Miss Buddha (87 page)

Also, by this time, Christianity had gained
an irreversible foothold on the Western world, and since all you
ever needed to know about the world and about the universe was
amply covered in the Bible, there was no need for science. In fact,
by then, science was viewed as a threat to the religious powers
that be.

And as if to underscore this state of
affairs, in 529 CE, both the Lyceum and the Academy finally closed
their doors, and those were the last two nails in our early
scientific coffin.

Chinese Science

While Western Europe suffered its scientific
slumber—a nap that was to last from about 500 to 1400 CE—it
contributed little in the way of scientific thought. Rather (and
most likely out of greed) European philosophers-cum-scientists
mainly dabbled in alchemy, that occult pseudoscience that sprung
from the delusion that you could turn inferior metals into
gold.

Now, it should be mentioned
that alchemy did foster some discoveries, one being sulfuric acid,
which was first documented in the early 14
^th
century. For real scientific
progress, however, we have to turn elsewhere: to China and to the
Arab world.

Keep in mind that Chinese science developed
wholly independently of Greece or Europe, and so followed a
different pattern.

However, just like the Egyptians and
Mesopotamians—and unlike the Greeks, who prized knowledge as an end
in itself—the Chinese took a very pragmatic view of science and put
their discoveries to use.

The list of China’s early discoveries does
dazzle. It includes the compass, which her curious pragmatists
invented in about 270 CE; woodblock printing, designed around 700;
gunpowder apparently clocked in around the year 1000; as did
movable type.

The Chinese were also competent
mathematicians and astronomers. In mathematics, they had calculated
the value of pi to within seven decimal places by the year 600;
while in astronomy, one of their most celebrated observations was
that of the supernova, or stellar explosion, that took place in the
Crab Nebula in 1054.

China is also the source of the world’s
oldest portable star map, dating from about 940.

Islamic Science

Meanwhile, closer to Europe, but during the
same dark ages, the Islamic world—which in medieval times extended
as far west as Spain and as far east as India—also made some
significant scientific breakthroughs.

Apparently picking through whatever scraps
of ancient knowledge remained after the Muslim conquest of India
razed most Hindu and Buddhist temples and libraries, the Arab
mathematician Muhammad al-Khwarizmi discovered and then introduced
Hindu numerals to Europe—many centuries after they had been
formulated in southern Asia.

Unlike the numerals used by the Romans, the
Hindu numerals included the very useful concept and symbol of zero
which as a mathematical device was unknown to Europe at the
time.

Astronomy-wise, Arab stargazers charted the
heavens, giving many of the brightest stars the names we still use
today, such as Aldebaran, Altair, and Deneb. Arab scientists also
explored chemistry, and they developed methods to manufacture
metallic alloys and to test the quality and purity of metals.

Arab scientists were also
active in optics. Early in the 11
^th
century, Alhazen, one of the
most famous Egyptian physicists, published a tract on the
principles of lenses, mirrors, and other optical devices. In this
work, he rejected the then-prevailing idea that eyes give out light
rays. Instead, he deduced that eyes work when light rays enter them
from outside.

Europe Stirs Again

European historians often attribute the
rebirth of its science to a political event—the capture of
Constantinople (now İstanbul) by the Turks in 1453.

At the time of capture, Constantinople was
the capital of the Byzantine Empire and a major seat of learning.
Its downfall led to a westward exodus of Greek scholars, and in the
period that followed, many scientific works, including those
originally from the never sleeping Arab world, were translated into
European languages and then, through the Western invention of the
movable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1450, made
widely available.

16
^th
Century

Unfortunately, this
resurrection of Western European science was rather short-lived.
The recurring outbreak of bubonic plague that began in 1347, and
which was to last for over two centuries—what we know as the Black
Death—was to thwart broad progress until well into the
16
^th
century when two books were published which were to have a
profound impact.

Curiously, they were both published in the
year1543.

Vesalius

The first of these
was
De Corporis Humani Fabrica
(On the Structure of the Human Body, 7 volumes,
1543), by the Belgian anatomist Andreas Vesalius.

Vesalius had studied anatomy in Italy, and
his masterpiece, which was illustrated by superb woodcuts,
corrected errors and misapprehensions about the body that had
persisted since the time of Galen—in other words, for over 1,300
years.

Unlike Islamic physicians, whose religion
prohibited them from dissecting human cadavers, Vesalius—curiosity
personified—dissected and investigated the human body in minute
detail. As a result, he set new standards in anatomical science and
created a brilliant reference work.

Copernicus

The second book was Nicolaus
Copernicus’
De Revolutionibus Orbium
Coelestium
(On the Revolutions of the
Heavenly Spheres). In it, the Polish astronomer—following in the
footsteps made by Pythagoras almost two thousand years
earlier—rejected the idea that Earth was the center of the
universe, as proposed by Ptolemy in the 1
^st
century BCE, and as
maintained by the Holy Roman Empire ever since.

Rather, Copernicus set out to prove that
Earth, together with the other planets, follows orbits around the
Sun.

Other astronomers of his time opposed
Copernicus’s ideas, and more ominously, so, naturally, did the
Roman Catholic Church (which by now had attained serious political
power and was not about to have divine revelations contradicted by
Polish upstarts).

In the early 1600s, the Catholic Church
placed Copernicus’ book on a list of forbidden works, where it was
to remain for a good two centuries.

