"With China's national strength today, we have unprecedented abundant conditions to promote China's scientific revolution and scientific and technological undertakings to achieve leapfrog development."
"Of course there are many popular explanations for the 'Needham Mystery', but none of these solutions can withstand scrutiny. The competition between European countries during the Renaissance is the essence of the 'Needham Mystery'."
In the 132nd episode of "This is China" broadcast on Dragon TV on February 7, Professor Zhang Weiwei, Dean of the China Institute of Fudan University, will join hands with Professor Wen Yi, a distinguished researcher from the China Institute of Fudan University, to lead the audience to explore " The answer to "Needham's Question" and the code of the scientific revolution.
Zhang Weiwei:
Three years ago, not long after the program "This Is China" was launched, we discussed a topic: Why was China far ahead of Europe in history, but then fell behind? How did Europe catch up with and surpass China? I mentioned three main reasons at the time: First, war. If we start from the 16th century, we can say that Europe has been at war for a long time. It started with four to five hundred countries, and by the end there were only two or three countries left. Ten countries.
According to statistics, from 1500 to 1799, major European countries were involved in large-scale wars most of the time. Spain was involved 81% of the time, the United Kingdom was involved 53% of the time, and France was involved 52% of the time. enter. But bad things turned into "good" things. Of course, this "good" is in quotation marks. European countries paid a very heavy price, including a large number of deaths and countless destruction.
Subsequently, some major European countries developed their military strength, social organizational capabilities, and scientific and technological strength. Then they started attacking others everywhere, establishing overseas colonies, and plundering a large amount of other people's wealth and resources.
A chart of war deaths from 1500 to 1799. Source: of war
The second reason is financial. Venetian merchants who made a fortune in Eastern trade, as well as some merchants from other places, began to invest in wars and financed many wars within Europe and many external wars. This tradition was later continued in the Netherlands and Britain.
In addition, although China was the world's largest economy at the time, China lacked precious metals. Starting from the Ming Dynasty, our currency supply began to rely on silver, suffering from "dependence" on Spanish-controlled American silver. In other words, China's money supply depends on the silver provided by the outside world. Once there is a crisis in silver supply, Chinese society will fall into chaos and turmoil.
The third reason is that the imperial court was arrogant, unwilling to make progress, closed the country, and was obsessed with the Chinese version of the "end of history" theory. I am the best in the world. This mentality made China unfavorable to the great changes in the outside world, especially the industrial revolution and scientific revolution in Europe. The revolution was almost numb and ignorant, and ultimately could not cope with the challenge of blood and fire brought by the rise of Western powers.
Well, related to China's decline and Europe's strength, there is another very sharp question raised by the British sinologist Joseph Needham. Joseph Needham has long studied scientific and technological inventions in ancient China. He said that scientific and technological inventions in Chinese history often far exceeded those in Europe at the same time, especially before the 15th century.
But he asked a question: Although ancient China made many important contributions to the development of human science and technology, why did the modern scientific and industrial revolution not happen in China? This is the famous "Needham Question" or "Needham's Mystery".
Many scholars have given their own answers to "Needham's question". The more representative answer is "it must be said that it is Greek", which means that Western civilization originated from ancient Greece. This view actually has some opinions today. We will not ignore the controversial issues here.
Ancient Greece had a tradition of free thinking that did not seek any practical purpose, which resulted in the ancient Greek mathematical axiom system. This system was combined with the inquisitive speculative tradition of European medieval scholastic philosophy, which ultimately gave rise to the Newtonian mechanics revolution in the 17th century. wait. In contrast, China has a tradition of putting knowledge into practice since ancient times. Therefore, China will have various technological inventions, but it is impossible to produce a scientific revolution.
On July 5, 1687, Sir Isaac Newton published Principles of Natural Philosophy and Mathematics.Source: Wikipedia
Some people who hold this view further argue that we cannot just learn Western science and technology, but must fully embrace the core elements of ancient Greek and Roman civilization that gave birth to modern science, experience the Western Enlightenment, and embrace the science and rationality represented by Western civilization. , democracy, modernity, etc., can eventually develop.
Of course, today's China has risen, and China is already at the forefront of the world's fourth industrial revolution. The outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic has shown us the comprehensive failure of Western epidemic prevention and control, and as a result, Western myths have further fallen from the altar. Ordinary Chinese people compare China and the West every day and gain what I call a great "mental victory": comparing today's China and today's major Western countries, who is more scientific? Who is more rational? Who has a higher quality of democracy? Whose country is more modern?
