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The global origins of modern science
by Dr James Poskett (2012)
For well over a century, historians have been searching for the origins of modern science.
Where did modern science come from? As a reader of The Fountain, you may be thinking that the answer is obvious. Surely modern science was invented at Trinity College? From the mathematician Isaac Newton to the physicist Ernest Rutherford, Trinity has long been home to some of the world’s most influential scientists.
That’s true, but what about the world outside of Great Court? In my new book, I push the history of science, not just beyond Trinity College, but beyond Europe, exploring the ways in which Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific fit into the story. Despite what we’re often told, modern science was not invented in Europe. Rather, new research has started to reveal the global origins of modern science. You’re probably familiar with the traditional story of the ‘scientific revolution’, the period between 1500 and 1700 when leading European figures challenged ancient wisdom and proposed radical new scientific theories. This was the period in which the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus put the Sun, rather than the Earth, at the centre of the universe. It was the period in which the Italian mathematician Galileo Galilei first observed the moons of Jupiter. And it was the period in which Newton himself set out the laws of motion in his Principia (1687).
Historians of science certainly disagreed on some things, such as the causes and timing of the scientific revolution. But very few stopped to ask whether they were looking in the right place to begin with. Was modern science really a product of Europe alone? As it turns out, European science was not quite as unique as historians had often assumed. What’s more, many of the great breakthroughs made by famous European figures were in fact reliant on their connections to the wider world.
Copernicus is a good example. In On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543), he cites five Islamic authors, including the Iberian astronomer Nur ad-Din al-Bitruji and the Mesopotamian mathematician Al-Battani. For much of his astronomical data, Copernicus relied on the Alfonsine Tables, an updated compilation of a set of earlier tables produced by astronomers in Muslim Spain. Copernicus also borrowed a very important geometrical technique from the Persian astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Known as the ‘Tusi couple’, this combination of two circles – a smaller one rotating inside a larger one – allowed Copernicus to solve a major problem with his
Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s ‘Tusi couple’, which enabled Copernicus to solve a major problem with his model of the universe.
© MPIWG LIBRARY / STAATSBIBLIOTHEK BERLIN.
(HTTPS://WWW.NDL.GO.JP/PORTRAIT/). © PORTRAITS OF MODERN JAPANESE HISTORICAL FIGURES
© AIP EMILIO SEGRÈ VISUAL ARCHIVES, GIFT OF SUBRAHMANYAN CHANDRASEKHAR.
Above: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, published 1543. Top right: Japanese physicist Nagaoka Hantaro (1865–1950). Bottom right: Portrait of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Fellow of Trinity College, 1934
model of the universe. The Tusi couple helped account for the characteristic ‘wobble’ of the planets as they move around the Sun, something that was especially important prior to the development of more complex models of planetary motion. On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres even features an exact copy of al-Tusi’s diagram. Without it, Copernicus would not have been able to put the Sun at the centre of the universe.
There’s a bigger story here. It isn’t just that Copernicus happened to be drawing on a range of Islamic authors. Rather, he was writing at a time when new ideas and manuscripts were reaching Europe. Following the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul in 1453, many Byzantine Greeks fled west, often to Italy. They brought with them translations of Arabic and Persian manuscripts, as well as earlier original works by ancient Greek and Roman authors. At the same time, there was constant traffic across the Mediterranean between Italian city states and the Ottoman Empire. Vatican envoys and Venetian traders would return from Istanbul with new scientific manuscripts, many of which are now housed in the Vatican Library. Copernicus himself most likely learned about al-Tusi’s ideas during his time studying in Rome and Bologna. It was ultimately the wider world of cultural exchange which fuelled the scientific revolution.
This idea – that global cultural exchange is at the heart of modern science – runs throughout my
book, which covers the period from the fifteenth century right up to the present. And once we think in these terms, we can also uncover the many hidden contributions of scientists who don’t normally feature in standard histories.
Take Hantaro Nagaoka, a Japanese physicist who is largely unknown outside of his home country. Nagaoka was born into a samurai family in the middle of the nineteenth century, just before the Meiji Restoration of 1868. He realised that the samurai needed to modernise in order to survive, and so decided to study physics at the recently established University of Tokyo. Nagaoka went on to have a brilliant career, travelling the world, attending scientific conferences, and working with many of the most famous physicists of the day. And in 1903, he made his first big breakthrough.
At a meeting of the Tokyo Mathematico-Physical Society, Nagaoka presented his theory of the ‘Saturnian atom’. The atom, Nagaoka argued, had to be made up of a large positively-charged centre surrounded by orbiting negatively-charged particles. It was rather like the planet Saturn, with its rings, hence the name. Over the next few years, Nagaoka went on to develop his theory further, explaining how electromagnetic waves would interact, and be dispersed, when they interacted with an atom.
Hang on a minute, I hear you say. Didn’t Ernest Rutherford discover the structure of the atom? That’s certainly what I was told at school. But the real story is more complex, and is another example of global cultural exchange in action. After all, Rutherford’s famous paper on the structure of the atom was not published until 1911, nearly a decade after Nagaoka.
So what was happening? Well, Rutherford was certainly a brilliant scientist, but he was no lone genius. Like all scientists, he built on the work of others. Debates about the structure of the atom were already commonplace by the early 1900s. Rutherford was aware of Nagaoka’s model, which seemed plausible based on mathematical calculations. However, there was as yet no experimental proof. And so, when Rutherford began his experiments in 1909, he invited Nagaoka to his laboratory in Manchester and showed him around. The two continued to correspond, and in 1911, when Rutherford published his results, he cited Nagaoka’s original 1903 paper. The discovery of the structure of the atom was ultimately a product of this encounter between British and Japanese science.
These are just some of the many examples that point towards a more global history of science. Which brings us back to Trinity. Because of course, Trinity has also been home to scientists from many different countries and cultures, whether that was the Russian physicist Pyotr Kapitsa or the Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Still, there is much more work to be done to diversify science, particularly at Cambridge. My hope is that a more representative history of science will inspire a new generation of global scientists, both at Trinity and beyond.
Dr James Poskett is Associate Professor in the History of Science and Technology at the University of Warwick. He completed his PhD in the History of Science at Trinity College, where he held the Tarner Studentship between 2012 and 2015. His new book Horizons: A Global History of Science, is out now with Penguin (UK) and HarperCollins (USA).
