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Speaker 1: One of the many reasons that it's all inspiring to

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Speaker 1: look up at the night sky, beyond the sheer beauty

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Speaker 1: and grandeur and the cosmic questions that it evokes, is

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Speaker 1: that it's something all humans have in common. There's one

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Speaker 1: night sky that we all stare at that we see

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Speaker 1: different pieces of it. But it's not just across the

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Speaker 1: globe that we have this in common, but across time

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Speaker 1: we have been looking up and asking questions. Basically since

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Speaker 1: people have been able to ask questions. Maybe since we've

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Speaker 1: been people, we understand it so much better than our

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Speaker 1: ancestors do, and we hope future generations will understand it

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Speaker 1: better than we do. But while asking questions about the

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Speaker 1: sky can reveal answers to some of the universe's deepest mysteries,

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Speaker 1: how we ask those questions, what questions we ask, and

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Speaker 1: how we find answers can reveal something about ourselves, how

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Speaker 1: we think, and our relationship with the whole universe.

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Speaker 2: Hi.

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Speaker 1: I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at

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Speaker 1: UC Irvine, and I desperately want to understand how we

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Speaker 1: understand the universe. We think about science as sort of

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Speaker 1: a basic inherent natural human activity to be curious about

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Speaker 1: the world, to try to figure out how the world

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Speaker 1: works as a way to filter good ideas from bad ideas.

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Speaker 1: But what seems natural to us now, what seems basically

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Speaker 1: true about the way science should happen, turns out to

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Speaker 1: be somewhat cultural and contextual. What we mean by science

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Speaker 1: has changed over decades and centuries, and it continues to change,

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Speaker 1: from cave people staring at the night sky to men

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Speaker 1: of leisure operating in their personal laboratories, to massive international

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Speaker 1: efforts spanning decades. It raises interesting questions. Are all kinds

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Speaker 1: of knowledge gathering something we would consider science is the

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Speaker 1: accumulated wisdom of medicine, men and women in prehistoric tribes

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Speaker 1: scientific knowledge? What would Isaac Newton think about what we

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Speaker 1: are doing? There's so many questions to ask. Is this

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Speaker 1: the only way to figure out how the universe works

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Speaker 1: in the future? Will we still be doing something that

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Speaker 1: we recognize as science? Will future scientists recognize what we're

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Speaker 1: doing as science or brush it off as prehistoric nonsense?

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Speaker 1: And where in the end does science come from? What

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Speaker 1: are its roots in history? How long have we been

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Speaker 1: doing it? What are the major moments in which it's

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Speaker 1: changed and become what we recognize today. So today in

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Speaker 1: the podcast, we'll be asking the question who was the

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Speaker 1: first scientist? And it's not that I want to give

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Speaker 1: anybody particular credit for being the first scientist. Really, I

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Speaker 1: want to know when did we start doing science? Was

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Speaker 1: there a moment in the history of humanity that we

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Speaker 1: can say was before science and after science? Is that

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Speaker 1: even an important distinction? And what is the story we

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Speaker 1: tell about science really say about ourselves. So, as usual,

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Speaker 1: I was curious what folks out there thought about this

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Speaker 1: question about who was the first scientist? So I reached

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Speaker 1: out to my community of volunteers to ask them without

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Speaker 1: any chance for preparation, to opine on this important philosophical

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Speaker 1: and historical question. Thanks to everybody who participates. If you

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Speaker 1: would like to hear your voice speculating basically on the podcast,

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Speaker 1: don't be shy. Everybody's welcome right to me to questions

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Speaker 1: at Danielandjorge dot com. So for you hear these answers,

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Speaker 1: think for a moment, who do you think gets credit

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Speaker 1: for being the first science? Here's what a bunch of

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Speaker 1: listeners had to say.

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Speaker 3: My first inclination might be to say Aristotle, but that's

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Speaker 3: not right because he just made pronouncements and didn't do experiments.

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Speaker 3: So maybe the first scientist was the Greek who figured

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Speaker 3: out that the Earth was round by looking at the

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Speaker 3: difference in the length of shadow at noon in Greece

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Speaker 3: versus Egypt.

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Speaker 4: The first scientist was probably one of our long dead

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Speaker 4: ancestors who looked at fire, or looked up in the

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Speaker 4: sky and saw those points of lights up there and said,

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Speaker 4: I wonder what this stuff is. It's probably not what

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Speaker 4: our shamans or witch doctors say they are.

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Speaker 5: I guess some cave person that was painting a supernova

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Speaker 5: on a wall. The first sort of modern scientists that

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Speaker 5: comes to mind would probably be Aristotle.

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Speaker 6: I imagine who the first scientist is is relative to how

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Speaker 6: you measure who the first scientist was. But I imagine

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Speaker 6: the first scientist, the first true scientist is probably someone

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Speaker 6: that most people on this earth never heard of, because

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Speaker 6: we don't have records from that time.

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Speaker 1: Undoubtedly weird al Yankovic.

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Speaker 6: I don't know, but if I have to guess, I

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Speaker 6: would say someone from Greece or Egypt.

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Speaker 7: I think the first scientists on Earth were Adam and Eve,

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Speaker 7: because there were the first people on Earth, and also

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Speaker 7: they had to know how to gather information and all

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Speaker 7: that stuff to know where to build cities and settlements.

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Speaker 8: Probably the very first human or proto human, if you're

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Speaker 8: talking about the simple act of making science as an

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Speaker 8: act of observation and learning from nature, but science as

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Speaker 8: a metadological mean for findings and recordings is probably much

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Speaker 8: more recent.

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Speaker 9: Presumably some distant ancestor who had a stick and poked

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Speaker 9: an ant hill and got some food out of it.

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Speaker 9: The first scientist was probably some unnamed hominid who looked

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Speaker 9: at the world and thought, I wonder why this is

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Speaker 9: the way it is more modern. I know there were

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Speaker 9: astronomers thousands of years ago in China, and then if

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Speaker 9: we're talking the scientific method, I know there were our

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Speaker 9: scholars and whatnot using a more modern approach. I don't

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Speaker 9: know exact names, but it'd be interested in learning that

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Speaker 9: science history.

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Speaker 7: I don't know.

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Speaker 1: Man, probably somebody living in a cave we looked up

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Speaker 1: at the sky and thought, whoa cool, what are those?

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Speaker 1: I gotta figure that out. These are some really great answers,

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Speaker 1: and I have to say I'm really impressed. I was

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Speaker 1: expecting a bunch of Galileo or Francis Bacon or Isaac Newton.

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Speaker 1: But everybody here is clearly thinking about science in a

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Speaker 1: broader sense, as a way of being curious about the

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Speaker 1: world and figuring out how it works, not just sort

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Speaker 1: of officially doing science as your job. So I think

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Speaker 1: this is really wonderful, and I think this is a

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Speaker 1: really difficult question to think about when science became what

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Speaker 1: we call science, and what we even mean by science,

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Speaker 1: and whether what people were doing thousands of years ago

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Speaker 1: is something we should consider science, and how we relate

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Speaker 1: to it, and what they would have to say if

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Speaker 1: they were fast forwarded to the future to come and

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Speaker 1: visit the large Hageon Cliner for example. Well, since I

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Speaker 1: am not an expert in the history of science, I

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Speaker 1: decided to do some reading and I read a fantastic

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Speaker 1: book called A Global History of Science from an expert

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Speaker 1: in the topic, Professor James Poskett, and then reached out

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Speaker 1: to him to invite him to chat with me about

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Speaker 1: this question on the podcast. So here's my interview with James. Okay,

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Speaker 1: so it's my great pleasure to welcome the program Professor

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Speaker 1: James Poskett. He's an associate professor in the history of

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Speaker 1: Science and Technology at the University of Warwick. He has

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Speaker 1: a PhD in the history of science from the University

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Speaker 1: of Cambridge and has held fellowships at Harvard and other universities.

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Speaker 1: He's also the author of a recent book, Horizons, a

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Speaker 1: Global History of Science, that we're going to dig into today. James,

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Speaker 1: thanks very much for joining us today.

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

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Speaker 1: Wonderful. So I want to start off very broad and

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Speaker 1: understand what we're talking about when we talk about science

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Speaker 1: and the history of science and who is doing science

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Speaker 1: and who isn't by doing something very nerdy and philosophical,

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Speaker 1: which is defining the terms. So like when I say

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Speaker 1: to you science, what does that mean to you? What

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Speaker 1: is science? And I'm curious your thoughts sort of from

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Speaker 1: the perspective of popular culture where people may think science

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Speaker 1: is and we're sort of like people who get really

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Speaker 1: nerdy about it. How they define science.

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Speaker 10: Yeah, it's a great question, and the very scientists kind

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Speaker 10: of question. Scientists love to start by defining their terms,

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Speaker 10: and I'd say historians are a bit more reluctant to

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Speaker 10: totally hammer down our terms before we start because it

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Speaker 10: might prejudge a few things which relate to some of

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Speaker 10: the problems. Actually, I think we'll be talking about about

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Speaker 10: how we define science today and how that might make

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Speaker 10: us lose track of some important aspects of science in

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Speaker 10: the past. And people that have contributed so famously philosophers

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Speaker 10: of science have spent one hundred plus years trying to

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Speaker 10: come up with a fool proof definition of science. Maybe

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Speaker 10: science is something that's falsified, or something that's testable, something

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Speaker 10: that's empirical, something that's rational, and science may at times

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Speaker 10: include some of those things, but also famously, none of

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Speaker 10: those definitions encompass all of the things that even today

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Speaker 10: we call science. Some sciences on't as testable in the

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Speaker 10: way that other sciences are, Some aren't predictive in the

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Speaker 10: same way other sciences are. So I don't think there's

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Speaker 10: one easy definition of sciences.

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Speaker 1: Interrupt then with a meta question, Yeah, which is, how

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Speaker 1: is it we can have a thing we call science

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Speaker 1: where the National Science Foundation scientist, we don't even know

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Speaker 1: what this word means. How do we end up with

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Speaker 1: in this mess?

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Speaker 2: Yeah?

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Speaker 10: So, in fact, you've kind of started answering the question

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Speaker 10: in a way, and that I think one of the

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Speaker 10: things we can think of science as is a set

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Speaker 10: of institutions, of practices around those institutions, a way of

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Speaker 10: structuring how we go about investigating the world world, and

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Speaker 10: that's changed over time. So rather than thinking of science

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Speaker 10: as simply just a method or simply just the content

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Speaker 10: of scientific theories, I think modern science particularly has arisen

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Speaker 10: out of quite specific sets of institutions and structures, and

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Speaker 10: the point of those is the structure the way we

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Speaker 10: investigate the world and to structure knowledge. So science isn't

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Speaker 10: just knowledge. It's not just stuff that I know or

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Speaker 10: someone knows. I would say that the structuring of that

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Speaker 10: knowledge in particular ways is what makes a difference.

