 Mae'r ddechrau'r cyfnodd yr ydy, Mary Ann O Hota, erbyn am gyfnodd yn anthurol. Mae'n ei wneud o'r adnodd o'r gyfnodd ar gyfer y TV-shows, fod y clywed ynglyn, ysbytio mewn Channelwn yn Llyfr Whithredd, i'r hynny'r hynny'r hynny, i'r hynny'r lle. Mae'n hosio'n ysbytio'r cyffredinol iawn, ysbytio'n ei chyfnodd, ac mae'n cyfnodd ar gyd, ond mae'r cyffredinol iawn, ac mae'r ddechrau i'r llwyddiad i'r archéolegio Brytas, yn rhoi hynny eu securedo'r hynny, y gweld y llwyddiad i'r Llywodraeth Brytas. Mae ydych yn rhoi'r cyfrifio ar y cyfrifio ac mae'r llwyddiad cyfrifio cyfrifio i panfermillan. Mae'r ddechrau i'r llwyddiad i'r llwyddiad, yn rhoi ddau'r llwyddiad i'r llwyddiad ar gael. Mae'n ddod am hynny. Yr dr James Posget mae'n ddwylo'r profeser yn Y Hysri A Theatrwyng, at the University of Warwick. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge, where he also held the Adrian Research Fellowship at Darwin College. James has written for The Guardian, New Scientist, Nature and BBC History Magazine, amongst others. He was once shortlisted for the BBC New Generation Thinker Award. Is that recently? It's not this year? Recently, yep. And was awarded the Best Newcomer Prize by the Association of British Science Writers. He's the author of the academic book Materials of the Mind, and Horizons is his first for general readership. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Welcome to you all. I'm very excited to be here. James, I am genuinely delighted that I have this opportunity to basically spend an hour talking to you about this book, which I really do commend to you. Horizons, a global history of science. We're told that modern science was invented in Europe, that it was a product of European culture of scientific great thinkers like Nicholas Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein. But unequivocally, James lays out all the arguments and all the evidence that demonstrates that this is wrong. Science is not and has never been a uniquely European endeavour. This has been described as a radical retelling. For me, I found it authoritative, persuasive, but not dogmatic, and genuinely eye-opening. So, thank you for writing it. It's quite a... I was going to say it's quite a piece of work, but that makes it sound like it's hard to read and it really, really isn't. So, commendations to you for also making it a rich story and just... it's a great read. It's a cracker. It really is. Please do queue up outside to buy it and get him to sign it because it's a good one. James, what is the argument that... When I first picked it up, actually, I thought, oh, a global history of science. I think I know what that's going to be. That's going to be about, you know, Ottoman astronomers. That's going to be about Chinese inventing gunpowder. You know, those kind of, you know, the missing chapters of the golden age of science in bits of the world that basically weren't France, Germany or Britain. But that's not what this book is. Absolutely not. Please, tell us, what is this book about? Yeah, I think it's useful, actually, to address what you just said, that the book is not a history of ancient Chinese science. It's not a history of medieval Islamic science or medieval Hindu science. Those are stories that are pretty well known in the public sphere. And in fact, they're stories that are part of the problem. They're the stories that allow us to think that science in the rest of the world was once great in the deep past, but since has declined and that the story of modern science, and the book is deliberately titled, or it's not titled, but it describes a history of modern science. It's one that is European. And that's the myth that the book unpicks, really, that this isn't just a history of medieval Islamic science. It's a history of science in the Islamic world in the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th centuries. The same goes for places like China and India that really put those places, and crucially the people and the cultures of those places at the centre of the origins of modern science, the story of the scientific revolution onwards from the 16th century onwards. And I think one of the arguments that you make so compellingly is that this isn't just about overlooked episodes that need to be written into the story of the history of science. It's not only about encounter, it's about those meetings that change the direction, the shape of scientific endeavour in itself. Yeah, absolutely. The book, I appreciate you saying it's good to read. I wanted it to be about these individuals, so it tells you about these individual people's lives that maybe we'll talk a bit about in a second. But it is part of a bigger narrative and the big argument is that modern science was a product of global cultural exchange, that it was these meetings, as you say, between Spanish conquistadors and Amerindian physicians or Jesuit missionaries and Chinese astronomers, that these encounters, these cultural exchanges, were what made modern science. And also your point about it not just being these individuals, when I was writing this or when I was learning the history