Despite this ban and despite the book’s
inaccuracies (Copernicus, for instance, believed that Earth’s orbit
was circular rather than elliptical), De Revolutionibus remained a
momentous achievement. It also marked the beginning of a conflict
between science and religion that has dogged Western thought ever
since.

17
^th
Century

In the first decade of the
17
^th
century, Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei put
a new device—the telescope—to good use. In fact, with the help of
this new invention, he provided independent evidence to support
Copernicus’s views on the sun and the planets.

Galileo Galilei was also the first person to
observe satellites circling Jupiter, the first to make detailed
drawings of the surface of the moon, and the first to see how Venus
waxes and wanes as it circles the sun.

His observation and plotting of Venus’ path
convinced Galileo that Copernicus’ sun-centered view of the
universe was in fact correct, but he was obviously also smart
enough to realize the political (not to mention personal) danger of
supporting such heretical views. His dilemma was this: how to
communicate his findings in such a way that they tell the truth
while not rubbing Rome the wrong way.

His attempt at this,
Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems,
Ptolemaic and Copernican
, published in
1632, was carefully crafted to avoid such life-threatening
controversy. But no such luck. He was indeed, and in short order,
summoned before the Inquisition and, under threat of torture,
he—unlike Giordano Bruno, who did not back down—did in fact recant.
The Bible and the Church was right, Copernicus (and Galileo) wrong.
End of story (if you relish your life).

During the
17
^th
century, European scientists did, however, make good progress
in areas less hazardous to your health. For one, as mentioned
earlier, Galileo himself investigated the laws governing falling
objects, and also discovered that the duration of a pendulum’s
swing is constant for any given length. Galileo then explored the
possibility of using this phenomenon to control a clock, an idea
that his son later—records show 1641—put into practice.

Two years later, in 1643, another Italian,
the mathematician and physicist Evangelista Torricelli, built the
first barometer. In the process he also discovered atmospheric
pressure (which, of course, is what the barometer measures) and
also constructed the first artificial vacuum known to science.

17
^th
century Europe also saw major
advances in the life sciences, including William Harvey’s discovery
of the circulatory system and the Dutch microscope maker Antoni van
Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of microorganisms.

Later than century, Robert Boyle, an
Irishman who settled in England to avoid the turmoil over Irish
colonization efforts made by English protestants, established
modern chemistry as a full-fledged science; while in France, the
philosopher and scientist René Descartes made significant headway
in mathematics, as well as advancing the case for rationalism—the
theory that opinions and actions should be based on reason and
knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response—in
scientific research (frowned upon, naturally, by Rome).

This century’s greatest achievements,
however, came in 1665, when Isaac Newton left Cambridge for his
rural birthplace in Woolsthorpe to escape an epidemic of the
plague. There, in peace and quiet, and in the course of a single
year, he not only developed new theories about the nature of light
and gravitation, but he also developed calculus, if for no other
reason than to document and prove that the force of gravity extends
throughout the universe and that all objects attract each other
with a precisely defined and predictable force.

Gravity, he pointed out, is what holds the
moon in its orbit around the Earth and is also the principal cause
of the Earth’s tides. This discovery revolutionized the view of the
universe and it, more than any other single event, is what marked
the birth of modern science.

Age of Enlightenment

What Newton demonstrated above all else was
that nature is governed by basic laws that, if you look hard and
well enough, and if you apply a rational scientific method to it,
can be identified, isolated, and stated.

This new approach to
observing nature—and again, much to Rome’s dismay—liberated
18
^th
-century scientists from passively accepting the untested and
unproven wisdom of ancient writings or religious
authorities.

And so, in what was to become known as the
Age of Reason, or the Age of Enlightenment, the curious began to
actively apply rational thought, careful observation, and
experimentation to solve a variety of problems (rather than
consulting the Bible or their local priests).

Advances in biology, for example, saw the
gradual erosion and eventual demise of the theory of spontaneous
generation—the long-held notion that life could spring from
nonliving matter.

This new freedom also brought the beginning
of scientific classification as pioneered by Swedish naturalist
Carolus Linnaeus, who isolated and recorded close to 12,000 living
plants and animals into a systematic arrangement that, in many
aspects, is still in use today.

Also, by the year 1700 the first steam
engine had been built, while improvements in the telescope enabled
German-born British astronomer Sir William Herschel to discover the
planet Uranus in 1781.

Throughout the
18
^th
century, science played an increasingly important role in
everyday life; new manufacturing processes revolutionized the way
that products were made, heralding what we now term the Industrial
Revolution.

The
19
^th
Century

As the scope of scientific discoveries grew,
and with knowledge building upon prior knowledge to grow this
edifice ever higher, science—by necessity, since the volume of data
was growing far too great for any one person to now embrace—began
to split, and scientists began to specialize in particular
fields.

This specialization,
however, did not mean that the discoveries made were limited to
particular fields, for from the 19
^th
century onward, research
began to unearth principles that applied to, and united, the
universe as a whole.

Chemistry

In chemistry, one of these universal
discoveries was a conceptual one: the notion that all matter is
made of atoms. This, of course, was not a new thought. As I mention
above, Leucippus and Democritus proposed the atom some two thousand
years earlier.

The man who eventually came to revisit this
notion—and this happened in 1803—was the English chemist John
Dalton, who then managed to provide clear and convincing chemical
proof that these little particles did in fact exist.