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Speaker 1: I see. So, is it about the way that we

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Speaker 1: accumulate the knowledge, like the method we use to discover

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Speaker 1: things about the world, or the institutional like the sociological

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Speaker 1: respect we have for that knowledge, or is it sort

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Speaker 1: of a big mess of all of these things.

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Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean kind of a big mess of all

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Speaker 10: of those things. I think those things relate that the

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Speaker 10: institutions ensure that certain kinds of methods are followed within

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Speaker 10: certain kinds of disciplines. But importantly, that's changed quite a

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Speaker 10: lot over time, which is why, particularly a historian, I'm

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Speaker 10: reluctant to kind of point at what we think of

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Speaker 10: as science today, national scientific societies, scientists like yourself conducting

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Speaker 10: research in a university, perhaps in their laboratory or using

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Speaker 10: high tech equipment, when all of that really is a

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Speaker 10: product of the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries.

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Speaker 10: That misses quite a lot of humans seriously investigating the

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Speaker 10: natural world before then.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, and something we say on the podcast a lot,

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Speaker 1: which I deeply believe, is that you don't have to

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Speaker 1: be a professional scientist to be doing sciences. Bawn that

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Speaker 1: everybody who's looking at for the net sky and is

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Speaker 1: wondering about the universe and trying to figure it out,

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Speaker 1: even just listening to this podcast, it's you curious about

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Speaker 1: the world, and you guys are all out there are scientists.

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Speaker 1: So everybody get your scientist's badge and put it on yourself. Mentally,

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Speaker 1: I couldn't agree more. And so one thing I want

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Speaker 1: to dig in you with you the genesis of science,

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Speaker 1: where it comes from. And there's this sort of traditional

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Speaker 1: story people learn in elementary school or whatever that science

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Speaker 1: began at some moment, you know, Galileo and empiricism and

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Speaker 1: Francis Bacon and the Enlightenment, and it all just sort

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Speaker 1: of like exploded as this new idea and then we

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Speaker 1: could rapidly accumulate knowledge about the world. But as you

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Speaker 1: exploring your wonderful book and I want to talk about today,

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Speaker 1: is it's more subtle than that, Isn't it's more graduals

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Speaker 1: more nuanced. Give us a picture about how you see

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Speaker 1: the sort of broader history of science coming together as

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Speaker 1: a thing.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 10: So, as you say, there's a traditional story, which is

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Speaker 10: something like science originated in fifteenth sixteenth century Europe with

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Speaker 10: something called the scientific Revolution, and we're familiar, as you say,

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Speaker 10: with the kind of people that are associated with these

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Speaker 10: individual geniuses often kind of presented as kind of really

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Speaker 10: riling against forms of authority, particularly religious authorities, people like Galileo,

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Speaker 10: people like Newton, people like Pernicus, particularly astronomy, and fittingly,

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Speaker 10: view is often the center of that story. And it's

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Speaker 10: certainly true that something important was happening at that time,

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Speaker 10: and some important stuff was happening in Europe. But the

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Speaker 10: argument of my book essentially is that if we only

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Speaker 10: look at Europe and we only try and explain the

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Speaker 10: development of modern science from that point onwards in terms

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Speaker 10: of European ideas or European society, or economics or politics,

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Speaker 10: whatever it is.

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Speaker 2: Then we miss two important things.

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Speaker 10: One is how other cultures actually had scientific cultures that

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Speaker 10: were developing in quite significant ways around the same time.

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Speaker 10: And two that that wasn't a coincidence. It's because the

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Speaker 10: world was becoming increasingly connected at that time, initially through

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Speaker 10: things like colonialism, slavery, global trade, religious pilgrimage, later through

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Speaker 10: kind of international capitalism, through international warfare.

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Speaker 2: Et cetera, et cetera.

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Speaker 10: So as the world becomes more connected, from say the

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Speaker 10: fifteen hundreds onwards, that leads to this intermingling of scientific cultures,

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Speaker 10: and that for me is the key kind of.

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Speaker 2: Driver of a lot of this scientific change.

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Speaker 10: In a nutshell, that is the argument of the book,

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Speaker 10: which I cash out in a lot more detail.

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Speaker 1: I see. So you're saying that the Western Europe came

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Speaker 1: into contact with the rest of the world and brought

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Speaker 1: together these strands of different kinds of thinking, data, and

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Speaker 1: understanding from around the world, and that's what sparked sort

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Speaker 1: of this revolution in understanding, not some solitary genius in

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Speaker 1: a tower somewhere, a man of leisure who decided let's

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Speaker 1: learn facts about the world in a different way.

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Speaker 10: Great summary, better than I the author in a way.

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Speaker 10: But yeah, it's and I liked your kind of point.

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Speaker 10: You know, it's about all these different things about data,

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Speaker 10: it's about ideas, it's about ways of approaching the world,

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Speaker 10: and as maybe we'll get on to talk about. But

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Speaker 10: many of these famous figures weren't actually locked in a

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Speaker 10: room disconnected from the world. These famous figures not by coincidence.

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Speaker 10: I argue, people like Isaac Newton in particular, were incredibly

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Speaker 10: well connected. Even if they didn't travel themselves, they were

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Speaker 10: able to amass information in a way that wasn't possible

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Speaker 10: before and make the claims they're open to about things

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Speaker 10: like gravity, about the nature of astronomy and such.

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Speaker 1: Right, And I want to dig into that, But first

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Speaker 1: I want to figure out where this story comes from.

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Speaker 1: I mean, I've heard this story Galleo, etcetera, etcetera. Where

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Speaker 1: does this myth come from? If it's a story, who

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Speaker 1: wrote this story of modern science? And why do we

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Speaker 1: all believe it's?

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Speaker 2: Great question.

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Speaker 10: I deal with this quite explicitly because I think it's

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Speaker 10: it could be disconcerting in general, but for the reader

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Speaker 10: of a book or when you're hearing this, to kind

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Speaker 10: of be told, oh, this story that you're quite familiar with. You,

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Speaker 10: I was taught this at school. I did a science

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Speaker 10: undergraduate degree.

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Speaker 2: I was kind of.

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Speaker 10: Taught similar things often sort of you know, it's not

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Speaker 10: front and center, but it's the kind of background were

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Speaker 10: and you think, well, you know, is this some kind

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Speaker 10: of conspiracy theory? Is this just all like where did

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Speaker 10: this come from?

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Speaker 2: Them? But it is.

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Speaker 10: You know, the narratives we tell about the past, including

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Speaker 10: the scientific past, they're not carefully crafted by some kind

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Speaker 10: of propaganda department, but they are reflective of the attitudes

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Speaker 10: of the time. And it was in the twentieth century

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Speaker 10: in particular, that the history of science became a professional thing,

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Speaker 10: that people started writing lots of histories of science, and

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Speaker 10: people professional historians, often actually professional scientists in places like

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Speaker 10: Britain the United States, began to present this very particular

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Speaker 10: view of science, which actually would have seemed quite alien

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Speaker 10: to anyone in say the eighteenth or the seventeenth century,

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Speaker 10: in which there was a special kind of Western culture

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Speaker 10: that produced scientific advances, and as I argue, in the book.

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Speaker 10: This is basically linked to the struggle between capitalism and

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Speaker 10: communism in the twentieth century that it became very important

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Speaker 10: for both the United States and on the other side

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Speaker 10: of the Soviet Union to present themselves as the future

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Speaker 10: of scientific advance and that their social and economic systems

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Speaker 10: produced science and there was something unique about them.

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Speaker 1: Does that mean that those folks who were embedded in

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Speaker 1: the Cold War in the sixties and seventies didn't see

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Speaker 1: the Soviets, for example, as doing science. I mean, I

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Speaker 1: grew up in Los Almos, and you know, it was

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Speaker 1: deeply a Cold War context, and we were doing physics

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Speaker 1: and Los Almos racing against the threat of you know,

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Speaker 1: Soviet physics, which would develop other weapons which would demolish ours,

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Speaker 1: Wasn't there sort of also at the same time, a

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Speaker 1: deep fear motivating the Soviets as doing science as well

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Speaker 1: in order to justify their fear and that expenditure.

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Speaker 10: Absolutely so, Yeah, it's partly out of a kind of

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Speaker 10: anxiety either in the early Cold War, particularly with things

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Speaker 10: like the launch of SPOTNK, there is a real anxiety

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Speaker 10: in the US that the Soviets might be ahead. Of course,

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Speaker 10: the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite SPOTNEK. They get

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Speaker 10: the first human into space for your a Gagarin. So

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Speaker 10: this kind of question about what is the relationship between

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Speaker 10: Western society and progress in science is really charged and

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Speaker 10: really really important, as you received quite a lot of

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Speaker 10: funding in the nineteen fifties nineteen sixties. As you say,

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Speaker 10: so it's less that the Americans or the Western world

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Speaker 10: thinks that the Soviets aren't doing science. Of course they

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Speaker 10: know they are, but they ultimately develop a narrative which

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Speaker 10: is actually quite explicitly introduced into high school and kind

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Speaker 10: of history one oh one curricula in the United States

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Speaker 10: in particular, that tells a longer history about why, yes,

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Speaker 10: the Soviets might have achieved something in the short term,

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Speaker 10: but in the long run of human history, the West

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Speaker 10: will prevail. So the superstition over irrationality over authoritarian isn't

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Speaker 10: And really Galileo becomes a kind of parable you're supposed

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Speaker 10: to read much like Star Wars, you know, like The

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Speaker 10: Empire Darth Vader is, the Soviet Union slash the Nazis.

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Speaker 10: You're supposed to read the Catholic Church in the kind

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Speaker 10: of Galileo versus the Church as a liberal fighting against

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Speaker 10: the authoritarian rule of the pope slash Stalin. So there's

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Speaker 10: this kind of mixing of the narrative. It's not that bluntly,

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Speaker 10: but that's the sort of the ethos that that narrative.

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Speaker 2: Is trying to develop.

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Speaker 1: So you're saying the pope is basically the emperor.

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Speaker 2: Yeah exactly, Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good way.

