She is a magnificent masterpiece about the history of science, which comprehensively summarizes the general situation of human development since the birth of the country. Tracing back to the course of scientific development, it is clear and systematic, presenting a "Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival" in the history of science.
She is a model of the combination of arts and sciences, rational thinking and humanistic care, which perfectly explains the strongest voice of the times that "science and technology are the primary productive forces" and also contains the humanitarian color of "harmony between man and nature".
She is the Faroes lighthouse outside Alexandria, which points the way for Noah's Ark lost in the Mediterranean.
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It's just that I didn't learn Chinese well since I was a child, and my writing was poor. These words are far from expressing my love and respect for this book. It can be said that The Course of Science is one of the best books I have ever read, and I can't praise her too much.
Some people will say that I exaggerate her so much, but it's not. Please listen to me slowly tell the essence of this book.
Because this book is a general history of the scientific community, rich in content and grand in system, but modern people don't have much time and energy to read it, and most of them like short and pithy "fast food culture", so I will choose some most representative foods for everyone to taste. I have an idea here that learning liberal arts is a very happy and extravagant thing. Why do you say that? Because what modern and contemporary China needs most is science. At present, 80% of college students in our country are science students, and only 20% are arts students. Of course, this is the need and embodiment of the national conditions, while western countries are relatively mature in politics, economy, society and culture, and gradually step into post-modernism, with more liberal arts students than science students in schools. )
All right, stop gossiping and get down to business.
If someone asks where the modern scientific spirit originated, we will not hesitate to say that it is in the west! Italy, a medieval country in the Renaissance, was born on the Apennine Peninsula. Of course, the main reason for the Renaissance is religious asceticism, which cruelly suppressed human nature. As the saying goes, where there is oppression, there is resistance, just like spring. The tighter you press, the greater the tension. As a result, the Renaissance became stale and went to the other extreme, leading to blind indulgence.
However, when we open the history of Italian civilization, we will find that Italy originated in ancient Rome and is the representative of pragmatism. A country that believes in pragmatism (such as ancient Egypt, this country attracted a large number of farmers to farm because of the regular flooding of the Nile, and every time it flooded, it needed to redraw the land boundary, and geometry was born; Moreover, due to religious reasons, the Egyptians believed that the soul could not die after death, so they tried their best to preserve human remains, that is, mummies. In the process of countless dissections, anatomy was born as modern medicine. But the Egyptians did not think further about why this phenomenon occurred, they just thought it was useful; Besides China, China's technology can no longer be practical. The ancient technology represented by papermaking, printing, compass and gunpowder is a model of pragmatism, and agriculture is developed to feed more people and so on. ) did not cultivate the spirit of "science for science's sake". It is the consistent style of Roman character to seek regional and even world political and military powers. Therefore, it is a false proposition that the scientific spirit originated in Italy.
So where does the scientific spirit come from? History has given this important task to the Greeks.
Greeks love freedom and refuse to give in to tyrants. Their democratic system is young and energetic. They love life and are optimistic by nature. The four-year Olympic Games is a portrayal of their happy life. They admire reason and wisdom, love truth and have unusual enthusiasm for knowledge. Of all the nationalities in the ancient world, the Greeks had a great influence on the modern world in terms of spiritual civilization.
Philosophers with outstanding intelligence appeared in the Greeks around 500 BC (at that time, the concept of scientist did not appear, until Newton wrote the Scientific Principles of Natural Philosophy, and philosophy slowly differentiated from science). They are the ancestors of many disciplines, including the famous natural philosophers Thales, Anaquel Simander, Anaquel Simini, Heraclitus and Zhi Nuo. , as well as humanist philosophers Rotgara and Socrates. There are systematic philosophers Plato and Aristotle, astronomers Sipax and Ptolemy, mathematicians Euclid and Diopandu, physicists Archimedes, medical scientists Hippocrates and Galen, biologists Theo Fielas, geographers Hyacitas and Ella Decolorization.
As Aristotle said, the scientific knowledge and technological achievements developed by orientals are mainly for practical purposes and religious needs. Only the Greeks first tried to give a rational explanation, trying to transcend specific and individual phenomena and reach a universal understanding. This is the characteristic of Greek thought and the unique contribution of the Greeks to human civilization.
