2022-04-21 Western Civilization and Science

The Beginning of Western Civilization

About two and a half thousand years ago, when China was at the end of the Spring and Autumn Period, when a hundred schools of thought were contending for supremacy, on the plains of Mesopotamia, Greek civilization also sprang up. While China produced Laozi, Confucius and Sunzi, Greece also produced a large number of famous philosophers - Thales, Pythagoras, Democritus, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. It may be a mere coincidence of time, but these wise men of the East and the West created two very different systems of science that have continued to this day.

Russell begins his History of Western Philosophy by saying, "Philosophy and science were originally indistinguishable." In fact, these Greek philosophers were also scientists at the same time. Pythagoras was a mathematician, Democritus proposed the "theory of atoms", Plato studied geometry, and Aristotle was almost the founder of logic and physics. The development of Western science continues to this day with the philosophical ideas of the ancient Greeks.

Let us look at a phenomenon that characterizes Western science and technology.

Pythagoras famously said, "Everything is number." This philosophical thinking caused the entire system of Western science is built on the basis of mathematics, when Newton wrote "the mathematical principles of natural philosophy," when the supremacy of mathematics is more unshakeable. Back to the ancient Greek era, Euclid synthesized Plato's geometric principles and Aristotle's logic, and wrote a work that has remained unchanged for more than 2,000 years, and even today is still the textbook of geometry in our secondary schools - The Principia Geometrica. This book introduced 467 theorems from 23 definitions, 5 axioms and 5 postulates. The basic idea is that if the axioms themselves are correct, and the reasoning process is correct, then the conclusion obtained must also be correct. As to the question of why the axioms themselves are correct, the ancient Greek philosophers saw no need for proof in this regard. When some modern people around us ridicule the Buddhist disciples for their devotion to Buddha, I wonder if it has ever occurred to them that the cornerstone of their belief in scientism is actually something unproven and unprovable.

The source of axioms is human observation. In reality, we can never be sure that our observations are a true reflection of the objective world. For example, there are many objects in the universe that do not emit light and emit electromagnetic waves that are invisible to the naked eye, but the fact that people cannot see them does not mean that they do not exist. When humans use various telescopes to convert the electromagnetic waves they emit into visible light, what we actually see is the projection of the planet in the visible spectrum. It's like a television set that can only recognize black and white, and still has to convert the signal to different shades of gray even when it receives a color signal; we only observe the projection of color on black and white, which is certainly not the reality of the objective world. Perhaps the same is true of axioms, which appear to be valid and eternal due to some more fundamental factors, and the axioms we see are only projections of those more fundamental factors on the observable world, and as soon as those more fundamental factors change a little, the axioms and the entire Western scientific system built on them will need to be drastically modified, or even come crashing down. From Newton's classical mechanics to Einstein's theory of relativity is perhaps one of the less dramatic of such modifications.

The Renaissance

Let's step out of the seemingly philosophical discussion we just had and look at the history of Western science. In the third century BC, ancient Greece was conquered by the Roman Empire. From then until the fourteenth century A.D., the civilization of ancient Greece not only did not develop, but even almost completely destroyed. At the beginning of the fourth century A.D., Christianity became the state religion of Rome after three centuries of persecution, and for nearly 1,000 years from then on, Europe was under the absolute rule of the medieval church. At the end of the fourteenth century, the Ottoman Empire invaded Eastern Rome, and many scholars fled to Western Europe for refuge, taking with them a large number of ancient Greek and Roman art treasures and books on literature, history and philosophy. This gives Western Europeans the opportunity to understand the brilliant civilization and artistic achievements of ancient Greece, a surging wave of "Greek fever" quickly swept through Western Europe, centered in Florence, ancient Greece and Rome's culture to restore and develop, which is the history of the famous "Renaissance "

The Renaissance is the first of its kind in the world.

The Renaissance was actually a revival of ancient Greek philosophical thought, and in the subsequent short period of 500 years or so, Western science and technology made rapid progress, and once again emerged a large number of scientists, artists and philosophers, such as Dante, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Einstein, Heisenberg, and so on.

Mathematics and astronomy have developed significantly, with Descartes founding analytic geometry, Newton and Leibniz independently working on calculus, and Kepler and Newton accomplishing a great deal in astronomy. These scientific developments may be regarded as a revolution in ancient Greek civilization in terms of their scale and magnitude, but they were still essentially the philosophical ideas of ancient Greece - observation, inductive axiomatics, and logical reasoning. Even the theory of relativity, which symbolizes the pinnacle of modern science, is not exempt from this: the theory of relativity takes "the constant speed of light" and "relativity" as axiomatic premises that do not need to be proved. In other words, if one of these two premises is disproved, the theory of relativity becomes a castle in the air.