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Speaker 1: Well, he basically is the last Holy Roman Emperor.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Oh that's fascinating. Well, it's interesting to me. It sounds

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Speaker 1: to me like you're saying that, you know, we're being

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Speaker 1: positioned to believe that our science is sort of like

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Speaker 1: the true descendant of pure science from history, that it's

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Speaker 1: we invented it and it's you know, it's our birthright

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Speaker 1: is sort of and not something from the East.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, is that separation.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, it's fascinating from also from the context of the

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Speaker 1: fall of the Soviet Union, because there's a lot of

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Speaker 1: like excellent Soviet physics going on and a lot of

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Speaker 1: that has just been lost, you know, alternative directions that

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Speaker 1: this community was following. We saw some of that this

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Speaker 1: summer with the excitement about l K ninety nine, the

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Speaker 1: room temperat superconductor, which was supposed to be a remnant

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Speaker 1: of Soviet physics. And I just had the sense that

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Speaker 1: there's all these jewels from really smart people working in

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Speaker 1: a different culture that has been essentially dismissed.

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Speaker 2: Absolutely agree, very much.

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Speaker 10: And I talk quite a lot about Soviet physics in

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Speaker 10: the late part of my book, and then back one

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Speaker 10: of my colleagues, doctor Claire Shaw, writes quite a lot.

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Speaker 2: About how many of the kind of exciting things in

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Speaker 2: the future of science.

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Speaker 10: Things like AI, things like low temperature superconductors, all of

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Speaker 10: this is coming out of the sort of lost world.

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Speaker 1: Of Soviet physics. Yeah, and I want to give some

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Speaker 1: credit to our listeners. I asked them who they thought

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Speaker 1: was the first scientist, and frankly, I expected to hear

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Speaker 1: a lot of Galileo, Bacon, et cetera. But I got

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Speaker 1: a lot of answers of things like a long dead

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Speaker 1: ancestor who looked up at the sky, or you know,

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Speaker 1: a cave person painting a supernova on a wall. I mean,

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Speaker 1: there was one guy who said weird Al Yankovic, which

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Speaker 1: is probably not accurate.

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Speaker 2: You said anyone could be a scientist.

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Speaker 1: I'm not saying weird Al's not a scientist. I mean,

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Speaker 1: it's definitely a creative dude. But the general sense was that,

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Speaker 1: you know, people have been doing science for a long time.

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Speaker 1: It's not just something that happened in Western Europe. So

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Speaker 1: you know, kudos to their teachers or to our listeners

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Speaker 1: from being more broadly educated. But I was wondering if

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Speaker 1: you could help us and paint the picture of how

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Speaker 1: these threats came together. You were telling us about how

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Speaker 1: this moment, the scientific revolution was more of a coagulation

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Speaker 1: of these ideas. Tell us about, for example, how Newton

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Speaker 1: relied on knowledge from around the world to build his theories.

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Speaker 10: Yes, a fascinating kind of classic. So Newton famously develops

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Speaker 10: his laws of motion, including identifying the laws for acceleration

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Speaker 10: of gravity. And Newton is not someone who is locked

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Speaker 10: in a room disconnected from the world. He doesn't travel

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Speaker 10: around the world. But particularly because he works as Master

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Speaker 10: of the Mint in the effectively the Bank of England,

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Speaker 10: the early version in England at the time, he's able

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Speaker 10: to collect information from around the world, information from East

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Speaker 10: India company officers who are sailing through the Bay of Bengal, even.

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Speaker 2: As far as Vietnam.

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Speaker 10: Some of the East India company officers are sailing, collecting

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Speaker 10: astronomical observations made by those.

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Speaker 2: Officers at sea or on land.

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Speaker 10: He collects information taken by astronomers, particularly French astronomers. He

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Speaker 10: traveled to West Africa and the Caribbean on slave ships,

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Speaker 10: and in fact, an important part of the story I

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Speaker 10: tell about Newton is how he was personally invested in

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Speaker 10: the slave trade and colonial trade, and that world in

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Speaker 10: which he was invested was also the world in which

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Speaker 10: he got his information from. The upshot of this is

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Speaker 10: by collecting astronomical observations, particularly of things like comets, but

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Speaker 10: also crucially observations of things like the tides and the

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Speaker 10: length of a pendulum to swing for a second, he's

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Speaker 10: able to figure out and really that is the empirical

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Speaker 10: evidence for his theory of universal gravitation, because his theory

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Speaker 10: of gravitation implies something that's at the time quite counterintuitive

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Speaker 10: and controversial, that the Earth isn't a perfect sphere, and

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Speaker 10: therefore the force the acceleration of gravity is different at

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Speaker 10: different points of the Earth. That nearer the equator, gravity

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Speaker 10: is effectively less because you're further away from the center

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Speaker 10: of the mass than at the pulse. And so this

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Speaker 10: ability to collect information from around the world, which is

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Speaker 10: linked to things like the slave trade, colonial trade, is

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Speaker 10: the really necessary conditions for someone like Newton to be

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Speaker 10: able to develop his theory. So that's more about data

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Speaker 10: from around the world than necessarily other cultures. But he's

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Speaker 10: a real, I think, smoking gun for this world of interconnection.

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Speaker 10: Being at the heart of the scientific revolution fascinating.

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Speaker 1: I was also enjoying the passage in your book about

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Speaker 1: Darwin and how he relied on data as well from

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Speaker 1: disparate sources. Tell us a little bit about Darwin's story.

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00:24:40,600 --> 00:24:43,600
Speaker 10: Yeah, so Charles Darwin famously did travel around the world,

440
00:24:43,600 --> 00:24:46,480
Speaker 10: and that was a very important part of his theorizing

441
00:24:46,520 --> 00:24:49,640
Speaker 10: of evolution. Because that's rather well known, I don't cover

442
00:24:49,720 --> 00:24:52,679
Speaker 10: that in detail in the book. Instead, I focus a

443
00:24:52,680 --> 00:24:56,439
Speaker 10: lot more on the fact that Darwin was well aware

444
00:24:56,640 --> 00:25:02,520
Speaker 10: that other cultures already had an idea about evolution. So

445
00:25:02,680 --> 00:25:05,920
Speaker 10: whilst Darwin, it's true, develops the theory of evolution by

446
00:25:06,080 --> 00:25:10,760
Speaker 10: natural selections of the specific mechanism, the idea that the

447
00:25:11,400 --> 00:25:16,119
Speaker 10: nature species had originated from some kind of natural process

448
00:25:16,840 --> 00:25:18,639
Speaker 10: that was common in many cultures.

449
00:25:18,720 --> 00:25:22,040
Speaker 2: In fact, I often say Europe was the odd one out.

450
00:25:22,080 --> 00:25:24,080
Speaker 10: It was weird, and it was one of the few

451
00:25:24,119 --> 00:25:27,760
Speaker 10: cultures that didn't believe in evolution prior to the nineteenth century.

452
00:25:27,800 --> 00:25:30,239
Speaker 10: I mean, the idea that there's a natural kind of

453
00:25:30,280 --> 00:25:34,040
Speaker 10: evolutionary origin of not just plants and animals, but humans

454
00:25:34,160 --> 00:25:37,720
Speaker 10: is like part of the course in say Hinduism or Buddhism.

455
00:25:37,840 --> 00:25:41,160
Speaker 10: And because darn was aware of that, he sought out

456
00:25:41,280 --> 00:25:45,840
Speaker 10: information from not just other places that are the cultures.

457
00:25:45,880 --> 00:25:47,560
Speaker 10: And one of the great examples I use in my

458
00:25:47,600 --> 00:25:52,200
Speaker 10: book is that on the Origin of Species, Darwin Well

459
00:25:52,280 --> 00:25:58,080
Speaker 10: cites a sixteenth century Chinese encyclopedia of natural history, and

460
00:25:58,119 --> 00:26:02,240
Speaker 10: he's particularly interested in how animals have changed over time

461
00:26:02,280 --> 00:26:07,639
Speaker 10: and the documentation of that in both recent and ancient sources,

462
00:26:07,640 --> 00:26:09,960
Speaker 10: because then he can kind of try and chart there's

463
00:26:09,960 --> 00:26:13,760
Speaker 10: an interesting charting whether evolution has happened over relatively what

464
00:26:13,800 --> 00:26:16,160
Speaker 10: we now would think of as relatively small time scales,

465
00:26:16,200 --> 00:26:19,080
Speaker 10: which we now know is unlikely. That he was interested

466
00:26:19,080 --> 00:26:23,720
Speaker 10: in that, and so he cites this Ming dynasty very

467
00:26:23,800 --> 00:26:27,560
Speaker 10: in fact important encyclopedia of natural history by a Chinese

468
00:26:27,600 --> 00:26:30,919
Speaker 10: physician called alishu Zen. And Darlin can't read Chinese, so

469
00:26:30,920 --> 00:26:33,040
Speaker 10: he has to get someone at the British Museum to

470
00:26:33,160 --> 00:26:36,880
Speaker 10: translate portions of it for him. And that's just one example.

471
00:26:37,080 --> 00:26:42,359
Speaker 10: He uses French translations of other Chinese works on agriculture

472
00:26:42,359 --> 00:26:44,120
Speaker 10: to get an idea about the development of.

473
00:26:44,080 --> 00:26:48,640
Speaker 2: Plants in China. He's interested in Russian accounts.

474
00:26:48,160 --> 00:26:53,359
Speaker 10: Of geology and natural history from places like Siberia, so

475
00:26:53,440 --> 00:26:56,679
Speaker 10: he's really not just a collector of specimens famously on

476
00:26:56,720 --> 00:26:59,360
Speaker 10: the Beagle Voyage, but rather like Newton, he's a collector

477
00:26:59,400 --> 00:27:03,320
Speaker 10: of information, including from other cultures.

478
00:27:03,320 --> 00:27:05,960
Speaker 1: Fascinating. Okay, I have a lot more questions about this

479
00:27:06,040 --> 00:27:21,920
Speaker 1: fascinating topic, but first let's take a quick break. Okay,

480
00:27:21,920 --> 00:27:24,400
Speaker 1: we're back and I'm chatting with Professor James Poskett about

481
00:27:24,400 --> 00:27:27,680
Speaker 1: the thorny questions of what is science, when did it begin?

482
00:27:27,880 --> 00:27:30,480
Speaker 1: And what it says about how we think. I also

483
00:27:30,480 --> 00:27:33,680
Speaker 1: thought your story about the Islamic world was really important.

484
00:27:33,720 --> 00:27:36,959
Speaker 1: We often hear about their role as sort of capturing

485
00:27:37,080 --> 00:27:40,280
Speaker 1: and reproducing and propagating the works of the Greeks, but

486
00:27:40,480 --> 00:27:42,720
Speaker 1: I love if you tell our listeners a little bit about,

487
00:27:42,920 --> 00:27:45,640
Speaker 1: you know, their critique and their elaboration on the work

488
00:27:45,680 --> 00:27:48,320
Speaker 1: of the Greeks, rather than just as being vessels for it.

