Nirmalya Deb
Scientific experiments and analysis are a class of human involvement with nature as social beings. Therefore, science is directly connected to the social achievement of humanity as a whole. But there are inevitable historical and political underpinnings that we can hardly afford to ignore. Take as an example the recent pronouncements of some Indian leaders at the International Science Congress held earlier this year that abstract and advanced scientific, engineering and mathematical discoveries like aircraft manufacturing, plastic surgery and the scientific art of the production of nuclear bombs (!) were known to the early Indian and Greek astronomers and mathematicians. That this is a bloated claim is beyond all reasonable doubt, but we will shortly approach this topic through another – interesting – route.
Proper understanding of the response of the colonized to the world outside is a historical project which has been very imperfectly carried out. Under the pressure of the prevailing Enlightenment “Reason” and “Rationalism” in late 19th century India and, of course, the great academic and intellectual weight of Western science, the urban Indian intelligentsia sought ways to glorify the past and this has been very amply documented by modern historians specializing in late colonial Indian society. Glorifying ancient Indian scientific texts, therefore, is nothing new. But making outrageous claims is! Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg in a recent interview to a leading English language daily has rubbished all such claims. He says the science of induction was unknown to the Greeks, and therefore modern empirical science generally, and the ancients had no idea of the mechanical picture of the mobile world presented by Newton, and its 20th century Einsteinian reconversions, and the nuclear structure of the atom and the world of matter, contemporary discoveries in astronomy and physics, and also the greater perfection of mathematical tools in modern scientific inquiry.
However, philosophers of science in the 20th century, notably Karl Popper, have held that the deductive system of logic and mathematics that originated in ancient Greece with the Aristotelian syllogism and in ancient Indian mathematical texts is the only rational method and the modern scientific method of hypothesis-building and inductive generalization is open to skeptical onslaughts of a severe kind. Now, to give the deductive method its due it is safe to concede that the geometrical system of Euclid and the discoveries of Ramanujan were great, though basically mathematicians they showed that the science of geometry could be deduced from the physical notion of space. Now, the ancients had a very geometrical idea of space and the modern relativist notion of space-time is a far superior projection of the reality of space in human cognition.
In formal predicate logic and in arithmetic as well as traditional geometry, the first propositions of a logical system are themselves inevitably unsubstantiated. For example, Augustus Caesar ruled Rome for X years. Now, the knowledge of the historical fact X is an empirical knowledge, not a knowledge like the one conveyed by the statement, say, “Tuesday was a day”, or “All bachelors are unmarried”. These statements are only true by virtue of the fact that the sense of the predicate is already contained in the subject, which historical statements dealing with a huge field of human action over the centuries certainly are not. Anyway, the implementation of modern mathematics in astronomy and engineering is astounding which was certainly unknown to the ancients. Therefore, the glorification charge persists.
Over-glorification, however, tends to distort the historical value of the texts as texts. The authority of Aristotle in logic proved an obstacle to the development of modern logic. Leaders who are glorifying the past are distorting history to take refuge in a self-protective patriotic shell to save them from the realities of the modern world. However, modern physics has shown that despite the scepticism of the philosophers of science, the inductive method is suitable for assessing the role of natural powers and mechanisms, and the forces of uniformity and discontinuities of nature and natural processes. By discovering the natural properties and relations of the physical world science is everyday creating hypothetical theoretical models to deal with the emergent properties of reality and carry out inductive experiments with them thereby creating further complicated explanations of reality.
By distorting history and by stating false propositions Indian leaders are obfuscating the real historical value of the mathematical discovery in India that 0 is a number. We proceed from thereon to a complicated algebra and calculus but the discovery had already laid the foundation. Let us read history dispassionately and seek out the reasons in it for present-day science and mathematics rather than waxing patriotic and unrealistic by making terribly misleading historical claims. Patriotism should, by now, be rid of the slur that it is the last refuge of scoundrels.
But, then, the second thing that concerns students of science who appreciate its close relationship with history and society is the true analysis and justification of the theories of science and the methodology that the natural sciences employ to uncover the universe. The natural sciences of physics, the biological sciences and chemistry, for example, have a methodology of experimentation and theoretic-practical inductive generalization. However, in education we are presented with the facts of nature as discovered by the natural sciences and its orthodox methodology presents a picture of nature and the universe in the realm of human interconnection. This realm, it is essential to recognize, is characterized by man exploiting nature for the sake of his own existence, and the property of human existence is such that man has to produce and reproduce to exist, that is produce and reproduce his own existence. Therefore, man multiplies his efforts to exploit nature for further reproduction and reconsolidation of the means and methods of production and exchange, that is social existence.
So, scientific knowledge being a slow, gradual process of historical accumulation of facts and truths about nature, and also, of course, cognition of the methods of scientific analysis and discovery, is a certain kind of knowledge that doesn’t claim to justify disputes in the realm of, say, social and political justice, economic inequality, gender issues, and problems related to mind and human conscience as well as good and evil. Therefore, the rapacious spirit of man in the age of rampant materialism and consumerism and the toll on nature, and questions related to the natural reactions against over-exploitation, is a dispute related to scientific cognition of nature and man’s relationship with nature.
Therefore, the scientific analysis of alternatives to the present process of human production – an alternative energy policy, for instance – is crucial for the continued application of science in human life. If scientific intervention fails to stave off the man-environment conflict, then positive political action in terms of setting about changing the conditions of social production can never start.
So, it is crucial that students who are fed the facts of science in schools and colleges which are products of human intellectual labour accumulated, organized and restored over the centuries, should also be made aware of the reality of conserving nature for the sheer existential purpose of self-perpetuation. Is there some hidden interrelationship between the theoretical methodology of the sciences and the human social role of ravenous overhaul of nature? An answer to this question is essential to determine the further application of science in human life, and also for the reappraisal of the social utility of science and the course of its historical development.