of science, I kept coming across all these exceptions to the rule that science was invented in Europe. And when you come across so many exceptions, particularly if you're a scientist, you should think maybe the rule is the problem. And so putting all these exceptions together, you end up with this bigger narrative and this different rule, the rule isn't that science was invented in Europe. The rule is that science was a product of global cultural exchange. Okay, let's put that into... Let's pull out some of those data points, shall we, as scientists and historians. Let's have some examples. So let's start with Martin Delacruth. Who is he? What is he? Where is he? What's he doing? So Martin Delacruth produced this beautiful image and many others like it in the middle of the 16th century in what's now Mexico. And he was an Amerindian indigenous physician, a doctor. He had a Spanish name. We don't know his indigenous name. He'd converted to Christianity and was given the name Martin Delacruth. He worked as a translator and a professor of Materia Medica of Medicine at the Spanish Royal College just outside of Mexico City after the Spanish conquest in the middle of the 16th century. And like many Aztec physicians, he had an incredible knowledge of the plants, the animals, the natural world and the medicinal properties that were in the New World. It kind of makes sense, right? Those are the people who were there. Of course they knew most about the nature and the medicine available there. And in 1552 he wrote this incredible book. Its title in English is Little Book of the Medicinal Herbs of the Indians. He actually wrote it in the Aztec language of Nautil and was then translated by another Aztec translator into Latin where it was circulated throughout Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. And it's this collection of incredible medicinal and natural knowledge that fed into various European works of natural history in the 16th and 17th centuries, exactly the time the scientific revolution was happening. When you're talking about an indigenous person who's been given a Spanish name and has kind of been co-opted into the system of colonialism, how much is it just a case that we're kind of looking at someone who has been kind of forced into producing knowledge in a particular way because now his master's a Spanish? That's true to an extent and a big part of the book actually is thinking and really revealing the relationship between the making of modern science and colonialism. It starts in Mexico with the new world with the Spanish conquest, both because that was really important for the development of modern science but also because it sets the tone that conquest made modern science and everything that came along with it. But even in conditions of colonial conquest that didn't mean all agency of an indigenous person were necessarily erased. Clearly he was constrained. We know he actually wrote this of his own accord. He wasn't asked to write this or forced to write it, although other indigenous people were forced to contribute to Spanish natural histories and geographies. He wrote this basically in his own time in the evenings and he wrote it in his own language as well. That gives us an indication that this was something he was interested in at first. Also the subtleties of it, it's not just European natural history, it actually reflects Aztec beliefs about the natural world, how medicine works, even though it looks like an early modern piece of European natural history. It has features that are revealing of its Aztec origins. I found it remarkable that in the book when you're describing Martin de la Cruz's work, you say that in some of these drawings he's actually incorporated Nahutul glyffs, so these pictographic characters that say something about the habitat of the plants. Absolutely. When I think historians first looked at this, they didn't see it and then later, actually from the 1950s onwards, experts in Aztec culture started looking at the images and because Nahutul was originally a pictorial language, glyffs, as you say, they thought they were just part of the pictures, but actually the ants here, and particularly the orange earthy shape at the bottom, and there are similar examples in other images. These are actually the Nahutul glyffs for particular environments, so he'd incorporated the actual Aztec writing system into the drawings, and the names of all the plants usually reflected as tech-classificatory systems as well about where they could be found, what they could be used for, so this plant says you can grind this up with a heart of a deer, basically, and drink this and it will cure pains of the heart. I think you probably meant things like heartburn or pain in your chest. Right. Amazing. I love the idea that different readers would have seen different things with this, and that's true of someone in 16th century Spain versus us reading it now as a historical document, but also for an Aztec person looking at his work compared to a conquistador. They would have read different things as well. Yeah, that's a really good point, actually. I