489
00:27:48,320 --> 00:27:53,120
Speaker 10: Absolutely, and your analogy that we often think of Islamic

490
00:27:53,200 --> 00:27:56,040
Speaker 10: science as simply the sort of vessels or you know,

491
00:27:56,119 --> 00:27:58,520
Speaker 10: like guardians of Greek science, they just holding on to

492
00:27:58,600 --> 00:28:02,280
Speaker 10: it to pass it on to European science later. But

493
00:28:02,800 --> 00:28:07,280
Speaker 10: the evidence for that that Islamic thinkers in both the

494
00:28:07,320 --> 00:28:10,440
Speaker 10: medieval period but including much later in the fourteenth fifteenth,

495
00:28:10,840 --> 00:28:15,920
Speaker 10: sixteenth century, they weren't just copying out Greek texts, they

496
00:28:15,960 --> 00:28:21,640
Speaker 10: were translating them into Arabic or Persian and then writing

497
00:28:21,760 --> 00:28:29,119
Speaker 10: detailed commentaries critiquing these earlier Greek astronomers and mathematicians in particular,

498
00:28:29,320 --> 00:28:32,960
Speaker 10: So someone like Ptolemy, the famous Greek astronomer that forms

499
00:28:33,040 --> 00:28:37,679
Speaker 10: the basis of sort of lots of European astronomy. Well,

500
00:28:37,880 --> 00:28:41,800
Speaker 10: Islamic astronomers recognized what was powerful about Ptolemy, but also

501
00:28:41,880 --> 00:28:45,560
Speaker 10: recognized that Ptolemy's ancient Greek astronomy, some of its assumptions

502
00:28:45,600 --> 00:28:52,480
Speaker 10: created massive problems. Particularly, Ptolemy insisted that everything in the

503
00:28:52,640 --> 00:28:55,800
Speaker 10: universe outside of the Earth had to move in perfect circles,

504
00:28:56,000 --> 00:28:59,360
Speaker 10: and this created a problem because if you insist that

505
00:28:59,400 --> 00:29:02,720
Speaker 10: all the planet to moving imperfect circles, I mean it's

506
00:29:02,760 --> 00:29:07,760
Speaker 10: impossible to perfectly model the movement of the planets around

507
00:29:07,800 --> 00:29:10,000
Speaker 10: the Sun or even around the Earth, if you think

508
00:29:10,040 --> 00:29:13,280
Speaker 10: there's a At the time, obviously people believe that the Earth,

509
00:29:13,560 --> 00:29:15,800
Speaker 10: by and Lodge, was at the center of the universe,

510
00:29:16,120 --> 00:29:21,240
Speaker 10: and in particular, a Persian astronomer in the thirteenth century,

511
00:29:21,680 --> 00:29:28,160
Speaker 10: nase aldn Altusi, who was working in what's now modern Iran,

512
00:29:29,000 --> 00:29:32,280
Speaker 10: wrote a very detailed account of how you would have

513
00:29:32,400 --> 00:29:38,160
Speaker 10: to change astronomy and ancient Greek astronomy, keeping some of

514
00:29:38,240 --> 00:29:43,840
Speaker 10: the good bits. But Tusi develops new techniques, new mathematical

515
00:29:44,040 --> 00:29:49,800
Speaker 10: and really geometric techniques to better model the movement of

516
00:29:49,840 --> 00:29:52,120
Speaker 10: the planets. So he basically has like a circle inside

517
00:29:52,120 --> 00:29:55,479
Speaker 10: another circle. It's called the Tusi couple, which allows you

518
00:29:55,560 --> 00:29:59,400
Speaker 10: to create linear motion from circular motion, which to come

519
00:29:59,480 --> 00:30:01,200
Speaker 10: long stories or allows you to kind of get the

520
00:30:01,240 --> 00:30:03,280
Speaker 10: planets to sort of wabble around a bit more as

521
00:30:03,280 --> 00:30:05,800
Speaker 10: they go. So it's not perfect, it's not you know,

522
00:30:06,160 --> 00:30:09,680
Speaker 10: the proper elliptical laws that Keptler comes up with, but

523
00:30:10,240 --> 00:30:15,000
Speaker 10: it's a lot closer, and Copernicus actually uses Nasa al

524
00:30:15,080 --> 00:30:21,320
Speaker 10: din Altusi's work later during the scientific of revolution, so That's.

525
00:30:21,160 --> 00:30:21,920
Speaker 2: Just one example.

526
00:30:21,960 --> 00:30:24,800
Speaker 10: But the point is as you say that the Islamic

527
00:30:24,840 --> 00:30:28,280
Speaker 10: Golden Age, for one, didn't suddenly end in like the

528
00:30:28,320 --> 00:30:32,760
Speaker 10: twelfth century, and two they weren't just copying out Greek texts.

529
00:30:32,920 --> 00:30:34,760
Speaker 2: They were seriously.

530
00:30:34,240 --> 00:30:37,440
Speaker 10: Engaging with them, building on them, and then later European

531
00:30:37,480 --> 00:30:42,760
Speaker 10: astronomers as well as chemists, mathematicians and so forth built

532
00:30:42,800 --> 00:30:43,480
Speaker 10: on that as well.

533
00:30:43,600 --> 00:30:45,960
Speaker 1: Wonderful now that we have a more sort of nuanced

534
00:30:46,000 --> 00:30:48,640
Speaker 1: picture of who is doing what, I want to trace

535
00:30:48,680 --> 00:30:50,960
Speaker 1: it back and try to answer the question of like,

536
00:30:51,880 --> 00:30:54,880
Speaker 1: when is its science and when is it just sort

537
00:30:54,920 --> 00:30:57,560
Speaker 1: of like thinking and wondering, And is there a meaningful difference?

538
00:30:58,040 --> 00:30:59,880
Speaker 1: I mean, if we talk about how we do science

539
00:31:00,160 --> 00:31:03,200
Speaker 1: day and imagine that we just looked back at what

540
00:31:03,440 --> 00:31:07,240
Speaker 1: Galleo and Newton and Bacon were doing, would we recognize

541
00:31:07,280 --> 00:31:09,920
Speaker 1: what they were doing as science or flip it around

542
00:31:09,960 --> 00:31:12,600
Speaker 1: if they showed up today, would they recognize what we're

543
00:31:12,600 --> 00:31:15,120
Speaker 1: doing as science or would they think it's totally alien?

544
00:31:15,200 --> 00:31:18,480
Speaker 1: You know, how is science today different in institution and

545
00:31:18,560 --> 00:31:22,160
Speaker 1: practice and theory than even just what we consider the

546
00:31:22,160 --> 00:31:24,720
Speaker 1: beginning of the scientific revolution. Before we go back and

547
00:31:24,800 --> 00:31:27,800
Speaker 1: talk about whether you know, the Chinese, we're doing science

548
00:31:27,920 --> 00:31:30,120
Speaker 1: or not? What about you know, could we lift up

549
00:31:30,160 --> 00:31:32,600
Speaker 1: as the grandfathers of science? How much has it changed

550
00:31:32,640 --> 00:31:34,080
Speaker 1: even in those few hundred years.

551
00:31:34,240 --> 00:31:35,280
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot.

552
00:31:35,680 --> 00:31:37,520
Speaker 10: It's a great question, and you're right, it's a good

553
00:31:37,560 --> 00:31:40,320
Speaker 10: way to maybe get to what science is and it's not.

554
00:31:40,480 --> 00:31:44,880
Speaker 10: I think if we look at people like Newton, Francis Bacon, Galileo,

555
00:31:45,360 --> 00:31:51,440
Speaker 10: if we look at them with today's standards, many of

556
00:31:51,480 --> 00:31:54,080
Speaker 10: the things they do do not look like science. For

557
00:31:54,120 --> 00:31:57,560
Speaker 10: a number of reasons. They're not embedded in the kind

558
00:31:57,600 --> 00:32:01,800
Speaker 10: of scientific institutions we think of. So Newton was president

559
00:32:01,840 --> 00:32:03,960
Speaker 10: of the Royal Society, which is of course a national

560
00:32:04,000 --> 00:32:09,680
Speaker 10: scientific institution today in England in the UK, but that

561
00:32:09,760 --> 00:32:13,360
Speaker 10: wasn't like a national scientific academy. That was a gentleman's club.

562
00:32:13,520 --> 00:32:15,600
Speaker 10: And a lot of what Newton did was really sort

563
00:32:15,640 --> 00:32:19,840
Speaker 10: of tinkering with stuff, writing very long books, I mean

564
00:32:19,880 --> 00:32:22,760
Speaker 10: in Latin, but doesn't look like science. He's not sitting

565
00:32:22,840 --> 00:32:26,720
Speaker 10: in a laboratory. And also, I think, to turn it round,

566
00:32:27,080 --> 00:32:29,680
Speaker 10: if they looked at today, I think the thing that

567
00:32:29,720 --> 00:32:33,000
Speaker 10: people like Newton and Bacon and Galileo would find odd

568
00:32:33,440 --> 00:32:36,520
Speaker 10: is how by and large we think of or at

569
00:32:36,600 --> 00:32:41,080
Speaker 10: least present science as totally separate from things like the

570
00:32:41,280 --> 00:32:46,960
Speaker 10: arts and philosophy, religion, politics, even history. And for all

571
00:32:47,040 --> 00:32:52,080
Speaker 10: of them, particularly someone like Isaac Newton, science was part

572
00:32:52,120 --> 00:32:54,480
Speaker 10: and parcel with doing philosophy.

573
00:32:54,600 --> 00:32:59,280
Speaker 2: It was part and parcel of religious thought, and it

574
00:32:59,360 --> 00:33:00,920
Speaker 2: was also part of the parcel of history.

575
00:33:01,000 --> 00:33:06,000
Speaker 10: So Newton spent much of his life searching for secret

576
00:33:06,280 --> 00:33:10,040
Speaker 10: meanings using kind of almost like the techniques of calculus

577
00:33:10,080 --> 00:33:13,280
Speaker 10: in the Bible. He also spent a lot of time

578
00:33:13,440 --> 00:33:17,240
Speaker 10: doing weird at chemical experiments in the hope of finding

579
00:33:17,280 --> 00:33:21,160
Speaker 10: the philosopher's stone. And he wrote long histories as well

580
00:33:21,200 --> 00:33:25,120
Speaker 10: about the kind of development of civilization and the kind

581
00:33:25,160 --> 00:33:27,680
Speaker 10: of future, made predictions about the end of the world.

