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Title: Lost Discoveries : The Ancient Roots of Modern Science--from the Babylonians to the Maya
ISBN: 0684837188
Author:
Dick Teresi
Publicate Date: 2002-11-01
Publish: 2002-11-01
List Price: $27.00
Average Customer Rating: 3.0
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $8.50
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $2.55
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Eye-opening
Teresi starts his book by noting,
"I began to write with the purpose of showing that the pursuit of showing that the pursuit of evidence of nonwhite science is a fruitless endeavor...Six years later, I was still finding examples of ancient and medieval non-Western science that equaled and often surpassed ancient Greek learning.... "My embarrassment at having undertaken an assignment with the assumption that non-Europeans contributed little to science has been overtaken by the pleasure of discovering mountains of unappreciated human industry, four thousand years of scientific discoveries by peoples I had been taught to disregard."
One reviewer has correctly noted that science consists of reproducible experiments, and I pretty much agree. But not all science is reproducible or even falsified or tested (consider super string theory). While I would not call Indian ideas of vibrations the precursor of quantum physics, I would not go as far as Morris Kline, whom Teresi noted characterized Babylonian and Egyptian math as the "scrawling of children, and called Indian mathematicians "fools."
Teresi's book is full of eye-opening accounts of ancient science that was as much real science as anything our "scientists" of 300 or 400 years ago cooked up. Is map-making a science? Chinese made Mercator projection maps almost 2000 years ago. Is astronomy a science? Ancient Chinese not only kept records of but also predicted solar and lunar eclipses. And recently Nasa has referred to ancient Chinese records in their efforts to determine how much the earth's rotation has slowed down. They used ancient Chinese records because they were meticulous, scientific observations.
Of course, Teresi's book is so chock full of facts that, inevitably, he slipped up on some. For example, on page 240 he wrote that "According to Confucius, there are also records of drilling with bamboo poles for natural gas in Szechwan in 211 B.C." Indeed, there was such drilling (2000 feet deep!), but if Confucius wrote about it, he was also a prophet, because Confucius died 268 years before this. But everyone, even an ex editor of Omni, slips up.
If writing this book opened Teresi's eyes, it can also open readers' eyes--unless they are determined to restrict the definition of science so narrowly that even some modern physics would not qualify.
I highly recommend this book. And if you're interested in ancient Chinese inventions, as I am, having lived in China over 20 years (in Xiamen, former Amoy), I highly recommend "Chinese Science and the West", written a couple decades ago by Clarke. Absolutely intriguing--and objective (based, I think, on a BBC series).
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2: absorbing survey of ancient, nonwestern science
This book presents myth-shattering evidence about the non-western roots of science and mathematics. The part about mathematical contributions of non-Western science seems to be well-researched and lies on solid ground. Past that, however, the book flounders as it confuses religion and philosophy with science. To lay claim that the Buddhist concept of emptiness has something to do with the void at the heart of the modern concept of atoms is more than a little bit of a stretch. The ancients may have accidentally hit upon the right concept, but so did they have thousands of other philosophical concepts that don't mesh well with modern science, and nowhere did they possess the mathematical and experimental proof to backup their claims. This is the main difference we make today between science and religion: that which can be proven versus that which cannot. It is a pity the author decided to take this turn, when the ancients had much that can be classified as solid, true science. The ancient Arabs, for example, contributed much in terms of optics, dynamics, meterology, and geographical projection. They were able to explain the formation of rain, explain motion, and draw accurate maps. So did many other cultures have solid contributions. Why focus on comparing the various Indian philosophic beliefs to string theory when the latter has less than a few dacades history and may be proven wrong? Isn't it more fair to compare those non-Western cultures to their European contemporaries, as the author briefly does in the introduction? It is another pity that the author refuses to include medicine in the scope of the book, since that is where much of non-Western contributions to science lie. Despite these shortcomings, this book is an exciting and gripping read.
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3: Expectations Unfulfilled
Lost Discoveries : The Ancient Roots of Modern Science--from the Babylonians to the Maya by Dick Teresi is a book that probably shouldn't have been written. I just don't have a lot of good things to say about it. Based on the premise I had high expectations that the book would investigate the technologies of ancient civilizations for things that we, today, don't understand or can't duplicate. I thought I'd get an examination into the pyramids, Mayan building techniques, and perhaps Pacific Island navigation methods. What I got instead was a lot of unsubstantiated speculation and loosely strung hypothesis. Teresi also filled his book with indigenous mythology cribbed right from Joseph Campbell's mythology books. Unfortunately I read Campbell's library and it's much more interesting in the unabridged version.
The worst thing I can say about a nonfiction book is that I didn't learn anything new from it. That's the truth of this volume.
- CV Rick, May 2008
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4: Poorly Written and Full of Inaccuracies
I bought this book because I liked its premise. However, I was thoroughly disappointed before I could even finish the first chapter. The book is filled with repetitious statements on the one hand and inconsistancies on the other. If you can get over the poor writing style, you will come up against the flagrant factual errors. For example, Teresi denegrates the Greeks for thinking the world is flat. Huh? Most of the greatest Greek philosophers, including Pythagoras and Ptolemy, thought Earth was a sphere. Aristotle even used the evidence that Earth casts a round shadow on the moon during an eclipse to support this idea.
This was just one of many factual errors that popped out at me while I tried to read this poorly executed book. As an archaeologist myself, I couldn't agree more that non-Westerners have made great contributions to science. However, believe it or not, so have Westerners!
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5: Lost Opportunities
The author had an opportunity to present achievements of non-western civilizations and missed it. The book is full of inaccuracies. For example on page 44 the author confuses Ahmes papyrus (also known as the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus) with the Mathematical Leather Roll. If you do not already know the subject, you may end up with incorrect information. It is best to avoid this book.
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