think, again, given that he wrote this himself without being asked to, I think there's a sense in which he was doing what he would have done before the Spanish conquest in the Aztecs also wrote down their medicinal knowledge just in these pictorial forms, and you're right, he's doing it for an imagined Aztec indigenous readership which is increasingly dwindling because of the Spanish conquest. Wow. Let's move forward slightly in time. Let's go to, well, partly modern-day Ghana, partly Dutch Surinam on a sugar plantation, and there we meet Graeme and Quassie. Tell me about Graeme and Quassie. Graeme and Quassie is one of the few named individuals we know about who represents something much broader and also something I think that the history of science and science today needs to engage with a lot more, a relationship between modern science and the transatlantic slave trade. So Quassie was born in late 17th century, what's today, Ghana in West Africa. He was a member of a Khan-speaking tribe, but he was enslaved as a young boy, purchased on the coast by a Dutch slave trader and transported to the Americas, where he worked on a sugar plantation in Dutch Surinam. And like millions of other enslaved people, his labor was stolen and we wouldn't know much about him if it wasn't for the fact that he became a kind of celebrity because he discovered the medicinal uses of this plant. This is another plant from the Americas that Europeans became particularly interested in. The bark of this plant could be made into a tea, a bit like in Chona bark, the Peruvian bark, when would act as a treatment for malaria. So Quassie discovers this and becomes famous for this discovery that he makes whilst foraging on the edge of the plantation. He probably also learned about it from other Amerindians who were there who knew about this plant as well. So there's a sort of three-way cultural exchange happening. But one, of course, again, that was an even more obviously forced form of cultural exchange. And that's another big theme of the book. It's got a nice explosion on the front. It starts off maybe thinking this is a happy story, but quite quickly, it's not a happy story actually. The making of modern science is wrapped up with the making of the modern world of the last 500 years. And that is a story of colonialism, of slavery, of capitalism, of ideological conflict. And I wanted to present that much more realistic and less talked about side of science in the book. You've got a quote at one point where Francis Bacon saying, the growth of the sciences depended upon the exploration of the world. How much, and I was struck repeatedly, actually, reading Horizons, how much you're kind of saying we wouldn't know this if it hadn't been for, I mean potentially putting words into your mouth, would we have known this if it hadn't been for empire, colonialism, the slave trade? Are there other ways that this knowledge that these cultural encounters would have come about, do you think? That's a good question. Historians hate counterfactuals usually, so I'm trying to resist just saying I don't want to answer that. I guess as a matter of fact, this is how these encounters took place. I think it is a problem if we just think about the past as a kind of cosmopolitan, globalised space where there weren't power relations. So it was through empires and colonialism and slavery that many cultures came into contact with one another over the last 500 years. Could it have happened otherwise? Well, yes, in the abstract, but in practice, not. The world we live in is a product of the past 500 years that did happen, and that's what I care about in terms of the future, about how that past that did happen affects the future we are going to live through. So that was a slightly longer version of what I don't like counterfactuals. Well, you did it very nicely, thanks. OK, let's go to India. Tell me about the Jantar Mantar Observatories. Very well. I should also say this plant was named after Gramanquassi. Oh, tell us, what is it? Cassia Amara has this kind of Latinised form of his aca name, Gramanquassi, and Amara means bitter, and it was named after him by Colonaeus, the most famous naturalist of the 18th century. But again, this is really an exception. Most plants were named after white European men, but in fact, many plants were discovered by or those European men learned about from various, either enslaved people, indigenous people, colonised people, and we see that throughout the world, and they're usually uncredited. So in a way this is an exception, but it's a useful one because we can tell a story about an individual rather than just say this knowledge came from somewhere in the abstract. Why was it that he, sorry, why was it that he is the exception? I mean, are there reasons perhaps that he hasn't just been appropriated and then erased? Yeah, I think this is, it's not super clear, but I think it's because he actually has a slightly more complicated position in the world of transatlantic slavery because he in some instances acts as a go-between between the Dutch and the Maroon communities, the runaway enslaved