582
00:33:27,880 --> 00:33:30,440
Speaker 10: Newton thought the world would end in twenty sixty and

583
00:33:30,600 --> 00:33:33,120
Speaker 10: you know, he might turn out to be right. But Newton,

584
00:33:33,360 --> 00:33:36,640
Speaker 10: and for anyone of his era in Europe or elsewhere,

585
00:33:36,680 --> 00:33:40,760
Speaker 10: that wasn't weird. That was part and parcel of thinking

586
00:33:40,800 --> 00:33:43,920
Speaker 10: about the nature of the universe, but therefore also the

587
00:33:44,000 --> 00:33:46,719
Speaker 10: nature of bigger things like society and got and I

588
00:33:46,760 --> 00:33:50,760
Speaker 10: think the way in which in the twentieth century in particular,

589
00:33:50,800 --> 00:33:53,080
Speaker 10: and it's part of actually the story we're talking about

590
00:33:53,240 --> 00:33:57,320
Speaker 10: at the same time as in the West we start saying, well,

591
00:33:57,320 --> 00:34:00,000
Speaker 10: Western science is very different from Eastern science.

592
00:34:00,960 --> 00:34:01,920
Speaker 2: That's exactly the.

593
00:34:01,880 --> 00:34:06,240
Speaker 10: Same time that we start saying, well, science is completely

594
00:34:06,280 --> 00:34:10,120
Speaker 10: separate from philosophy, from religion, from arts, from history.

595
00:34:10,160 --> 00:34:11,920
Speaker 2: So I think that's the big, big difference.

596
00:34:12,000 --> 00:34:14,399
Speaker 1: But is there a moment we can identify where there's

597
00:34:14,600 --> 00:34:17,719
Speaker 1: crucial elements added to the process of science to make

598
00:34:17,760 --> 00:34:20,399
Speaker 1: it more like what we considered today. I mean, could

599
00:34:20,440 --> 00:34:25,560
Speaker 1: we argue that empiricism is what brings Galleo and those

600
00:34:25,600 --> 00:34:28,640
Speaker 1: folks and makes them different from Aristotle and people who

601
00:34:28,680 --> 00:34:32,560
Speaker 1: just thought about the world and didn't explore it experimentally.

602
00:34:32,920 --> 00:34:35,319
Speaker 1: Is there really an inflection point there or is that

603
00:34:35,360 --> 00:34:36,279
Speaker 1: also a mythology.

604
00:34:36,640 --> 00:34:40,960
Speaker 10: I don't think the big difference between modern science and

605
00:34:41,040 --> 00:34:46,320
Speaker 10: pre modern science is sudden interest in empiricism. It's similarly

606
00:34:46,360 --> 00:34:51,160
Speaker 10: a myth that the Greeks were totally uninterested in observing

607
00:34:51,200 --> 00:34:55,560
Speaker 10: the world, including Aristotle. Yes, they had a philosophy that

608
00:34:56,400 --> 00:35:00,279
Speaker 10: relied some of them, like Aristotle, that relies more on

609
00:35:00,640 --> 00:35:03,719
Speaker 10: kind of a priori reasoning thinking about the nature of

610
00:35:03,760 --> 00:35:06,680
Speaker 10: things first, But it's not true that they didn't investigate

611
00:35:06,760 --> 00:35:10,120
Speaker 10: the world. And similarly, it's not true that even people

612
00:35:10,200 --> 00:35:14,880
Speaker 10: like Newton were straightforwardly empiricist. I mean, yes, he collected data,

613
00:35:14,920 --> 00:35:18,840
Speaker 10: but Newton is as much particularly in the development of

614
00:35:18,880 --> 00:35:24,520
Speaker 10: things like laws, that's a particular philosophical position on the

615
00:35:24,640 --> 00:35:27,560
Speaker 10: relationship between entities in the universe. So I don't think

616
00:35:27,600 --> 00:35:30,799
Speaker 10: there's this big shift to empiricism. My argument in the book,

617
00:35:30,800 --> 00:35:33,960
Speaker 10: which obviously you know, people can debate, is that the

618
00:35:34,000 --> 00:35:37,799
Speaker 10: shift is more to do with how the world becomes connected, which,

619
00:35:37,800 --> 00:35:40,600
Speaker 10: as I've discussed, produces new forms of data, but also

620
00:35:40,680 --> 00:35:43,320
Speaker 10: new ways of thinking. The modern science thing, though, I

621
00:35:43,360 --> 00:35:46,200
Speaker 10: think the kind of science we do today is more

622
00:35:46,239 --> 00:35:48,880
Speaker 10: of a product of the late nineteenth and twentieth century.

623
00:35:48,920 --> 00:35:51,960
Speaker 10: That's what people think of when they think of science.

624
00:35:52,000 --> 00:35:56,560
Speaker 10: They think of scientists, and the word scientists was only

625
00:35:56,600 --> 00:35:59,680
Speaker 10: coined in the eighteen thirties, so there was nobody who

626
00:35:59,800 --> 00:36:03,920
Speaker 10: called themselves a scientist. Newton wouldn't have called themselves a

627
00:36:03,960 --> 00:36:06,279
Speaker 10: scientist because there.

628
00:36:05,800 --> 00:36:08,360
Speaker 2: Wasn't a word. It was only coined in the eighteen thirties.

629
00:36:08,520 --> 00:36:09,000
Speaker 2: We think of.

630
00:36:09,000 --> 00:36:14,320
Speaker 10: Scientists doing science, which by which we mean professional science

631
00:36:14,440 --> 00:36:17,440
Speaker 10: is a job. I mean Newton wasn't employed as a

632
00:36:17,480 --> 00:36:23,279
Speaker 10: scientist either he was relatively independently wealthy by his later life.

633
00:36:23,520 --> 00:36:27,759
Speaker 10: Most scientific people in the past, including how the cultures

634
00:36:27,800 --> 00:36:34,120
Speaker 10: were gentlemen, literaty, etc. Science investigating the world was something

635
00:36:34,120 --> 00:36:37,320
Speaker 10: you did alongside everything else. So the idea of having

636
00:36:37,360 --> 00:36:40,600
Speaker 10: a job of being a scientist in a laboratory, in

637
00:36:40,680 --> 00:36:46,759
Speaker 10: a university funded by the nation state and or private business,

638
00:36:47,120 --> 00:36:49,200
Speaker 10: that's I think what we think of when we think

639
00:36:49,239 --> 00:36:52,400
Speaker 10: of science today. But that's only really happens, I mean

640
00:36:52,480 --> 00:36:54,800
Speaker 10: really in the twentieth century. It starts happening in Germany

641
00:36:55,200 --> 00:36:59,600
Speaker 10: in the late nineteenth century, and then in places like

642
00:36:59,640 --> 00:37:03,279
Speaker 10: Britain in America they start copying that and relatedly and

643
00:37:03,360 --> 00:37:07,280
Speaker 10: realizing that actually they need to get businesses involved with science,

644
00:37:07,280 --> 00:37:09,319
Speaker 10: they need to get the government to fund science. But

645
00:37:09,400 --> 00:37:11,600
Speaker 10: that's only happens around the kind of First World War

646
00:37:11,640 --> 00:37:13,279
Speaker 10: and then even more the Second World War.

647
00:37:13,360 --> 00:37:16,160
Speaker 1: So then if there isn't a moment when science as

648
00:37:16,200 --> 00:37:17,520
Speaker 1: we know it came to be, but sort of this

649
00:37:17,600 --> 00:37:22,880
Speaker 1: gradual evolution of philosophy and institutions, then that makes me

650
00:37:22,920 --> 00:37:25,760
Speaker 1: want to like dive deep into the history of humanity

651
00:37:25,800 --> 00:37:29,560
Speaker 1: and understand where these threads originate. And I've been reading about,

652
00:37:29,560 --> 00:37:33,840
Speaker 1: for example, ancient Sumerian astronomers, and of course astronomy is

653
00:37:33,880 --> 00:37:36,360
Speaker 1: something that we have in common with the ancient folks,

654
00:37:36,440 --> 00:37:38,040
Speaker 1: because you know, we've been looking up at the sky

655
00:37:38,120 --> 00:37:41,040
Speaker 1: and it's sort of one of the earliest investigations of

656
00:37:41,080 --> 00:37:44,560
Speaker 1: the natural world. And you know, the Sumerians famously kept

657
00:37:44,600 --> 00:37:47,799
Speaker 1: a very good celestial charts and developed the calendar. It's

658
00:37:47,880 --> 00:37:51,880
Speaker 1: very clear that they were systematizing their knowledge about the world.

659
00:37:52,400 --> 00:37:55,000
Speaker 1: And one thing I always wonder about is how much

660
00:37:55,080 --> 00:37:57,640
Speaker 1: they were sort of mentally doing what we are doing,

661
00:37:57,760 --> 00:38:01,520
Speaker 1: where you know, as a modern physicist, I'm developing a

662
00:38:01,680 --> 00:38:04,439
Speaker 1: model of the universe in my head and I'm sort

663
00:38:04,440 --> 00:38:08,320
Speaker 1: of separating myself from nature and saying, here's how nature works.

664
00:38:08,560 --> 00:38:11,600
Speaker 1: These are the rules of nature. And I wonder if

665
00:38:11,800 --> 00:38:14,279
Speaker 1: for the Samerians, if it was just like, well, look,

666
00:38:14,320 --> 00:38:16,839
Speaker 1: this is useful because I like to predict when it's

667
00:38:16,840 --> 00:38:18,480
Speaker 1: going to rain and when it's not, and when my

668
00:38:18,560 --> 00:38:20,640
Speaker 1: harvest is going to happen, and when there's an eclipse,

669
00:38:20,880 --> 00:38:23,840
Speaker 1: or if they were like building mental models about the

670
00:38:23,840 --> 00:38:25,759
Speaker 1: world in a way that we would recognize.

671
00:38:25,840 --> 00:38:26,760
Speaker 2: It's a great question.

672
00:38:26,960 --> 00:38:30,560
Speaker 10: And I think again, the reason astronomy is a great example,

673
00:38:30,600 --> 00:38:33,000
Speaker 10: because it's also institutionalized to.

674
00:38:33,080 --> 00:38:34,040
Speaker 2: Some of the other things.

