Think of a famous scientist from the past. What name did you come up with? Most likely, someone from Europe or the US. That’s not surprising, because science is often taught in Western classrooms as if it were a European-American endeavor.
James Poskett, a historian of science at the University of Warwick in England, believes that this myth is not only misleading but dangerous – and it is something he tries to correct in his recent book, “Horizons: A Global History of Science.” Billed as a “major retelling of the history of science,” the book frames the last five centuries of the scientific enterprise as a project that spans the real world.
In a recent chat on Zoom, Poskett explained why he believes this repetition is necessary. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
“Horizons: A Global History of Science,” by James Poskett (Penguin Books, 464 Pages).
Undark: You point out that the history of science, as it is usually taught, focuses on figures like Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. And I think we can agree that those people really made vital contributions. But what is left when we focus on those figures?
James Poskett: I agree, it is very important to emphasize that those figures made significant contributions. So my book is not about Newton and Darwin and Einstein do not matter. As you say, those people appear in the book. They are all significant figures in their own right. But by focusing only on them, we miss two global stories.
The first global story is that these famous figures we’ve heard about actually rely on their global connections to do much of the work they’re famous for. Newton is a good example, in that he relied on information he gathered from around the world, often from East India Company officials in Asia, or astronomers on slave trading ships in the Atlantic. So we miss the global dimension of these famous scientists — not just gathering information, but often actually relying on other people’s culture and knowledge as well.
The other part is the people from outside Europe who made their own significant contributions in their own right. There were Chinese, Japanese, Indian, African astronomers, mathematicians, later evolutionary thinkers, geneticists, chemists, who made really important contributions to the development of modern science. It completely skews the story if we have this exclusive focus on White European pioneers.
UD: Another interesting point you make is that when textbooks or popular histories of science talk about the contributions of, say, Islamic science or Chinese science, it’s often framed as a historical episode. The reader gets the impression that this is something that happened in the past. In your book, you say that this is not only misleading but can have harmful consequences. How so?
JP: We are actually quite familiar with the idea that civilizations in the Middle East and Asia, the Islamic world, Hindu civilizations, Chinese civilization – have contributed in some way to science. But it is always told as part of an ancient or medieval golden age narrative. And I always tell my students, you should be extremely skeptical, as soon as you hear the term “golden age,” because it’s incredibly loaded: It tells you you once had this great achievement, this once great civilization – but the emphasis is on “once,” because the “golden age” passage implies a fall from grace, or a dark age afterwards .
At first glance, it sounds good – you know, Islamic mathematicians, chemists, astronomers made important contributions in the 10th century – but really, that’s kind of pushing those achievements way back in the past. It has the rhetorical effect of saying that Islamic science is not modern, or that Chinese science, or Hindu science, or Mesoamerican science is not part of modernity; there is something kind of anti-modern about it.
Of course, the Islamic world made important contributions to science in the medieval period. But it didn’t end suddenly. It continued throughout the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. And that’s really the message of the book.
UD: An obvious turning point, not only in the history of science, but in the history of man in general, is when Europeans first contacted the indigenous peoples of America. In your book, you say that these encounters are crucial in thinking about humans as part of nature. You even write, “The discovery of the New World was also the discovery of mankind.” What do you mean by that?
JP: Broadly speaking, for Europeans, discovering that there was a “new world” was a great shock to the very foundations of how they thought about knowledge. Knowledge was supposed to be based on ancient texts; it was supposed to be on the authority of ancient Greek and Roman writers, people like Aristotle, or Pliny for geography. And also the Bible was a kind of environment with that too, as a source of old authority.
But of course, none of these ancient writers mentioned this huge continent. And not only was this continent full of life, full of animals and vegetables and plants and minerals that in some cases had not been seen before and not mentioned in the ancient texts – it was full of people!
So this then made thinkers in Europe start to say, well, maybe in fact, knowledge is not best derived from ancient texts alone; maybe we need to go out into the world and look at things to make discoveries. And of course, that’s the metaphor we still use. We are talking about scientific “discoveries”.
Human beings were considered separate from the natural world. They were created – in Christian Europe, and most of the major religions at that time – they are created separately. Human beings have a moral element that can be analyzed philosophically and morally, but they are not a meaningful part of nature in the same way that a horse is. But this idea of discovering the natural world also opened up the opportunity that there were things to discover, not only about the outside world, but about the kind of human’s inner world – if you could discover a tomato by looking out into the world. world, maybe you could discover something about human beings by looking inside them.
US: You point out that when we think of the structure of the atom, we tend to think of the New Zealand-born British scientist Ernest Rutherford, who is often credited with discovering it . In the book, you talk about an often overlooked figure, Hantaro Nagaoka. Who was he? What was his contribution?
