Transcript 1 The Rise of Western Science

The Rise of Western Science
TWENTIETH CENTURY TECHNOLOGY
Science in China
 China slow to adopt Western sciences
 First industry and military sciences
 Medicine one of the last sciences to be adopted in China
 America invested Boxer Rebellion indemnity in
Chinese education
 Chinese students began studying at American
universities
 Rebellion of 1911 brought a republican government
to power in China under Sun Yat-sen
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Led to increased interest in Western ideas
Science in India
 British colonial governors like Lord Curzon believed
it was the duty of the British to bring law, religion,
literature, and science to the British colonies
 British rule in India brought Western science to
forefront of Indian thinking
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Colonial government invested heavily in scientific education
By 1930 Chandrasekhara Venkata, an Indian intellectual
became first non-Westerner to receive the Nobel Prize in
physics
Science and Islam
 Ottoman Empire does not fully embrace Western
science until the “Young Turks” take power in 1908
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Pace of scientific adoption radically increases after WWI when
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk begins building a secular republic
Fundamentalist Islam hostile to Western science
 Not until after WWII will the Arab world fully
incorporate Western science into its education and
cultural institutions
 Western medicine was the most successful harbinger
of science in the Middle East and Africa
New Technologies at the Turn of the Century
 1901 Wireless Radio broadcast by Guglielmo Marconi
 1903 Wright Brothers successfully fly first airplane
 1907 Plastics are invented
 1911 Combine harvester invented
 Atom smasher, skyscraper, hamburger, and Coca-
Cola all invented prior to WWI
Physics
 1902 Henri Poncaire postulated the doctrine of
scientific skepticism = evidence can be explained by
numerous hypotheses
 1905 Albert Einstein posits first theory of relativity
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Mass and time relative to speed
Speed of light only constant in the universe
Matter and energy are interchangeable
 1911 Ernest Rutherford develops first theories of
quantum mechanics
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Subatomic particles
Atomic structures
Physics continued
 1929 Edward Hubble discovered the “red shift” and
the expanding universe
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Leads to development of “big bang” theory
Embraced by both religious (Pope John XXIII) and secular
communities
 1980s Chaos theory challenged the basic assumption
that science can be used to make predications
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“butterfly effect”
Chain of cause and effect too complex for human perspective
 Physics continues to search for the “Grand Unified
Theory of Everything”
Biology
 Major medical advances
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1922 Insulin isolated for diabetes treatment
1931 Penicillin, the first antibiotic invented
 Evolutionary controversy
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1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial”
Conflict between fundamentalist Christianity and evolutionary scientists
 Development of the science of Genetics
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1944 Erwin Schrodinger predicted DNA chains
Controversy over genetic screening and “designer babies”
Human cloning controversy
 Developments of neuroscience increased understanding of the human
brain
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Cognitive research
Artificial intelligence
Biology continued
 Primatology
 Close study of monkeys and apes revealed cultural features
 Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey
 Sparked inquiry into premise of human moral superiority
Challenged idea of “human” rights
 Brought out “animal” rights movement
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 Paleoanthropology
 Discovered that more primitive species like Neathderthals had
cultural markers previously thought only belonging to Homo
Sapiens
 Raised questions of what precisely a human is
Anthropology
 19th Century anthropologists believed white
Europeans to be biologically superior to other races
 1910 Franz Boas demonstrated that no difference in
biological intelligence existed between races
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Cultural tradition, not biology dictated differences
Society and environment explain dominance
Cultural Relativism=idea that cultures cannot be ranked or
judged by outside terms
 20th Century anthropology spells the end of the
“civilizing” mission for colonial acquisitions
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Margaret Mead and Coming of Age in Samoa
Psychology
 Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) founded modern
psychology
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Posited the theory of subconscious motivations
Developed psychoanalysis
Attempt to achieve awareness of subconscious
 Id, ego, and superego
 Oedipal Complexes
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 Psychology came to influence all parts of Western
society from medicine to education to child rearing
Philosophy in the Early 1900s
 William James popularized Pragmatism in 1907
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Truth is relative
Whatever is useful is good
 Positivism dominated philosophy in 1920s-30s
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Perception = reality
Reason can prove that our sense show truth
 Existentialism became popular post-WWII
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Only truth is from birth to death
Jean Paul Sartre’s views came to dominate Western thinking
An individual action is a statement about the type of species an
individual wants to belong to
 People must create their own identities
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Never popular beyond the Western world
Art in the Early 20th Century
 Art mirrored the world of science
 Modernism dominated art at the beginning of the
20th Century
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Belief that the “new” was superior to the “old”
 In 1907 Cubism became popular
 Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque
 Reflected in fragmentary and shivered angles the disorder that
atomic theory suggested
 In 1909 Emilio Marinetti developed Futurism
 The traditional needed to be abandoned or destroyed
 Gloried in war, power, chaos, destruction, machines
 Function of progress is to destroy the past
Guernica by Picasso
Futurismo by Marinetti
Art continued
 Dadaism rose to prominence after WWI
 Disillusioned, brutal, ugly, and meaningless
 Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst
 Surrealism succeeded the Dada movement in the
late 1920s and early 1930s
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Attempted to replicate the subconscious mind through
fantastic imagery
Salvador Dali, Meret Oppenheim
 After the 1930s art splintered in many directions as
technology, taste, and consumerism began to drive
artistic movements at an ever increasing pace
The Fountain by Marcel Duchamp
The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali
Consumer Art
 Cinema and mass entertainment became dominant
art post WWII
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Walt Disney (1901-1966) possibly the world’s most influential
artist
Musical theater displaced opera
Pop music ousted classical music
Television advertising became most profitable art
 Escapism rather than philosophical, social, or
political message dominated the end of the 20th
century
 Fantasy literature became popular in reaction to a
century dominated by science
Walt Disney
The West Turns to the East
 Revival of “Eastern Wisdom” in the West at the end of
the 20th century
 Western scientists began to reconcile Eastern philosophy
with modern science
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Cyclic nature of time and space
Oppenheimer’s “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”
quotation from Baghavad Gita
 Recognition of the Chinese roots of Western learning
 Zen Buddhism, Daoism, and Hindi culture appealed to
reactionary elements in the West
 Eastern medicine begins to influence the West
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Traditional herbalism
Acupuncture