Breakthroughs in matter and energy

The entire system of science remained untouched by human life until nearly 350 years after the Renaissance, when it was developed as an independent system. However, at the end of the 18th century, Western civilization was suddenly transformed by the invention of the steam engine by a man named Watt.

Before Watt's invention of the steam engine, all textile mills were built in valleys, using the mechanical energy generated by the water flowing down from the mountains to drive the textile machines. The invention of the steam engine, is the first time mankind mastered the conversion of thermal energy into mechanical energy, from then on the textile factory can be built in the city. Human civilization also began to change from the factory handicraft to the machine industry, "Industrial Revolution" officially began. 1807, the American Fulton put the steam engine on the ship, the end of the sailing era in shipping. 1814, the British Stephen put the steam engine on the train, opened up a new era of land transportation. By the 1830s and 1840s, the steam engine had been widely adopted in Europe and North America, which is known as the "Age of Steam."

In 1831, Faraday discovered that when a closed coil cuts through magnetic lines of force, it produces an induced current in the coil, which is the first time humans have mastered the conversion of mechanical energy into electrical energy, and declared the arrival of the "electrical age".

At the same time, the history of Western chemistry also appeared some epoch-making events. 1808, the English chemist Dalton published "A New System of Philosophy of Chemistry", put forward the atom as the smallest particles of chemical reactions. The study of the chemical properties of atoms led to the creation of the periodic table in February 1869 by the Soviet scientist Mendeleev.

Perhaps we can look at the following simple example to see why these new discoveries in physics and chemistry were so epochal in the advancement of human civilization.

Everyone knows that trees can make paper, think it is more than simple, but pondering it will find that the reason behind it is very profound, this process involves two aspects at the same time: first of all, people must realize that the basic components that make up the tree and the paper are the same, that is, the fibers, which is the side of the understanding of the material; and then there are the energy we have at our disposal must be able to return the tree into the fibers and follow the fibers of the paper. fibers, and by arranging the fibers in the order in which they are arranged in paper, paper can be generated. This example is still basically a physical change, that is, it does not change the structure of the molecules, but only the arrangement of the molecules. A deeper grasp of matter and energy would be a chemical change, in which the arrangement of the atoms is changed. For example, we can use petroleum to make rubber, asphalt, plastic, and so on.

Every time the exploration of matter and the mastery of energy goes one step deeper, human life changes dramatically. The steam age and the electronic age came about simply because mankind had mastered a shift in energy. The development of chemistry allowed man to invent synthetic materials. The invention of the computer was not so much a scientific advance as a technological one, because mathematical logic was created by Brin as early as the mid-nineteenth century, and the evolution from the electron tube to the transistor to the integrated circuit was simply the result of mankind's recognition of the properties of the semiconductor as a substance.

Leaps and Dilemmas in Physics

Beginning in the early twentieth century, there was a great leap forward in physics, as a group of energetic young people began to explore the microscopic world below the atom. Einstein proposed the theory of relativity applicable to the microscopic world, Bohr drew the structure of the atom, Planck put forward the idea of quantum mechanics, and Heisenberg proved the principle of inability to measure. Each of these major discoveries was a huge shock to the well-established classical physics theories and views of space and time.

The explosion of the first atomic bomb not only verified Einstein's equations about the relationship between mass and energy, but also showed the enormous energy of the microscopic world. However, more than 60 years have passed, human science in the understanding of matter and mastery of energy on the breakthrough is difficult to progress. Imagine, according to the understanding of modern science, the fundamental particles that make up an atom are no more than protons, neutrons and electrons. If we have such a cauldron, we can boil all the matter into the "elementary particles porridge", and then according to our needs to arrange these elementary particles as we wish, we can turn stone into gold, can turn all the decay into magic, and like trees and paper as convenient.

Of course, the actual situation is not so simple, just break the atom into elementary particles of the energy required is equivalent to the explosion of the atomic bomb. Such a large amount of energy for only skilled use of mechanical or chemical energy for human beings is like an ant to lift a large tree. On the other hand, human beings know very little about the forces and behavioral properties of particles in the microscopic world, so how can they manipulate and arrange those particles as they wish, which cannot be seen with the help of the largest microscopes available?

