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Comment by jernfrost | Hacker News Reader

From what I understand, the Chinese had often recorded many facts about nature and mathematics very early and accurately. However they never really created much laws. Laws of nature was a western invention. E.g. they observed accurately planetary movements, but never attempted to formulate the laws governing those movements. That sort of thinking was crucial for scientific thinking.

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Maybe true. The emphasis was on calculations. For example, there was a heliocentric model in India [1], which was too complicated to come from a "simple" mechanical model, but was quite accurate.

But I think we should not be too eager to jump on to "science is only from laws" bandwagon. Courses on the philosophy of science take this dogma to absurd extremes, ignoring how current science is often done. There is enough science done today where the laws are only vague, but we do predict useful stuff from simulations - climate models and earthquake modelling being the most prominent - despite not having "simple" laws behind them. As Freeman Dyson often observes, physicists still don't have a good explanation of why a bicycle doesn't topple when in motion - but we've been riding them for a century and half [2].

I think trial-and-error, and simulations also count as sophisticated science.

It's more than a tad racist to insist that Egyptians, Babylonians, Chinese and Indians, as well as medieval Arab scientists were all child races incapable of truly knowing what they were doing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nilakantha_Somayaji

[2] https://www.wired.com/1998/02/dyson/

I think you're being a little unfair to philosophy of science here, bearing in mind how poorly 'Leviathan and the air-pump' was received by actual scientists.

I totally uphold your idea. One more case, machine learning, especially deep learning, which lacks strict mathematical model and theoretical explanation, actually works pretty well on reality problems in fact. Maybe, it takes years for theorists to build a theoretical framework to explain, but it does not hinder us to exploit the technique.

"medieval Arab scientists"

Ibn_al-Haytham was one of the inventors of the "scientific method". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haytham

At least as far as is quoted on that Wikipedia article, he gives a description of basic rigor, not the scientific method.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/The_Scie...

Feynman can counter this much better than I can,

"Feynman on pseudo science" https://vimeo.com/118188988

Ancient science is not the same as pseudoscience.

The problem with a lot of the ancient sources is the lack of proofs. What I am arguing is that lack of proofs in ancient mathematical texts doesn't mean that it is all bunkum, and the authors did not know what they were talking about.

I am not talking cultural relativism or "social science is a science" relativism.

Again, another example: Euler is the father of modern analysis, through his "Analysis of the Infinite" [1]. None of his proofs are rigorous according to modern standards. Do you think Feynman would've called Euler a fool?

[1] http://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematica...

"Ancient science is not the same as pseudoscience."

Ancient science is science. Ancient pseudo science is ancient pseudo science.

Feyerabend's Against Method goes further: examining crucial discoveries in science reveals no pattern which could be called a scientific method. Everyone sort of freestyles it or does what works.

I think modern western science discounts other sources of knowledge, because it is not just a platonic ideal but a sort of politics of the scientists, which they need to justify the choices they make.

This is waffle. 'Western Science' is an abstraction. The 'official position of Western Science' is not an accredited publication as far as I know. More to the point, if you have criticisms of individual scientists (the ones who contribute to science [ i.e., people all nationalities and places on Earth) ] who 'discount other sources of knowledge' please be specific. They may or may not have a point. We can't know unless you specify.

Too much troll, didn't read

Regarding bicycles, I feel compelled to share one of my favourite articles on wikipedia. [1] Still, I think the point you made is valid.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_and_motorcycle_dynamic...

Pretty neat. There's also a TED talk about balance which was pretty amazing.

ps: I wonder if there's a skateboard dynamics.

Which is why it is so important that written knowledge survives civilizations, so that future generations can learn from the past.

With our current focus on digital media and "cloud", there won't be anything left in 2100 years for people to have a blick of what we are doing.

Even simulations are based on formulating rules or laws in which the different parts operate within. I think you are bringing up an awful lot of straw-men to counter my point. I never suggested one should be narrow minded about it, simply that by merely having observations, we don't really have science. IMHO science relies on having theories which we can formulate rules or laws from which makes it possible to make predictions. What else besides explaining things and making predictions is the point of science?