675
00:38:34,400 --> 00:38:37,799
Speaker 10: Humans have looked at plants for presumably as long as

676
00:38:37,840 --> 00:38:41,440
Speaker 10: there were humans and used them for medical purposes and

677
00:38:41,480 --> 00:38:44,960
Speaker 10: hate them, but that was rarely until much later institutionalized,

678
00:38:44,960 --> 00:38:49,319
Speaker 10: whereas astronomy. What astronomy Even in ancient Samaria or in

679
00:38:49,360 --> 00:38:52,760
Speaker 10: the Mayan court or an ancient Babylon, these were things

680
00:38:52,800 --> 00:38:56,279
Speaker 10: that the court paid people to do, and so you're right,

681
00:38:56,320 --> 00:39:03,240
Speaker 10: they had practical uses organizing festivals, religious festivals, harvests, making

682
00:39:03,640 --> 00:39:07,120
Speaker 10: astrological predictions, so that sort of had a link to

683
00:39:07,680 --> 00:39:11,520
Speaker 10: political power, if you like, in political decision making. Your question,

684
00:39:12,000 --> 00:39:15,600
Speaker 10: were they building a model of the universe? I think

685
00:39:15,600 --> 00:39:17,759
Speaker 10: the short answer is yes, just not like you are.

686
00:39:19,239 --> 00:39:24,560
Speaker 10: Astronomy wasn't just a tool for ancient people. Astronomy, I

687
00:39:24,560 --> 00:39:30,960
Speaker 10: think was almost always linked to quite detailed conceptions of

688
00:39:31,000 --> 00:39:36,120
Speaker 10: the nature of the universe and the relationship between humans

689
00:39:36,800 --> 00:39:41,040
Speaker 10: and nature and also humans and gods.

690
00:39:41,080 --> 00:39:43,080
Speaker 2: Often so if you think of.

691
00:39:43,040 --> 00:39:48,120
Speaker 10: Something like in the Maya and astronomical tradition, well, part

692
00:39:48,160 --> 00:39:51,239
Speaker 10: of the reason that many pre Columbian cultures are so

693
00:39:51,320 --> 00:39:53,600
Speaker 10: interested in astronomy is because the sun plays such a

694
00:39:53,680 --> 00:39:59,640
Speaker 10: central role in their conception of the origins of the universe,

695
00:39:59,680 --> 00:40:02,840
Speaker 10: of the origins of themselves. And so yeah, they're not

696
00:40:02,880 --> 00:40:07,880
Speaker 10: building a kind of detailed high physics model of the

697
00:40:07,960 --> 00:40:10,719
Speaker 10: nature of the Big Bang. But if we abstract that slightly,

698
00:40:11,840 --> 00:40:15,240
Speaker 10: they aren't just making tools. They are trying to link

699
00:40:15,360 --> 00:40:19,600
Speaker 10: not necessarily always through the mathematics, but certainly through quite

700
00:40:19,719 --> 00:40:24,680
Speaker 10: elaborate formulations about what is the relationship between this event

701
00:40:25,040 --> 00:40:27,800
Speaker 10: and my ability to predict this event like an eclipse,

702
00:40:28,160 --> 00:40:33,160
Speaker 10: like a solar or lunar eclipse, and how the universe

703
00:40:33,680 --> 00:40:38,719
Speaker 10: must be structured, and what humanity's place is within it.

704
00:40:38,840 --> 00:40:41,400
Speaker 10: And they might come to the conclusion, well, the universe

705
00:40:41,440 --> 00:40:44,640
Speaker 10: is structured in such a way that the Sun God

706
00:40:44,880 --> 00:40:50,960
Speaker 10: provides the Emperor with power which allows him to perform all.

707
00:40:50,800 --> 00:40:52,440
Speaker 2: These miraculous events.

708
00:40:52,520 --> 00:40:55,560
Speaker 10: And we today might think, well, that's ridiculous, but I

709
00:40:55,560 --> 00:40:58,880
Speaker 10: think if we just take a step back and think, well, structurally,

710
00:40:58,920 --> 00:41:01,759
Speaker 10: what are they doing, they are doing a similar thing.

711
00:41:01,920 --> 00:41:04,319
Speaker 1: All right, this is a fascinating discussion, but let's take

712
00:41:04,400 --> 00:41:19,839
Speaker 1: any quick break to hear from our sponsors. We're back

713
00:41:19,880 --> 00:41:23,959
Speaker 1: and we're diving deep into the philosophical and historical foundations

714
00:41:24,000 --> 00:41:27,239
Speaker 1: of what science is and when it began. Something I

715
00:41:27,320 --> 00:41:30,920
Speaker 1: think is really fascinating about that mental model is how

716
00:41:31,040 --> 00:41:34,840
Speaker 1: in modern times we implicitly separate ourselves from nature. We like,

717
00:41:35,120 --> 00:41:37,680
Speaker 1: we're subjective humans, but we're trying to build a model

718
00:41:37,800 --> 00:41:41,080
Speaker 1: of objective nature. And I was reading this fascinating book

719
00:41:41,120 --> 00:41:45,320
Speaker 1: about Sumerian astronomy by Francesca Rushberg, and she was commenting

720
00:41:45,360 --> 00:41:47,560
Speaker 1: that they don't even have a word for nature, that

721
00:41:47,640 --> 00:41:50,920
Speaker 1: this concept of nature as a separate entity doesn't even exist.

722
00:41:51,320 --> 00:41:54,880
Speaker 1: She writes, quote, there's no lexical counterpart to nature in

723
00:41:54,960 --> 00:41:59,000
Speaker 1: Cuneiform language, nor consequently, was there a conceptual counterpart. So

724
00:41:59,000 --> 00:42:02,000
Speaker 1: if you went back and asked, like the top Sumerian astronomer,

725
00:42:02,080 --> 00:42:04,479
Speaker 1: like what is your model of nature, you know, they'd

726
00:42:04,480 --> 00:42:06,400
Speaker 1: be like model of what? What are you talking about?

727
00:42:06,480 --> 00:42:08,839
Speaker 1: Like we are part of it all? This is all

728
00:42:09,000 --> 00:42:12,280
Speaker 1: the universe. It's it's fascinating how many of these implicit

729
00:42:12,280 --> 00:42:15,360
Speaker 1: assumptions there are in our modern view of science. And

730
00:42:15,400 --> 00:42:17,319
Speaker 1: I want to ask you about something you just said

731
00:42:17,320 --> 00:42:20,360
Speaker 1: about the structure of the world, because I think we

732
00:42:20,480 --> 00:42:24,040
Speaker 1: tend to think of the universe sort of very geometrically,

733
00:42:24,120 --> 00:42:26,080
Speaker 1: Like if I want to understand how does the solar

734
00:42:26,160 --> 00:42:28,440
Speaker 1: system work. I build a model in my mind and

735
00:42:28,440 --> 00:42:30,799
Speaker 1: it's sort of three D and Okay, the Sun is

736
00:42:30,840 --> 00:42:32,719
Speaker 1: going over here and the moon is over there, and

737
00:42:32,760 --> 00:42:34,759
Speaker 1: that's why I have an eclipse. And to me, the

738
00:42:34,800 --> 00:42:38,000
Speaker 1: three D geometrical picture is the answer to the question

739
00:42:38,080 --> 00:42:40,239
Speaker 1: of like why are there eclipses? But I was reading

740
00:42:40,280 --> 00:42:44,200
Speaker 1: about ancient Chinese astronomy, and you know, the Chinese famously

741
00:42:44,480 --> 00:42:47,239
Speaker 1: weren't as developed in geometry as the Greeks were, though

742
00:42:47,239 --> 00:42:50,239
Speaker 1: their astronomy was very accurate, right, they relied more on

743
00:42:50,600 --> 00:42:53,480
Speaker 1: algebra and arithmetic. And these days we know that there's

744
00:42:53,480 --> 00:42:56,960
Speaker 1: an equivalence between algebra and geometry. But I wonder in

745
00:42:57,000 --> 00:43:00,480
Speaker 1: the minds of those ancient Chinese astronomers, they have a

746
00:43:00,520 --> 00:43:04,240
Speaker 1: geometric picture in their minds, like why this was happening?

747
00:43:04,360 --> 00:43:06,880
Speaker 1: Or did they just think about it in a fundamentally

748
00:43:06,880 --> 00:43:10,200
Speaker 1: different way, because you know, geometry wasn't taught to them

749
00:43:10,200 --> 00:43:12,200
Speaker 1: in third grade in the week for all of us,

750
00:43:12,520 --> 00:43:15,400
Speaker 1: and it's impossible for us to like mentally get outside

751
00:43:15,440 --> 00:43:17,960
Speaker 1: of the geometric box. How do you think a Chinese

752
00:43:18,040 --> 00:43:20,200
Speaker 1: astronomer thought about the solar system?

753
00:43:20,440 --> 00:43:23,719
Speaker 10: Yeah, I think they did think about it in a

754
00:43:23,719 --> 00:43:27,879
Speaker 10: fundamentally different way, and they're supposed to get slightly more

755
00:43:27,920 --> 00:43:33,319
Speaker 10: philosophical about this. There's an area of philosophy called structural realism,

756
00:43:33,920 --> 00:43:37,360
Speaker 10: which is essentially that the universe might have a structure,

757
00:43:37,680 --> 00:43:41,080
Speaker 10: but there could be multiple ways in which you could

758
00:43:41,640 --> 00:43:44,759
Speaker 10: understand that structure, so there is not necessarily a one

759
00:43:44,800 --> 00:43:47,719
Speaker 10: to one equivalence between the structure of the universe and

760
00:43:47,800 --> 00:43:50,319
Speaker 10: a theory you might have. And actually you gave a

761
00:43:50,320 --> 00:43:54,320
Speaker 10: good example about how that's literally true in basic mathematical terms,

762
00:43:54,320 --> 00:43:58,359
Speaker 10: between like algebraic and geometric forms of understanding.

763
00:43:59,400 --> 00:44:00,839
Speaker 2: I think I don't get too.

764
00:44:00,800 --> 00:44:02,880
Speaker 10: Deep into the bossy of science, although I did study

765
00:44:02,880 --> 00:44:06,080
Speaker 10: it as part of my training, but that's sort of

766
00:44:06,120 --> 00:44:11,280
Speaker 10: how I think about how, say ancient Chinese astronomers would

767
00:44:11,280 --> 00:44:16,160
Speaker 10: have thought about the universe, or even Greek astronomers who Ptolemy,

768
00:44:16,239 --> 00:44:20,319
Speaker 10: thought what was happening on Earth was fundamentally different from

769
00:44:20,360 --> 00:44:23,319
Speaker 10: what was happening in the heavens, that the rules that

770
00:44:23,400 --> 00:44:27,280
Speaker 10: applied on Earth were not the same kind of rules.

771
00:44:27,280 --> 00:44:30,480
Speaker 10: There weren't just different rules, there were different kinds of rules,

772
00:44:31,040 --> 00:44:40,040
Speaker 10: and that you can conceptualize accurately the universe in different ways.

