taken by astronomers,

particularly French astronomers, who travelled 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, or 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 centre 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 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. 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. Yes, and Charles Darwin famously did travel around the world, and that was a very important part of his theorising 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 selection, so 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 19th century. I mean, the idea that there's a natural kind of evolutionary origin of not just plants and animals, but humans is like par for the course in, say, Hinduism or Buddhism. And because Darwin was aware of that, he sought out information from not just other places, but other cultures. And one of the great examples I use in my book is that on the origin of species, Darwin cites a 16th 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, but 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 Li Shuzhen. And Darwin can't read Chinese, so he has to get someone at the British Museum to translate portions of it for him. And that's just one example, but he uses French translations of other Chinese works on kind of 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. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our

lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace.

You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories. I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you,

stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I had this overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call, said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation, and I just wanted to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling.

And there is help out there. The Good Stuff Podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a nonprofit. fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide.

One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. I don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my...

head. Welcome to season two of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose. an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you because it's easy to say like like go you

go blank yourself right it's easy it's easy to just drink the extra beer it's easy to ignore to suppress seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just like walk the other way avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denial is easier drinking is easier yelling screaming is easy complex problem solving, meditating, you know, takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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'd love you to tell our listeners a little bit about, you know, their critique and their elaboration on the work of the Greeks, rather 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. So it's 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 14th, 15th, 16th 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 Astronautism. and mathematicians in particular. So someone like Ptolemy, the famous Greek astronomer that forms the basis 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 If you insist that all the planets are moving in perfect 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 large, was at the center of the universe. And in particular, a Persian astronomer in the 13th century, Nasser 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 planet. So he basically has like a circle inside another circle. It's called the Tusi couple, which allows you to create linear motion from circles. motion, which, to cut a long story short, allows you to kind of get the planets to sort of wobble around a bit more as they go. So it's not perfect. It's not, you know, the proper elliptical laws that Kepler comes up with, but it's a lot closer. And Copernicus actually

uses NASA Alden-Althusi'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 12th 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 it 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 back at

what Galileo 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 is 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 were doing science or not. What about, you know, who 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. You're right. It's a good way to maybe get to what science is and is 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. 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 it doesn't look like science. He's not sitting in a laboratory. And 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 of doing philosophy. It was part and parcel of religious thought. And it 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 alchemical 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 kind of future. He made predictions about the end of the world. Newton thought the world would end in 2060 and, you know, you 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 God. And I think the way in which in the 20th century in particular, and it's part,

part of actually the story we were 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 Galileo 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

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 relied more on 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 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 of a product of the late 19th and 20th 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 1830s. So there was nobody who called themselves a scientist. Newton wouldn't have called himself a scientist because there wasn't a word. It was only coined in the 1830s. We think of scientists doing

science, which by which we mean professional science, it's 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 our cultures, were gentlemen, literati, etc. Science investigating in the world was something you did alongside everything else. So the idea of having a job of being a scientist in a laboratory, 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 20th century, it starts happening in Germany in the late 19th century, and then in places like Britain and

America, they start copying that and belatedly 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 with the sky and it's sort of

one of the earliest investigations of the natural world. And, you know, the Samarians famously kept a very good celestial charts and developed a 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 Samarians, if it was just like, well, look, this is useful because

I'd 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 also institutionalized. So some of the other things, humans have looked at plants for presumably as long as they were humans and used them for medical purposes and ate them. But that was rarely until much later institutionalized. Whereas astronomy was astronomy even in ancient Samaria or in the Mayan

court or in 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, harvest, making astrological predictions, that they sort of had a link to political power, if you like, and 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 Mayan astronomical tradition,

well, part of the reason that, in fact, 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 religion, or 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 fascinating discussion, but let's take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories

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Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call, said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation, and I just wanted to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling,

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I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you. Because it's easy to say like go you go blank yourself, right? It's easy. It's easy to just drink the extra beer. It's easy to ignore to suppress seeing a colleague who's bothering. you and just like walk the other way avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denial is easier drinking is easier yelling screaming is easy complex problem solving meditating you know takes effort

listen to the psychology podcast on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts we're back and 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 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. It's sort of 3D 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 3D geometrical picture is the answer to the question of like, why are there eclipses? But I was reading about ancient Chinese astronomy and 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 of 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 gets 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 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 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 philosophy 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. They weren't just different rules. They 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 to Chinese astronomy.

One is the kind of technical aspect, which is equatorial, which you can very 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 force of nature. There's something called the mandate of heaven, which much as we were talking about, the separation between nature and humanity, again, there's not quite a strict separation. There's 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. And 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 say in 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 the 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 kind of verbal, concrete expression of mathematics and astronomy in 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 10,000 BC, ran that experiment 10,000 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 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. Yeah, like many good questions. I think this is probably an unpopular answer amongst scientists, but I do think it would look nothing like it does now. So I don't think that there's a very much 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 10,000 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, there was being done in the Soviet Union was really different to what was being done. US, 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 500 years or 1,000 years or 10,000 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 great. I mean, I think in the, let's say, the short term of quote-unquote 500 years, I mean, to be blunt, I don't think human civilization in any meaningful form is going to be around in 5,000 years. But we're pushing it at 500, to be honest. But let's say 500. 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 counts of science and how we organise it. So it's your way, it's hard to answer that question because what I want to know is, well, what's 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, or not even counterfactually, could run different thought experiments. If we turn towards a 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. 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're

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 500 years time. So maybe that will change how people approach science in a way which is more in a way pre-multant, unlike 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 irrelevant to that. I guess I'm probably maybe the latter. 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, 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 all. 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 10,000 years. It seems to me it must evolve, like even if you imagined that Galileo, et cetera, invented empiricism,

which obviously is overly simplified, that there wouldn't be future inventions, modifications to the way that we 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 about the future than you do. Although you're a historian, so maybe I should take note of that. I mean, my optimist's hat on is that humanity has survived many catastrophes.

So I don't think that humanity will disappear anytime soon. I mean, 5,000 years is a long time, 10,000 years a long time. I think even in worst-case climate scenarios, there will be humans around them, 500 years. It's just what society looks like, is the question. 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 I 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 it was 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 deepkeeping 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 is doing science, even if your job is not officially to be a scientist. 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, Insta, and now TikTok. And remember that Daniel

and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier.

Ignoring is easier. Denials is easier. Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast. on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone, and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, season two, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission.

One Tribe, save my life twice. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness. I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the powerful stories I'll be mining on our upcoming 12th season of family secrets. We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories.

Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.