This is not the end of the story; in 1927, Heisenberg discovered the principle of inaccuracy, that is, the position and momentum of microscopic particles cannot be precisely determined at the same time, and therefore quantum mechanics cannot help but exhibit stochasticity, that is, the motion of particles is stochastic: under the same conditions, it is possible to have completely different results. results. The theory overturned the emphasis on causality in traditional science and traditional philosophy. Then Bohr and Heisenberg ****together worked out the principle of covariance, which states that what scientists observing in the microscopic realm observe is related to the observer's perceptions and the means of observation. This in turn shattered another fundamental belief of Western science: that there is an objective world independent of the observer.

Particle physicists recently proposed the superstring field theory, which posits that elementary particles are composed of a string with a length of 1.66*10^-33 centimeters, and that it would take 10^19 electron volts to break this string, an energy equivalent to 10 billion times that of the fission of a single atomic nucleus. Humans have to look at this astronomical amount of energy in vain.

Converting a Philosophy

At the end of the nineteenth century, the whole of classical physics-from Newton's classical mechanics to Maxwell's electromagnetic theory-was quite well established. Scientists believed that the glorious edifice of physics had been completed, and that all that remained was some minor tinkering. Even Lord Kelvin, a recognized authority on physics, said at the annual physics conference of the time, "The future truths of physics will have to be sought in the sixth decimal place."

However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, two major breakthroughs in physics-the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics-opened up a whole new realm.In 1905, Albert Einstein published On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, which introduced the theory of relativity for the first time. Unusually, in this article, Einstein did not cite a single piece of scientific literature from his predecessors, but created it entirely in accordance with his own philosophical and scientific ideas. Einstein was y influenced by the philosophical ideas of Spinoza and Mach, and he himself said many times, "It would be better to say that I am a philosopher rather than a physicist." Heisenberg, one of the leaders of quantum mechanics, was also a philosopher and wrote the book Physics and Philosophy. In the preface to A Word on the History of Western Philosophy, Will Duran says, "All kinds of science begin with philosophy, ...... science only imparts knowledge, only philosophy can give wisdom." It is no exaggeration to say that the breakthrough in physics in the twentieth century is actually a breakthrough in philosophy.

Special relativity broke with the ancient philosophical notion of absolute space-time. The change of speed (the movement of the observer) makes time scalable, and the concept of the so-called "now" is not absolute. For example, the famous "twin effect": an astronaut who returns to Earth after traveling at high speed for several years becomes younger than his twin brother left behind on Earth. 1915, Albert Einstein completed his theory of general relativity, which states that the curvature of spacetime beyond the limit of the speed of light may even lead to the reversal of time, so that theoretically, one can go to the past as well as to the future. In theory, people can go to the past and back to the future.

Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, breaks the notion that there is an "objective" world, and turns science back into "metaphysics". Western science is built on the basis of observation, induction and verification, if the first link will be due to the "inaccuracy" and people say different, different opinions, subsequent induction and verification of course, completely lost the basis. The first step in the development of the microcosm, Western science has no way to go.

Western science and the way out

At the beginning of the Renaissance, even great scientists like Isaac Newton were still in awe of God. Just as scientific research reached its peak, Newton turned to the Bible and said, "This most beautiful system of suns, planets, and comets could only have arisen from the plan and control of a meta-intelligent, omnipotent God." It was also discovered that nature turned out to be so harmonious and magnificent that the subtlety of its composition made one suspect that the Creator was actually one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.

However, the days of harmony between humans and nature have drifted away with the development of science. The brilliant achievements in science have overwhelmed the human mind, and people who know little about nature have begun to arrogate to themselves. Conde said, "Give me matter and I will make a universe out of it." Laplace said to Napoleon, "Sire, I have no need of the stuff of God."

Nietzsche, on the other hand, declared, "God is dead." Nature is not created by God, so we do not need to fear and cherish, can be free to "development", "conquest", "transformation", has become the concept of many modern people. And the emergence of the theory of evolution has further pushed people away from God.

One of the guiding principles of Western science is to isolate the object under study from its environment and then abstract it, so that the result is often to disregard the interaction of the object with its environment, and to discard the impact on the environment of manipulating the object. What we are seeing now in terms of air pollution, the greenhouse effect, El Ni?o, deforestation, soil erosion, and desertification are all the result of this kind of thinking and science being used by modern humans to "transform nature".

Without an eternal Creator, without a final arbiter of good and evil, whoever has the energy and power can do whatever he wants. This kind of thinking has not only caused a moral catastrophe for mankind, but also an ecological catastrophe. The American scientist Lester Brown wrote this thought-provoking sentence on the title page of one of his books: "We are not inheriting the earth from our fathers, but borrowing it from our children and grandchildren."

In the face of the dilemmas and shortcomings of modern science, perhaps we must shift our thinking and seek answers from China's grand and profound Eastern philosophical system.