Translating Science

Scott L. Montgomery. Science inTranslation: Movements of Knowledge through Cultures andTime. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. xi + 325. $28;

David Wright. Translating Science:TheTransmission of Western Chemistry into Late Imperial China, 1840-1900. Sinica Leidensia 48. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Pp. xxvi + 558. $100.

Translation at the same time enables and hinders the exchange of knowledge. How that happens is not easy to understand. Science, with its ideal of perfect communication across cultural barriers, poses special perplexities that are the subject of these two very different books. They not only tell fascinating stories, but will be useful to scientists who are dissatisfied with platitudes. They are complementary in more ways than one.

Harried lecturers often rely on old history of science textbooks to add a pinch of humanistic spice to meat-and-potatoes technical courses. Such surveys tell a simple and linear story. This is how it goes: the Greeks invented science, and theoretical physics, molecular biology, and the rest evolved from their empirical and logical methods. There was one slight detour on this otherwise linear path of development: Europeans happened to wipe out their classical culture (and, for that matter, most of their literacy) over about four centuries beginning roughly AD 200. It took more than a thousand years to recover. As sophisticated intellectual life largely disappeared outside the church, the classics materialized in the Islamic world--never mind why or how. Muslims preserved them until Western Europeans were ready to let them back in and resume the real history of science and learning. In this way, the textbooks tell us, Islam served as a sort of Tonto (the half-savage but faithful sidekick) to Europe's Lone Ranger.

Since it was "the Greek genius" that engendered the modern world, Africa, South Asia, and East Asia play no role in this drama. The textbooks ignore their many cultures. The older authors explain that none was capable of real science; the recent ones, who know better, allot them a few uninformative words in passing. (James E. McClellan III and Harold Dorn's Science and Technology in World History: An Introduction [1999] is an exception, attractive in many respects but rather thrown together and dependent on some very undependable sources as well as good ones; Roy Porter's The Greatest Benefit to Mankind[1998] is more judicious.)

The last couple of generations of specialist historians who study one technical tradition or another, including scholars of Greek antiquity, have demolished this faith in an almost uninterrupted march of progress toward today's perfection, but their more complex accounts have had little impact even on recent textbooks. The problem of the textbook approach is not simple ignorance. Everyone knows the names of Joseph Needham, A. I. Sabra, and other eminent scholars who have revealed the richness of non-European traditions to a broad public, but not everyone goes so far as to read their work. The root difficulty is a disinclination to believe that people who are not like us (whoever "us" is) can be just as clever and inventive as we are or (of course) our ancient surrogates the Greeks and Romans were. By now, given the cultural diversity of first-rate scientists, mathematicians or chemists are seldom muddled enough to think of their own Indian or Korean colleagues as Tontos. But the mainstream historians who write surveys in English remain predominantly Anglo-American in standpoint. Most, in my experience, are still viscerally uncomfortable about studying non-European peoples.

In the last two generations, studies of science and medicine in several civilizations have converged on a view very different from that of the textbooks: the Greeks had some powerful things to say about the possibilities of scientific thought and practice, but so did the Persians, Indians, Chinese, and other peoples. Ancient Greek habits of thought about nature, if examined unsentimentally, are no more modern than those of other technically minded ancients.

I would put it that the prime focus of science from AD 700 to 1200 lay...