773
00:44:40,480 --> 00:44:44,640
Speaker 10: So for ancient Chinese astronomers. There's various aspects of Chinese astronomy.

774
00:44:44,680 --> 00:44:48,440
Speaker 10: One is this kind of technical aspect which is equatorial,

775
00:44:48,880 --> 00:44:51,880
Speaker 10: which you can explain better than I, but using fixed

776
00:44:51,920 --> 00:44:55,160
Speaker 10: polar stars, so keeping the kind of background of the

777
00:44:55,239 --> 00:44:58,759
Speaker 10: universe much more fixed, whereas in sort of Greek and

778
00:44:59,080 --> 00:45:02,800
Speaker 10: later Islami and Christian astronomy, it's a lot about the

779
00:45:02,920 --> 00:45:06,040
Speaker 10: rising and setting of stars, so it's about the ecliptic,

780
00:45:06,239 --> 00:45:08,799
Speaker 10: and so there's this technical difference, but there's also a

781
00:45:08,840 --> 00:45:12,279
Speaker 10: philosophical difference about what they think is happening there. For

782
00:45:12,719 --> 00:45:20,120
Speaker 10: Chinese astronomers, the universe is relatively flat but also circular,

783
00:45:20,360 --> 00:45:23,520
Speaker 10: but also there's a sort of a force of nature.

784
00:45:23,800 --> 00:45:28,359
Speaker 10: There's something called the Mandate of Heaven, which much as

785
00:45:28,400 --> 00:45:30,960
Speaker 10: we were talking about this separation between nature and humanity.

786
00:45:32,160 --> 00:45:34,719
Speaker 10: Again there's not that quite a strict separation as a

787
00:45:34,800 --> 00:45:38,160
Speaker 10: kind of separation, but the way in which the universe

788
00:45:38,200 --> 00:45:42,960
Speaker 10: is structured, what's happening when an eclipse happens, feeds into

789
00:45:43,160 --> 00:45:47,520
Speaker 10: the flow of this mandate. So it's not that there's

790
00:45:47,560 --> 00:45:50,600
Speaker 10: like a god, it's that there is this almost kind

791
00:45:50,640 --> 00:45:56,160
Speaker 10: of force that is provided through the structure of the universe.

792
00:45:56,880 --> 00:46:01,200
Speaker 10: Through the emperor and is reflected in the sky above.

793
00:46:01,480 --> 00:46:01,919
Speaker 2: You're right.

794
00:46:02,000 --> 00:46:04,640
Speaker 10: Also, what we find when we study other cultures is

795
00:46:04,640 --> 00:46:07,600
Speaker 10: a lot of particularly say in the Chinese case. And

796
00:46:07,640 --> 00:46:11,320
Speaker 10: this is what more technical historians of science have looked at.

797
00:46:12,320 --> 00:46:15,320
Speaker 2: Is that they're expressing.

798
00:46:16,440 --> 00:46:21,120
Speaker 10: Complex mathematical ideas but often through language. And this is

799
00:46:21,160 --> 00:46:22,640
Speaker 10: sort of thing you know, we think about at school,

800
00:46:22,680 --> 00:46:25,960
Speaker 10: the difference between saying two plus three is five versus

801
00:46:26,560 --> 00:46:29,120
Speaker 10: Jack has two apples, Amy has three apples.

802
00:46:29,160 --> 00:46:30,760
Speaker 2: How many apples do they have together?

803
00:46:32,080 --> 00:46:39,480
Speaker 10: There's a lot more kind of verbal, concrete expression of

804
00:46:39,520 --> 00:46:43,080
Speaker 10: mathematics and astronomy and many other cultures. But there's more

805
00:46:43,120 --> 00:46:46,880
Speaker 10: than one way to add up five apples, not just literally,

806
00:46:46,960 --> 00:46:49,160
Speaker 10: but also in terms of how we express that.

807
00:46:49,360 --> 00:46:51,560
Speaker 1: It's fascinating to think about the sort of history of

808
00:46:51,560 --> 00:46:54,279
Speaker 1: science and how it all came together. And I think

809
00:46:54,400 --> 00:46:58,800
Speaker 1: often about how our knowledge itself is a bit random.

810
00:46:58,800 --> 00:47:00,960
Speaker 1: That we've discovered X, and then why and then Z,

811
00:47:01,200 --> 00:47:03,239
Speaker 1: and if you ran the universe or if you ran

812
00:47:03,400 --> 00:47:06,640
Speaker 1: science again a thousand times, we might discover things in

813
00:47:06,760 --> 00:47:09,440
Speaker 1: different order and think about things differently. I wonder also

814
00:47:09,520 --> 00:47:12,799
Speaker 1: about science itself, like do you imagine, say we ran

815
00:47:13,200 --> 00:47:15,960
Speaker 1: the Earth from the year ten thousand BC ran that

816
00:47:16,000 --> 00:47:18,680
Speaker 1: experiment ten thousand times. Do you think we would have

817
00:47:18,760 --> 00:47:21,600
Speaker 1: arrived at science in roughly the same way every time?

818
00:47:21,800 --> 00:47:25,640
Speaker 1: Or we would have totally different cultural institutions and we

819
00:47:25,680 --> 00:47:29,000
Speaker 1: would argue bitterly with scientists in air quotes from the

820
00:47:29,000 --> 00:47:31,920
Speaker 1: other earths about who's really doing science or not? Is

821
00:47:31,960 --> 00:47:35,160
Speaker 1: it something which will inevitably bubble up as a human endeavor,

822
00:47:35,640 --> 00:47:38,239
Speaker 1: or is it just something peculiar to our history. Do

823
00:47:38,280 --> 00:47:41,680
Speaker 1: you think that's a great question. I suppose it's unanswerable,

824
00:47:41,680 --> 00:47:44,120
Speaker 1: of course, like many good questions.

825
00:47:44,640 --> 00:47:48,520
Speaker 10: I think it's probably an unpopular answer amongst scientists. But

826
00:47:48,680 --> 00:47:52,680
Speaker 10: I do think it would look nothing like it does now.

827
00:47:53,440 --> 00:47:58,280
Speaker 10: So I don't think that the particular form of science

828
00:47:58,360 --> 00:48:02,200
Speaker 10: we have today is a kind of natural consequence of

829
00:48:02,320 --> 00:48:06,080
Speaker 10: humans becoming better at understanding the world. I think that

830
00:48:06,200 --> 00:48:10,840
Speaker 10: doesn't look like how science has developed exactly as you say.

831
00:48:11,040 --> 00:48:14,239
Speaker 10: In fact, humans across the world over the last ten

832
00:48:14,280 --> 00:48:18,000
Speaker 10: thousand years have thought up all different kinds of ways,

833
00:48:18,520 --> 00:48:23,520
Speaker 10: some more accurate, some less accurate, some better for society,

834
00:48:23,719 --> 00:48:29,920
Speaker 10: some worse for society, to organize and structure their knowledge,

835
00:48:30,320 --> 00:48:32,880
Speaker 10: both institutionally and at the kind of level of just

836
00:48:33,000 --> 00:48:33,840
Speaker 10: doing it together.

837
00:48:34,040 --> 00:48:34,920
Speaker 2: So I don't think there's.

838
00:48:34,719 --> 00:48:38,200
Speaker 10: Any good reason to think that if you changed a

839
00:48:38,239 --> 00:48:40,359
Speaker 10: few of the variables at the start, or you just

840
00:48:40,560 --> 00:48:45,480
Speaker 10: accept there's a level of randomness in the starting conditions

841
00:48:45,480 --> 00:48:47,520
Speaker 10: of the experiment or bits that go along the way,

842
00:48:47,880 --> 00:48:50,160
Speaker 10: that we would end up in the same place today,

843
00:48:50,280 --> 00:48:52,279
Speaker 10: because I mean, you just see that in history and

844
00:48:52,320 --> 00:48:54,319
Speaker 10: even in contemporary science, like if you think in the

845
00:48:54,360 --> 00:48:57,800
Speaker 10: Cold War, the kind of science that was still good science,

846
00:48:57,840 --> 00:49:00,360
Speaker 10: but by and large there was being done in the

847
00:49:00,400 --> 00:49:03,640
Speaker 10: Soviet Union was really different to what was being ws.

848
00:49:03,800 --> 00:49:06,880
Speaker 10: But that's because the kind of starting conditions were different.

849
00:49:06,960 --> 00:49:08,879
Speaker 10: So I don't think you'd end up with the same thing.

850
00:49:09,040 --> 00:49:10,920
Speaker 10: I think you'd end up with something else. And I

851
00:49:10,960 --> 00:49:13,200
Speaker 10: think we will end up with something else in the

852
00:49:13,239 --> 00:49:15,080
Speaker 10: next however long.

853
00:49:14,960 --> 00:49:15,600
Speaker 2: We've got left.

854
00:49:15,920 --> 00:49:17,680
Speaker 1: Right, So that's my last question for you, which is

855
00:49:17,680 --> 00:49:21,680
Speaker 1: equally unanswerable. Is project forward five hundred years or a

856
00:49:21,719 --> 00:49:24,799
Speaker 1: thousand years or ten thousand years in human society. Do

857
00:49:24,840 --> 00:49:28,560
Speaker 1: you think future historians of science will look back and say, oh, yeah,

858
00:49:28,600 --> 00:49:31,440
Speaker 1: back then that was science, that was modern science, or

859
00:49:31,440 --> 00:49:32,839
Speaker 1: do you think they will sort of like, you know,

860
00:49:33,160 --> 00:49:36,879
Speaker 1: chuckle behind their hands. The way a lot of modernists

861
00:49:36,880 --> 00:49:39,240
Speaker 1: do at ancient ways of knowledge.

862
00:49:40,040 --> 00:49:42,640
Speaker 10: That's a great I mean, I think in the let's

863
00:49:42,640 --> 00:49:45,640
Speaker 10: say this short term of quote unquote five hundred years.

864
00:49:45,680 --> 00:49:48,919
Speaker 10: I mean, to be blunt, I don't think human civilization

865
00:49:49,160 --> 00:49:50,759
Speaker 10: and any meaningful form is going to be.

866
00:49:50,760 --> 00:49:52,120
Speaker 2: Around in five thousand years.

867
00:49:52,160 --> 00:49:54,919
Speaker 10: But we'll be questioning it five hundred to be honest,

868
00:49:54,960 --> 00:49:57,239
Speaker 10: but let's say five hundred, we might survive that long?