Nineteenth century Japanese physicist Hantaro Nagaoka was the first scientist to describe the Saturnian structure of the atom in 1904.
JP: Hantaro Nagaoka was a Japanese physicist. He was born in the middle of the 19th century. He came from a Samurai family, like many 19th century Japanese scientists, and was studying physics at a time when Japan was industrialising; where the Samurai were finding a new place for themselves in this modern industrial society. And very early in the 20th century, in 1904, he gave a description of the structure of the atom. He called it the “Saturnian” atom.
He had worked this out theoretically, rather than by doing experiments. He worked out, based on complex theoretical assumptions and following these through, that there must be a large, central, positively charged nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons. And he called it the Saturnian atom after the planet Saturn, with a big central thing with its rings around it. This is the basic structure of the atom that Rutherford was later famous for developing, for doing the experimental work for – but Rutherford published his paper seven years later, in 1911.
And in fact Rutherford would have recognized this. Rutherford quotes Nagaoka’s paper at the end of his famous paper in 1911. And Rutherford was actually corresponding with Nagaoka. Nagaoka was not an unknown scientist that no one had ever heard of. He was attending conferences in Paris; he came to Britain and was given a tour of Rutherford’s laboratory in Manchester, where Rutherford did the experiments. And in fact, if you look at textbooks from the early 20th century, they mention Nagaoka – he just fell out of history later on.
So he made this really serious contribution to atomic physics. But he is one of the smoking gun examples of someone who produced a key theoretical piece of science, which was a major influence in the 20th century, but has been almost completely forgotten outside of Japan.
My point is not that Rutherford stole the idea. My point is that science is made through these processes of global cultural exchange, through these different people making different contributions.
US: Turning to the present: You describe the current relationship between the US and China as akin to a new Cold War. How does science fit into this new “war”?
JP: Science fits into it in some ways like the original Cold War, in that science has a practical function. And that’s clearly how states like China, like the United States, like India, the United Arab Emirates – they see it as part of their economic strategy. Basically, that investment in sciences like artificial intelligence will allow to transform the economy, increase productivity — and this is really important for keeping citizens happy, and ultimately have the kind of economic influence to dominate the world economically and politically and through soft power.
Also, in more practical terms, space science has a very clear military element in relation to satellites, rockets. I talk a lot about climate science as a science that fits with the new Cold War, as it is seen by states as a kind of security problem. For China, climate science is important to invest in because their coastal regions are major economic centers. They don’t want those who go under the water.
So there are practical elements – but it’s also ideological. We are seeing the return of a form of nationalism – this strange combination of globalization and nationalism. Xi Jinping is a nationalist, much more so than some of the previous Chinese leaders. He is just the most obvious example, and probably the person most likely to be able to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. But there are nationalist leaders in India, in Turkey, in the United Arab Emirates, in America, in Britain. Boris Johnson spoke of making Britain a “scientific superpower.” Thus science also becomes an ideological sign of national prestige.
UD: Throughout the book you argue that it is wrong to frame the history of science as a European or an Anglo-American effort. Why do you feel it is so important to rewrite or update that framing?
JP: For overlapping reasons. A fundamental one relates to representation and diversity in science; equity. Science, in Europe and Britain, certainly in America — the United States and North America in general — is not fair, especially in terms of diversity in relation to ethnic minority groups, but other forms of diversity as well, in terms of class and gender , disability , and so on.
So I think if the scientific profession is disproportionately people like me—White men who went to Cambridge—then part, but not the only reason for that, is because we repeatedly present an image to the public, for school children, for university students. of the sciences that look like me. They’re people like Newton or Einstein or Darwin – they’re these White men. Yet my point is not that they are not part of the story. They absolutely are. But that there are other people from all over the world, from different cultural backgrounds, who are part of it.
We are at a sort of crossroads in history, but also in science. And the narratives that scientists were taught and told themselves in the West was a narrative built for the Cold War. But the Cold War is over – the original one. Yet we still tell these narratives about Western science, with science being neutral. And I think a lot of public mistrust of the sciences in general is really a function of this—that we need to present publicly a more realistic, political, diverse account of how science is done—how we did in now – in order to get the consent and engagement of the mass public in the sciences.
I really think that this kind of history of science should not be seen as a threat to scientists. I’m not doing it because I want to see an end to science, and for all of us to become vaccine deniers. I do it for the other reason: I think if you want to stem the tide of vaccine and climate denial, and xenophobic nationalism, then you need a history of science that really engages with these rather difficult histories.
