Letter: Challenging science

From Susantha Goonatilake

Michael Snowden
(7 October, p 48)
raises the issue of why science does not
always fare too well in developing countries. His anecdotal observations are
those of an astronomer and thus other specialists might give different
explanations.

There can be no disagreement with his central thesis that the Renaissance
freed the Western imagination and practices from the religious stranglehold of
the Dark Ages. There is also no argument that science is affected by cultural
and social factors.

Galileo, Copernicus and Darwin challenged the idea that there was a creator,
God, who made humans in his image a few thousand years ago and then made other
living creatures for our use. But not all religions share this belief and,
unlike Christianity, they would not have been challenged by discoveries in
science. Asian belief systems, for example, deal with very large time spans.
They also accept as a central tenet that all life forms are related, and they
believe in many extraterrestrial abodes, not just one Earth. Many even have
evolutionary schemes.

South Asian astronomy accepted a heliocentric system from relatively early
times. And as recently published manuscripts reveal, astronomers of the Kerala
school developed an almost identical idea of a heliocentric system nearly a
century before Tycho Brahe did.

Snowden writes about his experiences in setting up a telescope in Sri Lanka
in 1993. There were several players in this event and a plethora of contingent
factors that influenced it. These include debates between universities and
wrangling between ministries—just as happens in the US or the European
Union. Such conflicts have nothing to do with Renaissance attitudes.

There’s no doubt that developing countries face real challenges in science.
But the reasons are complex. Indeed, one is precisely the opposite to which
Snowden alludes. Asian scientists live bifurcated internal lives—their
rich classical intellectual culture is divorced from their scientific
work—restricting their scientific imagination and output.

Colombo, Sri Lanka