After international comparisons of epidemic prevention and control, most Chinese people have their own answers. Frankly speaking, we have learned a lot from the West. We are still learning now and will continue to learn in the future, but we are very clear that this is selective learning. At the same time, our vision has long gone beyond the Western model, and we have seen many deep-seated problems in Western political and social systems, as well as other systems.
Today, the West should have the courage to get rid of its arrogance, prejudice and ignorance towards China. Of course, if the West chooses to continue to maintain this kind of arrogance, prejudice and ignorance. As I often say, we can only keep you in the darkness. I sympathize with you very much. You must be the one who regrets it in the end, not China.
Not long ago, Professor Wenyi asked me to write a few sentences for his new book "The Code of Scientific Revolution". I wrote this: "This book brings the impact and shocking power unique to excellent original research results. This book deconstructs the mainstream narrative of Western discourse about the Renaissance and the origin of modern science, making it People convincingly demonstrated the social needs of Europe. In particular, the long-term wars and military competitions between countries at that time were the core driving force for the development of modern science. Professor Wen Yi quoted from many sources, put forward many insights, and answered the 'Needham question' head-on. '. "The Code of the Scientific Revolution" is very inspiring for China to break through the shackles of Western discourse and establish the Chinese people's own mainstream narrative about China and the world."
"The Code of the Scientific Revolution" breaks "Western-centrism" and discusses historical issues.Source: Sina Reading
As soon as I finished writing this paragraph, I saw a video that swept the entire network at the time. On October 29, 2021, Huawei held the "Five Legions Formation and Inauguration Conference." The "five major corps" are: coal mine corps, smart highway corps, customs and port corps, smart photovoltaic corps, and data center energy corps.
I realized that Huawei has grasped a series of the most urgent and urgent needs of Chinese society, and then closely integrated these needs with Huawei's technological strengths. This will surely open up new and broad prospects for Huawei. From a broader perspective, General Secretary Xi Jinping has regarded the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and meeting the needs of the Chinese people for a better life as the biggest driving force for China's scientific revolution and technological innovation.
With China's financial, human, material, and national strength today, we have unprecedented abundant conditions to promote China's scientific revolution and scientific and technological undertakings to achieve leapfrog development.
I would like to quote here what Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei said to his "Five Legions" soldiers on the expedition that day. He said it brilliantly: "I believe that peace is achieved through hard work. Heroic sacrifice will create a peaceful environment for the next 30 years so that no one dares to bully us anymore. We are sacrificing our lives for ourselves and the country. The sun and the moon shine together, the phoenix is nirvana, and people and heaven look up to us!"
Okay, let’s invite Mr. Wen Yi, a distinguished researcher at the China Research Institute, a distinguished professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the author of the book "The Code of Scientific Revolution", to give a speech. thank you all!
Article 1:
A famous historian of science, Joseph Needham, had a big question when he studied the very brilliant scientific and technological achievements of ancient China. He thought that with such brilliant scientific and technological achievements, why did the scientific revolution not happen in China? in the West? Then this is called "Needham's Mystery" or "Needham's Question".
There are many popular explanations for the "Needham Mystery", which have been proposed for nearly a hundred years. One theory is that the Eastern gold-casting tradition and utilitarian culture hindered the emergence of modern science in ancient China. This concept holds that the emergence of science must get rid of utilitarianism, and Eastern civilization happens to be a civilization based on utilitarianism. Everything must be asked whether it is useful, so modern science cannot be produced.
Another theory is that the combination of the axiom system of ancient Greece and the monotheistic scholastic tradition of the Middle Ages led to the explosion or emergence of modern scientific theories. Compared with ancient Greek civilization, Chinese civilization has lacked logical thinking and monotheistic religious traditions since ancient times, so it is impossible for a scientific revolution to break out in China.
There is also a theory that although both Catholicism and Islam have absorbed the civilization of ancient Greece and have monotheistic religious traditions, neither of them can produce a scientific revolution. Because the religious reform movement that emerged during the Renaissance did not occur in countries where Catholicism was dominant and where Islam was dominant. Protestantism happened to be a movement of ideological emancipation, leading to freedom of thought. Only on this basis could a scientific revolution occur. However, China did not produce a religious revolution similar to Luther and Calvin at all, so it was impossible to produce it. Scientific revolution.
