What are the differences between Chinese and Western science and technology?

This is the Joseph Lee puzzle, and many people have given various answers. In fact, the answer can be easily obtained by understanding the nature of science and the history of Chinese civilization.

A variety of factors have led to a lack of soil for modern science in China.

There are two main foundations of modern science, a well-developed formal logic and positivism. Simply put:

Science = logic + empirical evidence.

Unfortunately, China, despite its world-leading civilization, is extremely deficient in these two areas.

In terms of ways of thinking, traditional Chinese culture has made the most of analogies and comparisons. Each thing has its own unique characteristics and rules, but there is a considerable part of the rules are common, in the field of natural research, if every thing is strictly analyzed, will undoubtedly increase the cost of research, at this time, the law of analogy greatly reduces the cost of research, as long as the existing rules according to the "everything is common" guide, directly to other areas on the line. As long as the existing rules according to the "all things are alike" guidelines, directly to other areas on the line, and in fact, there are indeed quite a number of things have similar rules. This is the reason why China was once ahead in civilization.

But because of this, China has become so reliant on analogies that it has become too lazy to conduct new research. Moving ruts of poetry and quoting scripture, but not many people are willing to do a more detailed analysis. And the essence of science is to understand nature, all the use of science for the benefit of mankind its premise is to have sufficient knowledge of the natural world. But China's ancient thinking that the yin and yang, five elements of gossip is enough to explain the world, and everything a reason, just the phenomenon to the theory on the set on the line, the rules of the universe, as much as in the ancients carry on.

It is worth mentioning that this kind of lazy thinking is not only in China, in the West also have, after Newton discovered the law of gravity, the scientific community also once appeared, the laws of the world Newton has been found finished, and later scientists is how to apply these laws. Only this veneration of ancient times is not as developed as in China, and did not become the mainstream of the scientific community.

And in terms of empirical evidence, China is also not very interested in, "see the bottle of ice to know the world's cold," the assertion that, although in the localization of the possibility of correctness, but in the whole, the fallacy of thousands of miles. But the ancients were so convinced that very few people ever questioned it. In fact, if questioned, it is quite dangerous, such as the end of the Qing Dynasty, a Chinese medicine Wang Qing Ren, in a plague, after the death of the autopsy, found many of the errors in ancient medicine, and therefore wrote a book, "Medical Correction," but was scolded by the Chinese medical profession as "legacy of poison," and died of depression, towards the science of a little spark just so! The first time I've seen this, I've seen it, and I've seen it, and I've seen it, and I've seen it.

On the contrary, in the West, in the Christian rule of a thousand years, ignorance and backwardness, civilization, as well as the economy is far behind China, but the logic of ancient Greece has not been extinct, and the field of mathematics is more solid development, mathematics is digital logic, mathematics, mathematics, several major developments, but also the performance of the logic of the continuous improvement. After the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, religious theocracy gradually declined, Europe out of the shadow of the history of obscurantism, the constant wars between the countries as well as oceanic gold activities to promote the application of science and technology on a wide scale, and the application of science and technology itself is the process of empirical proof of scientific theories.

After the rise of empirical behavior to positivism (and then the development of falsifiability), the combination of logic and positivism finally made the birth of modern science a success.

At that time, China was still dreaming of "I have everything in China, I don't need to communicate with barbarians". Even Kang Xi, who had a keen interest in mathematics and mechanics, did not realize the significance of science and technology.

While Western scientific theories were being surpassed one by one, and new ones were being born that relied on more solid evidence, China, which had little to offer in terms of logic and empirical evidence, lost the possibility of modern science.

If it were not for the Opium War, which opened the closed doors of the country by force of arms, the people of China would still be obsessed with the dream of self-delusion. In the invasion of a hundred useless "I Ching" is not still some "experts" touted as the key to unlocking the cosmic code? Until now, there are still some cultural nibblers naively believe that our ancestors have long mastered the truth of the universe above the Western science, only the modern Chinese people do not understand it, they have never thought that the advance of mankind should be one generation stronger than the next, and what reason is there for the Chinese ancestors to break through the historical limitations and get a glimpse of the ultimate truth of the universe?

Modern science was reborn in the West after abandoning the classical theory of the four elements. Logic + empirical thinking ensures bold reasoning and hypothesizing, but also ensures careful proof and avoids degeneration into metaphysics.

Unfortunately, these two things are still lacking in our country until now. Hundred Lecture Theatre has become a literary and historical forum, Liu Taishi, Zhang Wuben and other miraculous doctors and liars were launched by the official media one by one to scourge the people, those pseudo-scientific works abroad such as "Trial of Darwin" "water knows the answer" and so on was introduced as a large number of scientific reading material, and even as early as in the United States in the 1970s on the case of the Bermuda Triangle to the United States on the fight against counterfeiting, to the present there are still people stupidly analyzing the mysterious reasons for the existence of the cause. In order to prove that they are good enough to be compared to Einstein.

And history has played a big joke with China, China's geographic location allows China to sit back and watch the sky, Western Europeans if you want to climb the mountains and mountains to hit the Chinese, more difficult than the sky, the proximity of the great powers of India by the influence of religion, relatively peace-loving, even if it was invaded by the British, at best, but also "nonviolent non-resistance movement ", little interest in aggression (interestingly enough, after the British return of India's dominion, India is suddenly ambitious), and China's neighboring small countries, either low civilization is still in the nomadic stage, or the bombing of the land of the barbarians into the Lord, but also quickly assimilated by the relatively advanced farming civilization. So the Chinese have a sense of historical superiority over their own culture.

In this sense of superiority, in the eyes of Confucianism as the orthodoxy of the country, science and technology are "obscene and strange", not enough to be compared with the heavenly way of our dynasty.

Under a variety of misunderstandings and historical conditions, China did not pass by modern science, but simply did not have the soil for its birth. If the West had not invaded China by force, in another thousand years, modern science would not have been born in China. Of course, there might have been developments in individual technologies, but it would have been difficult to build on basic scientific theories.

Many people like to put the blame on the Qing government, in fact, the Qing government was influenced by the civilization of the Central Plains, has been completely assimilated, the Qing government to do things, Song, Ming government are doing, cultural heritage in the academy system, incentive system in the system of science and technology, the Qing government have inherited, but also inherited is that the scientific research has never been placed in the position that should be placed, but the status of when low.

So, the core problem lies in the traditional cultural way of thinking out of the question, since the Qin down, China no longer have the soil to produce modern science.