In practice but not in theory
Tony Osman
CHINA: LAND OF DISCOVERY by Robert K. K. Temple
Patrick Stephens. £12.95
We all know about gunpowder and the magnetic compass: most people know about paper and the printing press — all Chinese inventions that appeared, much later — a thousand years or more later in Europe. Quite a few people know that the Chinese invented rockets, and reflect on the irony that they now seem to be the only nation able to put communications satellites into orbit. But as this book shows, these inventions are only a tiny fraction of those that the Chinese can lay claim to. It also raises a quite fascinating question. What went wrong? After this efflorescence of invention, much of it in the few centuries before and after the birth of Christ, the momentum was lost. There is no record of Chinese telescopes or micro- scopes, no electric motors or steam- engines, for example — all inventions that seem to have appeared in Europe at their due time, independently invented by a number of people. Why did China stop when it did?
The end papers of the book give a startling summary of what was achieved, and, strikingly, show how long it took for the invention to reach, or be made again, by the west. They list around 110 inven- tions and discoveries, and the list is im- pressive. The iron plough — sixth century BC in China, 2,200 years before us. Water power: first century AD — 1,200 years. The parachute: second century BC — 2,000 years. The kite: fifth to fourth century BC — 2,000 years. The seismograph: second century AD — 1,400 years.
Sometimes, and this is an example, the author is a bit generous. This seismograph did not, as our modern devices do, mea- sure earthquakes. It used a delicately balanced ball to detect earth tremors. Again, the claims are sometimes based on uncertain evidence. Thus, a quotation from a philosophical work by Lao Tzu, who probably lived in the fourth century BC, is used to make a claim for the invention by this time of the double-acting bellows. It may well be, but the quotation does not unequivocally speak of a double- action bellows. In the history of inventions, there is nothing so good as a drawing or painting or technical description: phrases from a philosopher are rather poor evi- dence.
There are times when the claims of the book could be called misleading, even conflicting. The steam-engine is placed in the fifth century Etc — 1,200 years before we had steam-engines in the west. But the book does not anywhere claim that the early Chinese actually had a steam-engine, and when we look into this claim, we discover that it is based on a double-action bellows driven by a water-wheel through a crank. And although industrial steam- engines, used for pumping, were not around in the west until the 18th century, Hero of Alexandria had a steam-driven toy in the first or second century AD.
Robert Temple's book is a distillation a double distillation — of Joseph Needham's revolutionary work, Science and Civilisation in China. This will be complete in 25 volumes, and though there are still ten to go, Needham, now in his vigorous eighties, views the project with calm anticipation. There is also a shorter version of Needham's book in the process of being published, but even this is for fairly serious scholars, rather than for the general reader who is the likely target of Temple's single volume.
The origins of Needham's original work are fascinating. It is, as he recently said, his `half life's work'. He had already earned distinction as a biochemist and embryolog- ist when, in 1942, he went to China. He had been working with some Chinese researchers in Cambridge, had discovered that their thinking followed patterns very much like his own, and had resolved to discover what Chinese science and technol- ogy had achieved, with, clearly, a view to finding out why, if Chinese scientists thought like those in the west, they had achieved so little. He found, to his sur- prise, a wealth of evidence about very early discovery, and his work revolutionised the west's ideas about Chinese achievements.
But, as you'll discover from this book and it is well worth a browse, picking out inventions that particularly interest you it is not really science that it is talking about. It is quite possible to invent a pump without understanding that atmospheric pressure is involved. You can discover the Chinese did — how to convert brittle cast-iron to tough steel without knowing that you have to remove carbon to do it. In Europe, there were two traditions: practic- al people and those — scientists — who tried to produce unified theories of nature, matter and change. The Chinese seem not to have evolved this second group.
They produced theories to explain what they saw. They noticed, certainly by the seventh century AD, that the tail of a comet always pointed away from the sun, so that at times the comet would be moving into its tail, not away from it, and they had an explanation: the tail was affected by the 'ch'i' of the sun. Ch'i, as Temple tells us is an untranslatable word implying rather more than simply force. The trouble is that untranslatable words are not precise, and you cannot found a scientific theory, in- volving hypothesis and calculation, on imprecise ideas. The scientific revolution that started in Europe in the 17th century was based on careful definition and measurability.
As Needham says, why the Chinese never got this far is still a puzzle. In Europe, this was accompanied by the Protestant Reformation and the rise of capitalism. We cannot know if any one of these gave rise to the others, or it they were generated by some other change. We can know that this kind of science did not occur in China. Or anywhere else but Europe.
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