"It's more than a tad racist to insist that Egyptians, Babylonians, Chinese and Indians, as well as medieval Arab scientists were all child races incapable of truly knowing what they were doing."

What on earth are you rambling about? Were have I made even the faintest suggestion that that is the case? Different civilizations has invented different things and advanced at different levels and different times through our history. Pointing this out isn't racist with respect to other people. Is is racist against Europeans to suggest that Indians invented the zero and our numerals. Am I then suggesting that those stupid childish Europeans couldn't come up with even basic stuff like numerals themselves?

Is it racist to point out that native Americans didn't invent quantum mechanics?

Anyway I don't believe there is such a thing as human races, but there definitely are differences between various cultures and civilizations.

It is an undeniable fact that western civilization was the main driver of the scientific revolution. Should it then not be interesting to understand why it was that the west advanced so much further than the others. One of the key observations which helps understand this is the western preoccupation with formulating laws of nature early on.

How else can you explain how a relatively poor and backwater region of the world could end up eclipsing, far richer, more populous and advance regions such as the Arab world, China, India?

> native Americans didn't invent quantum mechanics

Maya's totally knew about quantum, how else could they have had novelty theory and predicted the 2012 timewave zero collapse? It's not like they had access to the I-Ching[0] to be able to model it like Terrence McKenna did.

... on that note, a bit more serious; this is as good an opportunity to randomly ask as any; can anyone explain to me (as far as pseudo-science goes, going along with all of the assumptions) what the basic reasoning is in Timewave Zero, how they got from the King Wen sequence (which is a certain permutation of the 64 I-Ching hexagrams, but afaik they just use it as a particular 64-element permutation compared to the original order, without taking into further account the symbology of the invididual hexagrams), and turned it into that fractal line graph they call the Timewave? There is an article on deoxy.org that appears to go into technical detail but when I read it and tried to reproduce, it doesn't really say how that step is done. OTOH apparently there's software (screenshots) that plot this graph, so there must be some kind of deterministic algorithm, but I haven't been able to find any docs about it.

[0] ... OR DID THEY??

Why bring racism to every comparison. They obviously weren't good at the kind of mathematics/science that leads to technological progress. So what?

I didn't know "earthquake modeling" was a thing.

You're spreading antiscientific misinformation with your claim that Freeman Dyson asserts that we don't have a good explanation for why bicycles don't topple. The linked article doesn't support that claim.

What Dyson says is that it's hard to design a technological artifact, like a bycicle, from scratch, using theory only. We know perfectly how and why it works, but it's very hard to design something the behavior of which is actually governed cleanly by the fundamental explanatory principles in predictable ways. That doesn't make the principles of the explanation wrong: it's recognizing that reality is incredibly messy. It's about how hard technology is, not about science.

This is an interesting idea, even if it does play into the "exotic Oriental thinking" meme. I've seen this line of thinking usually attached with rubbish like "The Westerner wants to control the world, the Eastener only wants to explain it."

However I think that first making observations and then the crucial step of extrapolating and making predictions based on those is as good as any formally named 'law'.

Reading up on Copernicus, Kepler and astronomy gives a good idea I think about what I am getting at.

Extrapolation isn't that easy to do with e.g. astronomy. Orbits don't go in straight predictable lines. They are ellipses where the speed will vary depending on where you are in the orbit. Kepler found that the are covered per time unit was constant, thus implying that when the orbits were closer to the sun they would speed up.

I guess you could say extrapolation was what Kepler tried to do but it took him a lot of work to figure it out. The Chinese while very advance in many respect did not try doing that. What I've read is that they did not have the Judeo-Christian belief that the mind of God could be learned. The laws governing the motions of the heavens was assume inscrutable to the human mind.

Proofs were not always of the same rigor - what was once considered a proof may not be so by modern standards.

Now what this book shows is that 2100 years ago some level of proof was also a requirement in Chinese mathematics; this makes classical Greek/western thought look not quite as unique as it is portrayed.

You might be interested in (perhaps already know) of this book, which develops your idea in some detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginning_of_Infinity

Yes, induction is what makes our progress possible.

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