people in Suriname. And he also, he basically trades his knowledge and a certain form of allegiance with the Dutch for security and ultimately is rewarded with his freedom. That of course is some of the deeper ways in which the system of slavery worked in that it co-opted people because of the power relations. So I think he was held up as a kind of exception at the time, but in this case an exception for Europeans that proved the rule that in their view there was no meaningful knowledge to be acquired from people that weren't European by and large. So yeah, it gets a little bit more complicated. It's interesting, isn't it? You have to do quite a lot of mental gymnastics to say these people aren't really people that are brutes, the bestial worst, and yet the information, the knowledge they have of this environment is essential to us knowing how to set up the mission, how to cure the terrible fevers that the people are suffering from, how to grow the crops or whatever the plantation system is. I mean humans are incredibly clever and creative at holding conflicting ideas in their minds all at once, but I mean there's so many examples of it. I think that's a good summary of the history of science actually. Humans are very good at holding conflicting ideas in their minds at once. Okay, Jantamanta, there they are. Or there's one of them? There's one of them. This is probably, I guess one of my favourite examples, it's certainly one of my favourite places, because you can still go to them, so they are just there and they're enormous. A series of astronomical observatories and instruments that were built across Northern India in the 18th century and by a Maharaja named Jaiseng, Jaiseng II, and they're in major cities, the biggest ones in Jaipur, it's quite famous, it's a tourist destination, there's one in Delhi. This is actually the one that's less famous, but I think it's more significant in Varanasi, Benares on the banks of the Ganges in the Hindu holy city. And these were some of the most accurate scientific instruments and sites at the time. The main supreme instrument it was called at Jaipur, the biggest one, it's over 25 metres tall, it gives you the time to the nearest two seconds, and Jaiseng used the multiple observatories to compare results to correct for errors. So these weren't just five observatories for the fun of it, this was actually a network of observatories to correct for errors. So really quite advanced scientific work, astronomical work, and Jaiseng himself wasn't just a patron, he designed many of these instruments, he was an architect and mathematician himself. So this world of early 18th century Indian science that again is often forgotten when we just focus on something like ancient or medieval Hindu science, as in fact the Hindu right liked to at the minute in India. This is modern Indian science in the 18th century. So as you kind of just made reference to, modern nationalist governments also drew on this idea that there was a kind of a golden age of scientific discovery, exploration, advancement, and then this dark ages that we need to now lift ourselves back up into the light. And so there's a kind of a huge chunk of their own history that is being raised or kind of denied. Why is that? Explain that to us. So I set a bit of this out at the start of the book because I think it's helpful to answer where this idea that modern science was invented in Europe came from. It's absolutely everywhere. Even if you're not too interested in science, even if you're just kind of a general reader or interest in the historian, you've probably heard about the scientific revolution and Newton and Copernicus. But this very tight story was only invented in the middle of the 20th century. It's a remarkably recent story. It was one that was invented really by western historians to bolster the West in the Cold War. It was about how literally the West was at the forefront of science, how people like Galileo were fighting for freedom in place of the tyrannical Catholic Church, Reed Soviet Union. It was basically Star Wars but for science for the Cold War. So there's this kind of Western narrative, but just to go back to your question, the important thing is it's actually really helpful for post-colonial nationalists and even more helpful more recently for the kind of right wing nationalists we're seeing outside of Europe as well as in Europe. Because it allows this narrative of a golden age decline and then what nationalism is going to do is revive this once great civilisation. So it provides a narrative for nationalists not just in Europe but actually in places like India and China. That's why when there was the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing in 2008, it was all about ancient to medieval Chinese science and then kind of skipped over up until the Communist Party came to power in the late 1940s. So these enormous chunks of history are missing because they don't fit this kind of decline and rise narrative that nationalists want. So the Jantar Mantar being constructed as observatories, I guess two questions. Why was astronomical observations so