In my opinion, these answers cannot withstand scrutiny, and we return to the war-torn Renaissance era in which Galileo lived. In everyone’s impression, the Renaissance is an era of prosperous art. In fact, the biggest feature of the Renaissance is not art, but the war between city-states. Through reading, the poet Dante and the greatest thinker of the Renaissance Machiavelli's work can be confirmed.
The Italian Renaissance (Italian: ) covers the 15th and 16th centuries, a period known for developing culture across Europe and marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity.Source: Wikipedia
It was the introduction of gunpowder that caused Europe, which was already divided, to enter a European version of the "Spring and Autumn and Warring States Period" similar to the Chinese Spring and Autumn and Warring States Period. The frequency of wars was surprisingly high. During the 200 years between the launch of the Great Navigation and Newton's publication of the Principles of Mathematics, Europe was at war for 95% of the time.
In order to win one war after another, European countries must often spend more than 80% of their fiscal revenue on military expenditures. Since the cannonballs fly very far away and at very high speeds, when the cannonballs are ejected from the chamber, they miss the target by just a few centimeters and miss thousands of miles when they hit the ground.
Therefore, how to make the cannonball land on the enemy's head reliably and hard became a major scientific research topic that all mathematicians and physicists during the Renaissance urgently needed to solve. As the chief scientist of the Venice Arsenal, Galileo, one of his important tasks was to discover the ballistic laws of the flight of artillery shells through a large number of artillery experiments, thereby improving the accuracy of the artillery shells. In this way, Galileo proposed the famous law of inertia and The law of falling bodies under the influence of gravity.
In addition to the mechanics of cannonballs, gunpowder explosives was also a matter of concern to all European alchemists and natural philosophers at that time. Under this research background, it paved the way for the outbreak of the chemical revolution.
Below we can use modern Europe's consumption of two natural resources, wood and saltpeter, to illustrate how different the frequency, density, and breadth of wars in the European version of the "Warring States Period" were. First, wood was as important to modern European wars as steel was to the wars between the two world wars.
Timber is an important building material for naval warships and an important fuel for the cannon and ironmaking industry. After a naval battle, hundreds of warships may be destroyed and damaged, and making high-quality warships requires high-quality wood and the destruction of large areas of forests. Therefore, since the war of gunpowder, artillery and hot weapons broke out in Europe, the deforestation of Europe has been extremely serious, and the forest area has disappeared so rapidly that even Nordic countries like Sweden will produce sandstorms.
On the other hand, let’s look at the strategic material saltpeter. It is the most important ingredient in gunpowder. Saltpeter is found in feces, urine, and soaked soil, so it requires many disgusting and cumbersome processes to extract it. Then it is mixed with sulfur and charcoal to become gunpowder. However, the cost of gunpowder and shells in that era was so high that the price of one pound of gunpowder was equivalent to five pounds of gold, and the price of a heavy cannon was equivalent to the price of a missile today.
Therefore, Queen Elizabeth's chief minister of the interior pointed out to Parliament that 20,000 pounds of gunpowder was worth more than 100,000 pounds of gold and jewels to Queen Elizabeth. For example, in the 1540s, France consumed 20,000 pounds of gunpowder every year, equivalent to 100,000 pounds of gold.
Mons Meg, a medieval cannon weapon built in 1449 at Edinburgh Castle in Scotland, has a muzzle diameter of 510 mm, making it one of the largest caliber cannons in the world.Source: Wikipedia
This is why European countries started the Great Geographic Discovery and the Great Navigation Movement. Their purpose was to go to other countries, other nations, and other civilizations to plunder gold, silver, and resources, so that they could support their long-term wars. Therefore, they adopted a policy of openly supporting pirates, issuing "private licenses" to pirates, allowing pirates to become the backbone of their ocean-going navy, and allowing pirate groups to become the backbone of various chartered companies to provide services to pirates. Own overseas colonization provides a powerful tool of state violence.
In order to ensure the stocks of gunpowder, especially saltpeter, both Britain and France launched nationwide mobilization to collect urine and dung from humans and animals to extract saltpeter. For example, the British government purchased saltpeter across the country at high prices and developed a large number of private saltpeter purchasers or "dung diggers" through the "saltpeter grabbing certificate" issued by the royal family.
