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72 of 78 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A lot to offer, with a few flaws, December 1, 2002
I'm usually fascinated by histories of science that expand our understanding past the standard picture that science started with the ancient Greeks and has largely been carried out in the West. So I dived into Lost Discoveries with great excitement. Unfortunately, I soon found myself putting the book down and wandering off to other things. Having finally finished it, I see it as a remarkably comprehensive and valuable step towards a broader understanding of early and non-Western scientific contributions, but also as having some significant flaws. On the positive side, Teresi has gathered together a great deal of scholarly work on Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Maya, and Arab science and mathematics, and presents it clearly and understandably. He more than makes the case that we need to deepen our understanding of the ancient roots of science and broaden our acceptance of the idea that science has existed in many non-Western cultures. Readers will come away not only with these big and very important ideas, but with many fascinating details about advances and discoveries made long before they were made in the West. On the other side of the ledger, I found myself seriously put off by the author's willingness to present just about any story that ever expressed any culture's mythology about the creation or structure of the cosmos as a meaningful predecessor of current cosmological thinking. Maybe I'm just not post-modern enough to grant equal scientific weight to an ancient creation myth as to the inflationary Big-Bang theory. The ancient story may be poetic and psychologically very meaningful, but it can't predict the primordial percentages of hydrogen and helium, or the wrinkles in the cosmic microwave background. Similarly, when Teresi writes that when particle physicists finally find the Higgs boson, they will validate the Buddhist idea of "maya," I found myself wishing that the author had used a finer sieve when chosing what to write about and what to leave out. Still, anyone who is interested in the history of science, and at all curious about what kinds of science and mathematics predated or paralled the canonical Western scientific tradition, will find Lost Discoveries well worth reading. Robert Adler, author of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation
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45 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Strong on fact, enfeebled on the philsosophy of science, December 1, 2002
By A Customer
This book contains a wealth of facts, many not widely appreciated. However, it is tragically flawed by its confused and ambiguous definitions of science, technology, and mathematics. Science is the investigation of the natural world using REPRODUCIBLE observations as the ultimate arbitrators of truth and the organization and systemization of those observations. Mathematics is the investigation of the meaning of axiomatic systems using deductive logic as the arbitrator of truth. Technology is the body of knowledge and facilities used by humans to create artifacts. Both science and mathematics are tools in the process of creating technology. Lacking a clear understanding of these definitions, the author wanders about in the last 4,000 years of history confusing the development of technologies with science, science with mathematics, technology with mathematics, and worst, myth with all three. Thus, for example, he notes that Pythagorean triples (e.g., 5x5 = 4x4 + 3x3) were know to the ancient Babylonians 1000 years before Pythagoras lived. The Babylonians, however, did not state the theorem or prove it. This distinction is pivotal from the point view of a mathematician. Mathematics as we know it today began when the first theorem was proved. Likewise, "reproducible observation", the essence of science, did not become an identifiable and prevalent methodology by which to seek truth about the natural world until about the time of Galileo Galilei in Sixteenth Century Europe. Thus, although there has been a great deal of under reporting by European historians of technologies developed by Chinese, Indian and other civilizations, this book fails to make the crucial distinction between science and technological development, the history of which trails back at least 40,000 years and is certainly not confined to white European inventors. Some scientists, notably Richard Feynman, have claimed that the development of science does not much depend the pre-development of mathematics, asserting that when the scientific need arises the mathematics will be developed by the scientists. However, it is difficult to imagine that Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century science would have occurred had three thousand years of mathematical development not preceded it. The author rightly emphasizes the fact that much of this early mathematics can be attributed to non-Europeans. Unfortunately, this point is almost entirely lost in the jumble of imprecision engendered by the lack of coherent definitions of the disciplines of mathematics and science. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, throughout the book the author repeatedly reports myths or half-baked and unsupported ideas that seem to presage some modern scientific fact or theory, he then implies that the myths were the precursors of the science. For example, 3,000 thousand years ago an Indian cult had the notion that all things consisted of vibrations. The author reports this and then announces that this may have been the beginning of quantum mechanics. It is as though he was rummaging around in garbage dump, found a shoe box, held it up and proclaimed here is the precursor of the radio because it had about the same shape at that of early radios. This book is worth reading because of its factual content, but constant mental surveillance is required to avoid being caught up in the author's confusion about the nature of the basic entities he is discussing and his persistent tendency to give primitive myths the status of the precursors of modern scientific knowledge.
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73 of 84 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Trivia Mother Lode, December 19, 2002
In "Lost Discoveries," Dick Teresi sets out to prove (and largely succeeds) that many of our science discoveries, previously attributed to Hellenic and other white-European civilizations, were actually preceded by--or flat out ripped off from--non-white, non-Western types, such as the Chinese, Sumerians, Babylonians, Mesoamericans, Africans, Indians, etc. He selects several general areas of scientific endeavor--mathematics, astronomy, cosmology, geology, and mechanical invention--and shows examples from each of how Man's understanding of the laws of the universe is much older than we think. And he names names. The book ends up being a fantastic compendium of science knowledge, with enough interesting trivia to keep the average dinner-party know-it-all armed for a lifetime. What Teresi explains is that claiming Copernicus was the first to hypothesize that Earth orbits the Sun is like claiming that Columbus was the first to discover America. That ignores the natives, the Mesoamericans, the Vikings, and probably a few more. The same can apparently be said about who decided Earth was round, who invented paper, and on and on. There were plenty of smart thinkers in older times, and their discoveries have been "lost" or ignored for a variety of reasons. These, too, Teresi tries to detail. Part of Teresi's problem is deciding how to differentiate between a notion and scientific proof. A 3,000-B.C. barbarian looking out across the ocean, noting its curvature, and deducing that Earth is round is not the same as Columbus sailing three ships out there and not falling off. Teresi really begins to stretch matters in favor of the ancients when he drags out their cosmic mythologies and tries to claim its early quantum physics. A minor annoyance is that the book's premise would have been better if discoveries were traced back to their true origin without regard to race. Show the evidence and the links, and let the chips fall where they may. Teresi patronizes "non-white, non-western" types by trying to validate their heritage; and jumps on the PC bandwagon as he insults European descendents by constantly reaching for the conclusion that old dead white guys are never as smart as we're led to believe. As if it matters. He even hints that due credit for non-white discoveries may have been suppressed over the centuries by a vast conspiracy fueled by racial prejudice. This book would have been better if he'd just left Rodney King out of it. --Christopher Bonn Jonnes, author of Wake Up Dead.
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