important and how much was this either a product or in defiance of or in collaboration with the colonial powers that were circling the Indian subcontinent at the time? Yes, so a lot of early modern science is about astronomy because it was incredibly important for political and religious purposes. It was essential to be able to determine the calendar for religious festivals, whether that was for Islam, for Hinduism, for Christianity, for other kinds of festivals or holidays, also for the harvests and the like. So the calendar was at the centre of political life and local rulers like a Maharaja or indeed rulers of empires like the Mughal Emperor or the Emperor in China would produce and patronise these calendars as a display of their ability to rule. In fact, in the Chinese case, if you got the prediction of an eclipse wrong, this was a really bad omen for the Emperor and it would significantly weaken his rule. In Jai Sing's case, he actually dedicates these tables that he produces to the Mughal Emperor as a show of allegiance. So they're translated from Sanskrit into Persian for the Mughal Emperor. So the systems of shoring up politics, organising religion, astronomy is central to that. In terms of colonialism, these are built just before the British Empire really has significant power because it's after the middle of the 18th century, after the Battle of Placid that the East India Company gains territorial power in Bengal and then moves across the rest of India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. So they aren't really having to contest so much with the kind of colonialism we know about. There is connections to Europe though, so it's actually in the other direction. In Jai Sing sends a mission to Portugal to collect books and information and they return with Napier's tables of logarithms that he installs in his library. So yeah, that's European knowledge coming to India but it's Indians going out to the world to collect that knowledge. It's the reverse of the story that we often hear about and he wasn't just collecting European knowledge, he had Sanskrit, Persian, Latin, he had Latin translations of Chinese texts in his library. So this world of early 18th century India was so much more cosmopolitan than the colonial world the British imposed 100 years later. Interestingly, just a small point on this, when the British do find these in the mid-18th century, they come across them and they say, wow, these are incredible. They must have been built thousands of years ago. So these are 30, 40 years old when East India company officers first come across them and this again placing what is in fact contemporary Indian science into the deep past is something that is happening in this case from the 18th century onwards. But as I tell my students, if you hear the term golden age, you should be super suspicious. It's just set up. It's just telling you there was this great thing but now it's gone so I'm going to make it great again. Not to quote myself. You should get that on a cap. Yeah, exactly a cap. Okay. The book takes us around the world. So in the time that we have, we're going to go around the world too. Let's go to Polynesia and meet Topaya. Yeah, so moving forward, a tiny bit in time, but still in the 18th century. So this map is actually in the British Library. So it's particularly appropriate for today. And it was drawn by a Polynesian priest and navigator named Topaya who joined Captain Cook's voyage of the endeavor from Tahiti in 1769. Maybe I'll talk a little bit more about it in a second, but it's useful just to know who Topaya was. He was born on the island of Riotea in the Pacific. He trained as a master navigator but also a priest of a religious cult for the war god Oro. And he travelled around Polynesia, met it to other islands, collecting tribute, training as both a navigator and a priest. So again, the religion and the science were going together in 18th century Polynesia. And he ends up in Tahiti where he's patronised by the Tahitian queen. But he joins endeavor with Cook and Joseph Banks, these two very famous 18th century Europeans and produces this map. Now this is a map of the islands of the Pacific, particularly around Tahiti right in the middle called Tahiti, and on the one hand it's pretty accurate. You look at it, the islands are there, these are islands that Europeans knew nothing about. Topaya helps Cook navigate down to New Zealand and to Australia, so he's essential for Cook's voyage. But this map is actually one of the most incredible examples of cultural exchange in action because the distances between the islands are quite rough when you look at this closely. The islands don't quite seem to be in the exact positions they should be so maybe Topaya didn't know what he was doing. But of course he did know what he was doing. He was a master navigator who had trained his whole life. What this map is is actually a calculating device that combines the idea of European mapping and Polynesian navigation. It tells you not the relative distance between each island, but the direction you should sail in to account for differences