They were granted the privilege of breaking into houses and any place where urine and dung could be found, including mangers and pigsties, to seek saltpeter and pull away other people's dung. Therefore, he often broke into people's houses in the middle of the night, making chickens and dogs restless and complaining all over the country. In contrast, Britain's mortal enemy, France, also had the same needs. In order to compete with Britain and have enough gunpowder and saltpeter, the National Public Safety Committee divided the country into eight regions and mobilized the entire population to organize the production of saltpeter.
People across the country were mobilized, and all pits, pig pens, chicken coops, cattle pens, and horse pens were dug and collected to refine saltpeter. Therefore, it was this national demand for large-scale production of gunpowder and saltpeter that lasted for hundreds of years, and the desire to deeply understand the combustion and explosion mechanisms of gunpowder. This desire led to the Lavoisier Chemical Revolution. break out.
In order to have enough gunpowder and saltpeter, the National Public Safety Commission divided the country into eight regions and mobilized the entire population to organize the production of saltpeter. Source: Quora
In other words, if the competition between European countries during the Renaissance was still based on broadswords, spears, and bows and arrows, then it would not have been possible to produce more technological progress, military innovation, and civilian technological innovation than during the Warring States Period in China. So this is the essence and the answer to the "Needham Mystery".
So the key to the question is not who first invented Euclidean geometry, but who first created the social need to apply mathematics to the military industry and gun industry to describe the trajectory of artillery shells. In the same way, it is not who invented gunpowder first, but who first created the social need to apply gunpowder to weapons of mass destruction and to uncover the mechanism behind the combustion phenomenon.
It is precisely because of the lack of social needs related to national survival, armed struggle for hegemony, and overseas plunder that China, which first invented gunpowder, did not have a modern scientific revolution and military revolution. Therefore, the philosopher Bertrand Russell said that Chinese art, literature, and customs are by no means inferior to Europeans. What is it that gives us an advantage? It is Newton, Boyle and subsequent scientists, because they have given us more skilled "killing skills", making it easier for an Englishman to kill a Chinese than for a Chinese to kill an Englishman. In one sentence, demand creates supply, theory comes from practice, backwardness will be punished, and technology is the highest productivity.
thank you all!
Roundtable discussion:
Host: The answer to "Needham's Question" is not about ancient Greek, European, or Western thought and culture, but about their huge war needs, which led to all-round changes in funds, technology, talent reserves, etc. Moving forward, so in the end there was this scientific and technological revolution.
Zhang Weiwei: Let me add one more point. In fact, there are many interesting ideas in Mr. Wen’s book. It is assumed that it was indeed ancient Greece that formed axiom systems such as mathematics and geometry, etc., but if there was no need for powerful wars after 1500, Then this knowledge will just lie in the library forever. In addition, the opposite is true. With such a huge demand, even if there were no such things as ancient Greece, these axiomatic systems would be produced after 1500.
Article 1: Teacher Zhang is right. Ancient Greece did not invent calculus. Couldn’t Newton have invented calculus? Similarly, we all know that the theory of relativity requires Riemannian geometry. Does it mean that the emergence of Riemannian geometry naturally leads to the theory of relativity? That is not the case. It was because of the demand of Einstein's theory of relativity that Riemannian geometry was found. If there was no demand, Einstein himself or others could recreate it.
Moderator: With this demand, many people will engage in this research, and this research will eventually produce results. You just mentioned Galileo, and I was thinking that if you just go by what you have learned or heard before, you might know that Galileo was a scientist. When Professor Wen Yi gave a speech just now, he turned out to be the chief equipment scientist of the arsenal in the city where he was working at that time. This is a completely different concept, so the huge military demand has also given rise to a reserve of talents. Galileo must not be the only such scientist, right?
Wen 1: A lot.
Zhang Weiwei: Teacher Wen also mentioned in the book that when we were children, we often heard Newton, the story of under the apple tree, how the apple fell, and the gravity. He said that it was actually a cannonball hitting the head. This is the real story. its motivation.
Wen Yi: Moreover, our Chinese scientists, even famous scientists, mistakenly believed that Newton was actually inspired by an apple hitting his head, which inspired him to think about gravity. This is simply incredible.
Host: You just mentioned demand. I also quoted another book. An American scholar, whose Chinese name is Ouyang Tai, is a student of the famous historian Mr. Shi Jingqian. He wrote a book called "From Pills to Pills". guns". He also analyzed that in fact, China's gunpowder technology has always been ahead of the world, and we also had guns and cannons in the early days, but why are such giant cannons in Europe and not in China. This is because first, their war needs are too great; second, their city walls are very thick and must be attacked with cannons.