With the accumulation of internal contradictions in Greece, the consequences of the war have further deteriorated. The original stable democratic regime is gone forever, and the building of science has become crumbling, without a stable foundation. At this time, Rome is gradually unifying the various regions along the Mediterranean coast with its powerful political and military power. However, it is generally believed that the Romans focused on political and military issues, paid more attention to legal and military research, and lacked interest and enthusiasm for natural science. They care about reality and don't like to think that this is completely different from the Greeks.
Here we can draw a conclusion that the prerequisites for scientific development are: first, a stable internal and external environment; Second, it has the temperament that the Greeks pursue transcendence and despise realistic skills. Unfortunately, the Romans paid too much attention to reality and neglected the inheritance and development of Greek temperament. The scientific spirit of Greece has been sleeping for nearly a thousand years, and the Romans should bear great responsibility. At the same time, the decline of Roman science is also a historical lesson that cannot be ignored in contemporary China.
The most unfavorable aspect of Roman rule to the development of science is its combination with Christianity. In 392 AD, the Roman Emperor Diodosi I issued a decree recognizing the status of Christianity as the state religion in the Roman world. Since then, rational thinking has been replaced by belief in almighty God, which is deeply rooted in people's hearts. With the further development of Christianity, this kind of asceticism and obscurantism, which suppress human nature, is growing, and people's spirit is plunged into ignorance and superstition, and they can't stop.
But when God closes one door, he also opens another door for mankind. The so-called west is not bright and the east is bright.
In the East, the Chinese Empire, as an ancient civilization, radiates dazzling scientific and technological brilliance. It is embodied in the four great inventions. The invention of paper spread to Europe and became the midwife of Renaissance and Enlightenment. Knowledge is no longer the patent of the upper class, which greatly popularized the exchange and dissemination of culture. Gunpowder blew the knight class to pieces, which opened the firearms revolution and military theory reform in this period; The compass opened the world market, helped the bourgeoisie to establish a vast colony and gradually completed the primitive accumulation of capital; Printing has become a tool of religious belief and the most powerful weapon to spread the spirit of capitalism.
In the cultural desert era of Europe, Arabs established their own empires, and culturally inherited the scientific heritage of Greece through the Great Translation Movement, becoming the preservers of the scientific flame.
The historical process developed to the late Middle Ages, and European academic circles began to wake up from the long night. On the basis of missionary schools, a modern education system, universities, has emerged in Europe (so religion cannot be completely denied, it has its historical origin and practical needs, and Marxism is somewhat extreme in dealing with religious issues). The Crusades brought back China's four great inventions and Greek learning from Arabs (through direct translation into Arabic). By translating and digesting Greek classical literature, European scholarship was revived, and a famous scholastic philosopher Thomas Aquinas appeared (he successfully integrated Christian theology with Aristotle's philosophy and established a huge scholastic philosophy system. He himself was also praised by the British Times as one of the great thinkers in the Millennium alongside Einstein and Marx) and Bacon, the pioneer of modern experimental science (he has a famous saying: knowledge is power. I add here that useful knowledge is power.
In the late Middle Ages, modern science was born in a scientific revolution, which was called Copernicus Revolution in history (more of an ideological revolution). The astronomical revolution initiated by Copernicus is the first stage of modern scientific revolution. Since then, the development of science has been like a torrent. Astronomy, physics, chemistry, life sciences, natural history, computer technology, universe and space technology have developed alternately, and there is a tendency of "you sing and I will appear".
After reading this book, I am very excited for many reasons. The most important thing is that I have sorted out the context of scientific development (in this article, I mainly look at the process of scientific development from a macro perspective, without involving specific scientific processes. However, the specific scientific process is the essence of this book. I hope people of insight can understand, and the fun can't be expressed in just a few words. Many scientific problems that I think are profound give me a headache.
Of course, I'm sad, too. This book is a bit thick, nearly 600 pages, but what I read about China's science and technology is pitifully out of touch with the population proportion of China. I can list them for you. Apart from the four great inventions, China only has its own independently developed agriculture, medicine, astronomy, mathematics, ceramics, silk weaving and architecture, which is beyond reproach. This is the pride of ancient China. But in modern times, we just eat our old books, and when we are finished, robbers come in.
History is sometimes really similar. Since the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties, there has been a China version of the Middle Ages, obsessed with world trends and arrogant; After the humiliation in modern times, we learned from a bitter experience and got our own great translation movement (China today, with the Westernization Movement as the forerunner and the reform and opening up as the theme, is the meaning in the title).