in wind and tides as well. Polynesian navigators didn't use maps, they memorized star charts which stars to sail towards and these memorized lists of stars would have built into them corrections of things like the swell of the tides, the currents, the movement of the winds and all that information is built into the map itself. So it's this really complex but wonderful example of two cultures coming together and producing something that is completely original that's both in one sense European, it's like a Cartesian map but on the other sense Polynesian is about how you navigate across the Pacific something that Europeans, obviously, had only just started doing in earnest earlier navigations across the Pacific in the 16th century by Europeans but cooks major voyage in the 18th century and it's also worth noting at the time that Europeans have a very poor understanding of how tides operate in detail. They can predict tides but they don't quite understand how tides operate between the moon and particularly difficult tides and currents to predict in places like the Pacific or Asia. I'm assuming if you're travelling between these islands you get the currents being deflected or altered because of the fact of land being just over there or what have you. You can tell before you can see an island that you're approaching an island because of the way in which the swells will change due to the island being there like you put something in a bath and see the ripples change that's happening at a larger scale and you have to just be trained and have experience to be able to notice that. Would it have been the case that European sailors people who had spent most of their life on these voyages would have also had that working knowledge even if they didn't have the abstract academic scientific way of putting together the model of explaining the tides? Yes to an extent and in fact this is a separate story of European science in the 18th century that sailors knew how to navigate but they were being told by scientists in the 18th century to use all these weird new tools use a chronometer take all these complex observations of the moons of Jupiter when actually bearings and knowing the tides the winds were how sailors wanted to navigate and were very good at it so there is a kind of parallel there the difference is the scale navigating the Pacific is not like navigating even the Atlantic or the Mediterranean particularly the vastness of it made it particularly difficult because you could go wrong very easily and even European sailors tended to think of oceans as empty spaces whereas for Polynesian navigators the ocean was rather like the land it was a landscape on which you moved across and so that way of thinking about oceans was quite different even though I totally agree all sailors had tacit knowledge of the sea But this is there was a system of knowledge I guess that as you were saying Tapia was a master navigator he memorised these star charts is it a stick chart so you might have seen models you get the stick charts with the shells on they were actually used for teaching sometimes they weren't maps that people took with them you just memorised directions and that was part of Polynesian history was also memorised they didn't have a particularly well they didn't really have a written culture as we'd know it so it was all orally memorised rather than writing it down would have been weird for Tapia but he was kind of asked to have a go and this is what he produced which was kind of incredible wow very cool and it's just next door a quick reminder for those at home please do if you have questions for James we will be coming to them so please use the question box that's on your screen to put those questions in and I'll come to them shortly okay we've got two other people hopefully we've got time there's loads of people to talk about I mean there's loads of people in the book but we kind of just picked six Hantaro Nagata yup ah yes I've got a picture of him so the other thing I really wanted to do in the book was have this move all the way through to the present so we've talked quite a lot about the early modern period but the book also goes into quite a lot of detail about the 19th the 20th even the 21st century and reveals these forgotten figures so even at the points of high imperialism high capitalism people around the world were still making serious contributions to modern science they were often overlooked and the gentleman on the left, Hantaro Nagata was a Japanese physicist who in short set out the structure of the atom almost a decade before Ernst Rutherford who won the Nobel Prize and is often credited with discovering the structure of the atom so this is this is I guess one of the smoking guns of this guy literally did the discovery but this guy I mean they've got similar moustaches but one guy's, well he's actually born in New Zealand but a white British New Zealander and a Japanese scientist this guy gets the credit that's it so the model of the atom is the one I mean I remember being taught at school they kind of wheel out Rutherford at school at GCSE physics where the