Great Scientists We've Forgotten to Remember

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2022

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We are told that modern science was invented in Europe, the product of great minds like Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. But science has never been a uniquely European endeavour. Copernicus relied on mathematical techniques borrowed from Arabic and Persian texts. When Newton set out the laws of motion, he relied on astronomical observations made in Asia and Africa. When Darwin was writing On the Origin of Species, he consulted a sixteenth-century Chinese encyclopaedia. And when Einstein was studying quantum mechanics, he was inspired by the Bengali physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose.

James Poskett is an Associate Professor in the History of Science and Technology at the University of Warwick. James joins Dan on the podcast to uncover the ways in which scientists from Africa, America, Asia and the Pacific fit into the history of science.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is sponsored by Audible, where you can now stream the new series of that brilliant Stephen Fry's
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0:14.1	police women, radio, the movies, jazz, the British sense of humour,
0:20.3	censorship and the secrets and lies, the financial crash. This is another installment of Stephen Fry that listeners love.
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0:38.7	Hi everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit.
0:43.0	Now, I was brought up in the 80s. We were told that Europeans took this world from a place of
0:49.7	superstition and ignorance, to a place of enlightenment.
0:53.4	A lot of science was done from a kind of complicate or somewhat. But you know what?
0:58.3	I'm picking that narrative now. Like much of other than that at school, it turns out it might not have been true.
1:02.6	And no one's doing that more so. The associate professor in the history of science at technology at the University of Warwick, James,
1:08.1	Posket, he's just written a gigantic book, a radical retelling of the history of science that challenges this Eurocentric narrative.
1:16.3	Tell you, you can't walk across the street with these days without someone challenging a Eurocentric narrative.
1:20.6	But it's good because there's no challenging. I'm happy to see it. His book leaves the Europe behind and it talks about
1:26.3	scientists from Africa, America, Asia, Pacific. And he really convinces me that science is this extraordinary, very rich story
1:36.2	of global cultural exchange. And we've talked in this podcast about ideas rattling up and down the silk roots.
1:43.0	And people like Newton, like some of the great European scientists that we've all heard of, engaging, learning, listening,
1:49.4	and building on the work of scientists all over the world. Super exciting stuff.
1:53.6	If you wish to listen to other podcasts about science and history of science, we do more and more of that here at History.
1:57.8	I think it's the older I'm getting, the more I realize it may be in the spend less time on the generals, more time on the scientists.
2:03.7	And so we're doing a lot of that. We did a lot of that during the pandemic.
	...

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