869
00:49:59,120 --> 00:50:02,160
Speaker 10: Would they think what we're doing is science? So at

870
00:50:02,160 --> 00:50:06,560
Speaker 10: its core, I'm a social cultural political historian that thinks

871
00:50:06,640 --> 00:50:10,400
Speaker 10: that the thing structures of society, ideas in culture do

872
00:50:10,520 --> 00:50:14,520
Speaker 10: fundamentally matter to what we think counter science and how

873
00:50:14,520 --> 00:50:15,359
Speaker 10: we organize it.

874
00:50:15,800 --> 00:50:16,520
Speaker 2: So it's your way.

875
00:50:16,560 --> 00:50:19,040
Speaker 10: It's hard to answer that question because what I want

876
00:50:19,080 --> 00:50:21,360
Speaker 10: to know is, well, what society going to look like?

877
00:50:21,480 --> 00:50:24,120
Speaker 10: What's culture going to look like? I assume it's not

878
00:50:24,160 --> 00:50:26,319
Speaker 10: going to look the same as it does now, but

879
00:50:27,360 --> 00:50:30,160
Speaker 10: what it will look like is hard to guess. I

880
00:50:30,200 --> 00:50:33,480
Speaker 10: guess you could run different counter and not even counterfactory

881
00:50:33,560 --> 00:50:37,520
Speaker 10: could run different thought experiments. If we turn towards a

882
00:50:37,600 --> 00:50:40,600
Speaker 10: kind of right wing populism and the world is run

883
00:50:40,680 --> 00:50:44,400
Speaker 10: by authoritarian rulers, well you'll get a different kind of

884
00:50:44,480 --> 00:50:48,520
Speaker 10: science that will probably be negative for society.

885
00:50:48,840 --> 00:50:50,760
Speaker 2: Maybe it's not as.

886
00:50:50,600 --> 00:50:54,239
Speaker 10: Simple as a kind of political future between authoritarianism or not.

887
00:50:54,360 --> 00:50:57,759
Speaker 10: Maybe it's more about how climate change is going to

888
00:50:57,800 --> 00:51:02,719
Speaker 10: fundamentally change in the end humanity's conception of its place

889
00:51:02,800 --> 00:51:06,080
Speaker 10: in nature. So you talked about separating humans from nature.

890
00:51:06,960 --> 00:51:10,640
Speaker 10: Climate change obviously literally confronts us with the idea that

891
00:51:11,160 --> 00:51:13,680
Speaker 10: humans are not separate from nature, and in the end,

892
00:51:13,719 --> 00:51:16,600
Speaker 10: whether people like it or not, they won't have to

893
00:51:16,680 --> 00:51:19,279
Speaker 10: kind of believe the evidence from the scientists because they'll

894
00:51:19,280 --> 00:51:23,359
Speaker 10: be believing the evidence of, you know, the climate catastrophe

895
00:51:23,400 --> 00:51:26,480
Speaker 10: in their face in five hundred years time. So maybe

896
00:51:26,520 --> 00:51:30,680
Speaker 10: that will change how people approach science in a way

897
00:51:30,719 --> 00:51:33,160
Speaker 10: which is more in a way prim or don't like

898
00:51:33,200 --> 00:51:37,400
Speaker 10: you were suggesting, where human agency and non human agency

899
00:51:37,480 --> 00:51:39,920
Speaker 10: are wrapped up a lot more in how scientists are

900
00:51:39,920 --> 00:51:42,880
Speaker 10: thinking that it wouldn't be possible to kind of be

901
00:51:43,080 --> 00:51:45,759
Speaker 10: this astrophysicist where you say, well, I'm just going to

902
00:51:45,840 --> 00:51:47,759
Speaker 10: sit in my office and I'm just going to think

903
00:51:47,760 --> 00:51:49,759
Speaker 10: about what the structure of the universe is and work

904
00:51:49,800 --> 00:51:52,799
Speaker 10: it out mathematically, and my humanity is a relevant to that.

905
00:51:52,920 --> 00:51:55,200
Speaker 2: I guess I'm probably maybe the latter.

906
00:51:55,680 --> 00:52:01,600
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I like to imagine that even though we

907
00:52:01,640 --> 00:52:03,640
Speaker 1: think we've understood so much about the world that in

908
00:52:03,680 --> 00:52:06,640
Speaker 1: the longest sweep of knowledge gathering, we're just in the

909
00:52:06,680 --> 00:52:09,880
Speaker 1: beginning stages, you know, the foothills of climbing that mountain.

910
00:52:10,320 --> 00:52:12,759
Speaker 1: I think going along with that, we have to recognize

911
00:52:12,800 --> 00:52:15,640
Speaker 1: that the way we're going to do science could also change,

912
00:52:16,000 --> 00:52:19,000
Speaker 1: and that it's really very narrow and sort of hubristic

913
00:52:19,040 --> 00:52:21,879
Speaker 1: to imagine like, oh, we have some final method that

914
00:52:21,920 --> 00:52:23,400
Speaker 1: this is the way science is going to happen for

915
00:52:23,400 --> 00:52:25,000
Speaker 1: the next ten thousand years. It seems to me it

916
00:52:25,080 --> 00:52:28,760
Speaker 1: must evolve, Like even if you imagined that Galileo, etcetera

917
00:52:28,880 --> 00:52:33,840
Speaker 1: invented empiricism, which obviously is overly simplified, that there wouldn't

918
00:52:33,840 --> 00:52:37,000
Speaker 1: be future inventions and modifications to the way that we

919
00:52:37,080 --> 00:52:39,080
Speaker 1: do science, that people in the future would recognize this. Oh,

920
00:52:39,160 --> 00:52:41,640
Speaker 1: everything before that is basically a waste of time. I

921
00:52:41,680 --> 00:52:44,240
Speaker 1: look forward to seeing some of those revolutions in the future,

922
00:52:44,280 --> 00:52:46,120
Speaker 1: and I hope we get to see some of those changes,

923
00:52:46,280 --> 00:52:51,200
Speaker 1: though I do have a slightly more optimistic view than

924
00:52:51,239 --> 00:52:53,920
Speaker 1: you do. Although you're a historian, so maybe you know

925
00:52:53,960 --> 00:52:55,239
Speaker 1: maybe I should take note of that.

926
00:52:55,280 --> 00:52:59,480
Speaker 10: I mean, my optimist tat on is that humanity has

927
00:52:59,560 --> 00:53:05,439
Speaker 10: survived many catastrophes, so I don't think that humanity will

928
00:53:05,440 --> 00:53:08,200
Speaker 10: disappear anytime soon. I mean, five thousand years is a

929
00:53:08,200 --> 00:53:10,920
Speaker 10: long time. Two thousands a long time. I think even

930
00:53:10,960 --> 00:53:13,680
Speaker 10: in the worst case climate scenarios, there will be humans

931
00:53:13,760 --> 00:53:17,520
Speaker 10: around them five hundred years. It's just what society looks like,

932
00:53:17,640 --> 00:53:18,120
Speaker 10: is the question.

933
00:53:18,480 --> 00:53:20,440
Speaker 1: Right. Well, I hope that we continue to get to

934
00:53:20,440 --> 00:53:24,480
Speaker 1: do science. Yeah, well, thanks very much for this fascinating conversation.

935
00:53:24,600 --> 00:53:27,719
Speaker 1: I learned so much and encourage everybody out there to

936
00:53:27,760 --> 00:53:29,440
Speaker 1: get your book. Tell us again the name of the

937
00:53:29,440 --> 00:53:31,040
Speaker 1: book and where people can get it.

938
00:53:31,040 --> 00:53:35,960
Speaker 10: It's called Horizons, the Global Origins of Modern Science, and

939
00:53:36,000 --> 00:53:39,320
Speaker 10: you can get it from all good book resellers or

940
00:53:39,520 --> 00:53:40,759
Speaker 10: less ethical booksellers.

941
00:53:40,800 --> 00:53:46,040
Speaker 1: But all right, well, thanks again James for joining me

942
00:53:46,040 --> 00:53:47,080
Speaker 1: today with pleasure.

943
00:53:46,840 --> 00:53:48,600
Speaker 2: No real pleasure, Daniel, thank you so much.

944
00:53:48,680 --> 00:53:51,759
Speaker 1: All right, many thanks to James for that fascinating conversation.

945
00:53:52,120 --> 00:53:55,160
Speaker 1: I think that really helps us understand the more nuanced

946
00:53:55,200 --> 00:53:58,520
Speaker 1: and subtle history of science. There isn't really one inflection

947
00:53:58,600 --> 00:54:01,319
Speaker 1: point where you can give some credit for being the

948
00:54:01,360 --> 00:54:05,360
Speaker 1: first scientist. I think that the listeners were mostly correct

949
00:54:05,440 --> 00:54:07,839
Speaker 1: that science is something we've been doing for a long time,

950
00:54:07,880 --> 00:54:10,440
Speaker 1: as long as we've been asking questions and trying to

951
00:54:10,480 --> 00:54:13,760
Speaker 1: build knowledge about the world, and we should be careful

952
00:54:13,760 --> 00:54:16,200
Speaker 1: about deed keeping and saying who is a scientist and

953
00:54:16,239 --> 00:54:20,080
Speaker 1: who isn't a scientist, what kinds of knowledge gathering are valid,

954
00:54:20,080 --> 00:54:22,120
Speaker 1: and which kinds are not valid. Some of them are

955
00:54:22,120 --> 00:54:24,960
Speaker 1: more effective than others, surely, and we're making progress not

956
00:54:25,200 --> 00:54:28,440
Speaker 1: just in our knowledge but in our methods for accumulating knowledge.

957
00:54:28,520 --> 00:54:30,480
Speaker 1: But I think we have a lot to learn in

958
00:54:30,480 --> 00:54:33,560
Speaker 1: both contexts. So thanks very much everybody out there who

959
00:54:33,640 --> 00:54:36,480
Speaker 1: is doing science, even if your job is not officially

960
00:54:36,520 --> 00:54:39,320
Speaker 1: to be a scientist, And thanks very much for listening.

961
00:54:39,640 --> 00:54:47,759
Speaker 1: Tune in next time for more science and curiosity. Come

962
00:54:47,800 --> 00:54:50,560
Speaker 1: find us on social media where we answer questions and

963
00:54:50,719 --> 00:54:54,880
Speaker 1: post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Instant, and now TikTok.

964
00:54:55,000 --> 00:54:57,759
Speaker 1: And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is

965
00:54:57,800 --> 00:55:02,520
Speaker 1: a production of iHeartRadio. More podcasts from iHeartRadio visit the

966
00:55:02,600 --> 00:55:06,719
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your

967
00:55:06,800 --> 00:55:07,560
Speaker 1: favorite shows.