How the West overtook China in science and technology and what that means today

If you ask when science began, you will get different answers. And if you want to know how the West overtook China in science, it is important to know when people actually began producing it. In this article, I will assume that science was a particular set of principles, grounded in the scientific method, that began in the High Middle Ages and came to full flower in the Renaissance. But even scientists do not agree on this definition.

Carl Sagan, the famed astronomer and host of the hit show Cosmos, who passed away in 1996, often argued that ancient hunter-gatherers were scientists. What they lacked in modern tools and methods, he claimed, they made up for in their mindset. He wrote, in the Demon-Haunted World, a book I devoured as a newly minted atheist teenager in the ’90s,

The footprints of a fast-moving animal display a more elongated symmetry. A slightly lame animal favors the afflicted foot, puts less weight on it, and leaves a fainter imprint. A heavier animal leaves a deeper and broader hollow… The correlation functions are in the heads of the hunters.

For Sagan, “science” was about inferring something you can’t see from what you can. Impressionable teenage me had no reason to doubt Sagan’s pronouncement.

In a reversal of the story of Adam and Eve, our “fall” was not a turning away from God but a turning away from rationalism. Sagan supposes that, because many hunter-gatherers have little to say about the supernatural, the natural state of human beings is clear-headed, atheistic rationalism. Pre-enlightenment civilization was to blame for introducing gods, including the God of the Bible, and replacing our scientific minds with superstition.

I’m no longer an atheist, but I am a scientist, and Sagan and others who continue to argue the noble rationalism of our hunter-gatherer ancestors are wrong. What Sagan depicts is not science. It is mastery, and mastery is not the same as science.

Mastery is grounded in empiricism, while science is grounded in theory. These are very different things.

I came to recognize this truth recently after finishing Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford, a bestselling 2009 book on the value of mastery in tradecraft.

Crawford’s father was a professional physicist, and Crawford himself majored in physics before pursuing a doctorate in political philosophy. After only 5 months working as director of the George C. Marshall Institute in Washington, D.C., he quit to start a motorcycle repair shop in a sketchy part of Richmond, Virginia.

In the book, Crawford, a perpetual gearhead, recounts an encounter with his father that crystallized in his mind the difference between tradecraft and science:

One day I came into the house filthy, frustrated, and reeking of gasoline, my dad looked up from his chair and said to me, out of the blue, ‘Did you know you can always untie a shoelace just by pulling on one end, even if it‘s in a double knot?’ I didn’t really know what to do with this information. It seemed to be coming from a different universe than the one I was grappling with.

Thinking about that posited shoelace now, it occurs to me maybe you can and maybe you can’t untie it in a stroke—it depends. If the shoelace is rough and spongy, and the knot is tight, it will be a lot harder to undo than if the knot is loose and the shoelace is made of something slick and incompressible, like silk ribbon. The shoelace might well break before it comes undone. He was speaking of a mathematical string, which is an idealized shoelace,….

Science is primarily concerned with extracting ideals from a messy reality. It is fundamentally rooted in the Platonic world where Crawford’s father’s shoelace, spherical cows, and other such ideals live. Thus, it is rooted not in human mastery, which Sagan wanted to believe, but in Western thought beginning with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who laid the foundation for thinking about the world in terms of idealized laws.

The merger of Greek thought with messy reality, however, came even later in the early modern era with the experiments of Galileo, Kepler, Robert Hooke, and Robert Boyle, and, of course, Isaac Newton.

All these men had mastery over their instruments, such as telescopes, prisms, lenses, and scales. They understood, however, that, by applying the philosophy of the Greeks, it is possible, by observing the motion of an object, a planet, a spring, a weight, a pendulum, or some liquid, to infer the existence of universal laws. Such laws do not exist within the messiness of human tradecraft where heuristics, i.e., rules of thumb, rule.

When tracking an animal, fixing a motorcycle engine, or baking bread, universal ideals are as useful to the master hunter, mechanic, or baker as the ideal shoelace is to someone with a stubborn knot.

Thanks to the science developed in the last 400 years, we can not only understand how to untie shoelaces, an example of mastery, but model it using the laws of physics so that we understand precisely why and under what circumstances we can and cannot untie them. Concepts like momentum, friction, tension, and so on were invented to idealize the real world and, in so doing, help us understand why the heuristics of the masters work.

But before that, there was little that we could call science, and none outside the Western world, and those civilizations it influenced.

Now, let us look at China. China has been, since the beginnings of civilization there about 7000 years ago, highly technological. There we find heuristic knowledge forming over millennia, such as the Four Great Inventions: gunpowder, papermaking, the compass, and printing. Yet, the Chinese did not have the underlying philosophy that would turn these heuristics into science. Even their philosophers regretted the lack of a theoretical basis for their science, as Joseph Needham writes,

In the 13th century, however, some minds were becoming very dissatisfied with the mainly empirical methods on which the science of surveying had been based. In his two books Hsii Ku Chat Chhi Suan Fa and Suan Fa Thung Pien Pén Mo, both of about 1275, Yang Hui strongly criticised Li Shun-Féng and Liu I, who had been content to use methods without working out their theoretical origin or principle. ‘The men of old’, he said, ‘changed the name of their methods from problem to problem, so that as no specific explanation was given, there is no way of telling their theoretical origin or basis… This was an extremely modern attitude.

It was then, in the 13th century, in China, but even more so in Europe, as dissatisfaction with the empirical methods of the ancients, based on mastery, grew, that we see the beginnings of what would later become science, not before. It is no surprise that, as Needham says, many translations of Euclid were made into Chinese in the 13th century, transmitting the Western ideals built into Greek geometry to the East.