The problem of Chinese science

Due to the publication of Joseph Needham's profound and monumental study, Science and Civilisation in China, the question of why modern science arose in the West but not in the East has focused on a comparison of Europe and China. The implicit suggestion has been that Chinese science came closest to paralleling Western scientific achievement, and therefore China probably came closer than any other civilization to giving birth to modern science. As we saw in Chapters 2 and 5, however, the path leading to the scientific revolution in Europe was paved most significantly by Arabic-Islamic scholars. Not only had the Arabs developed, discussed, and deployed several aspects of the experimental method, but they had also developed the mathematical tools necessary to reach the highest levels of mathematical astronomy. Furthermore, the work undertaken by those associated with the Marâgha observatory in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, culminating in the work of Ibn al-Shatir (d. 1375), resulted in the development of new planetary models of the universe. These have often been described as the first non-Ptolemaic models along the path to modern science. It was these planetary innovations that were to be adopted (or independently invented) by Copernicus. The missing ingredient was the heliocentric anchoring, not mathematical or other scientific devices. It was the failure to make this metaphysical leap from a geocentric to a heliocentric universe that prevented the Arabs from making the move “from the closed world to the infinite universe.”

In the case of China, however, the disparity between the state of Chinese science and that of the West – but also the disparity with Arabic science – was far greater in regard to the theoretical foundations upon which the scientific revolution was ultimately launched in Europe. The superiority of China to the West, to which Needham refers, was primarily a technological advantage, conveyed in Needham's claim that from the first century B.C. until the fifteenth century, “Chinese civilization was much more efficient than occidental [civilization] in applying human natural knowledge to practical human needs.”