atom before then was sort of as a plum pudding is often what's said just a big mass with positive and negative charges in and then Rutherford realises it's a small positive mass at the centre with negative electrons going round it okay that's the model of the atom in 1903 Hantaro Nagata described this and even called it the Saturnian atom like Saturn the planet so the planet Saturn was the positive nucleus and the rings of Saturn are these electrons in orbit and he describes it in detail even in 1904 so he sets this out in 1903 he publishes some more papers in 1905 describing exactly how electromagnetic radiation would interact with his atom but Rutherford's paper is only published in 1911 and actually I don't think it's really a case of Rutherford stealing this it's more about how we distribute credit in the sciences because Rutherford knew about Nagoka Nagoka wasn't a nobody Nagoka was in Europe for conferences Rutherford invited Nagoka to his laboratory in Manchester showed him around talked about the experiments and they sent letters to one another in Rutherford's Nobel Prize winning paper he cites Nagoka so it's all there hiding in plain sites really and a lot of this is hiding in plain sites actually what I describe in the book yet when we teach histories of science when we just teach science even to secondary school pupils teach physics we have these very select group of white European men who are wheeled out and we don't hear about these broader stories even in some cases when someone like Nagoka really did pre-empt this discovery and feed directly into Rutherford's work and something I think Rutherford would have happily acknowledged and in fact if you read physics textbooks from the 1920s they talk about Nagoka but physics textbooks in 2020s don't it's a bit depressing really the book's a good read I promise but I did finish it in lockdown and I kind of got more angry as I wrote it as I was doing research and putting it all together so it's not pessimistic I think it does end in a kind of hopeful mode but in a realistic mode in that the world we live in is not perfect as is rather obvious and being seriously with some of the legacies of these histories that I've told but also challenging some of the myths that just permeate culture that are unchallenged I think that's really important if we're going to make the world a bit better I was just as you were talking then I was kind of imagining what would one of those kind of history of science primers or kind of you know in your secondary school science textbook you have the little box out with a little picture and a little bit of a biographical information now obviously the more you know about science the more you realise that people are building on you know they stand on the shoulders of giants it's never just one genius in an isolation there's whole teams of people and obviously perhaps just one or two names end up on the Nobel Prize or get the professorship or whatever it is but there is something that is really systematic about who gets to be in the little box and now if we were to kind of go okay James has a point as do many other people who are kind of challenging this inheritance this terribly you know short-sighted blinkered inheritance that we have what textbook do we write now who goes in the little box I kind of feel like you would come up against a lot of warriors of the culture wars going oh dear it's very proficient I mean why are we so wed to I mean Ernest Wilford great guy sure but he shouldn't be in the box should he or should he should they both have their little boxes yeah it's a good question I expect we'll get questions like this in a bit yeah I guess there's two ways to do it either the box is the problem so I think it is about how we apportion credit sort of reifying individual scientists yeah exactly and in a way this happens in life generally because you made the point that you know I'm not the only one making this argument you know I'm here my name's on the book but there's hundreds and hundreds of historians of science who are have been developing uncovering this evidence over the last decade so how we apportion credit is part of the problem I've said I think you're also right that scientists like the idea that science is collaborative that teams make it that it's building on the shoulders of giants so you could have something like a box that actually did that work that it's not about Rutherford being the bad guy who stole it and that he should be written out of the textbooks nor is it that Hantar and the Gokar is some saint that science develops yes by building on the shoulders of giants but through these processes of cultural exchange some willing some unwilling and yeah you can't dish up horizons to every undergrad or every school child but you could have a box that set out a little bit of the many people who made the atom rather than hanging it on the genius whether that's a lone Japanese genius or a lone British genius Satyendra Nath Bose I had never heard of this guy to my shame but now I have tell us more here's another one of my favourites I have lots of favourites Satyendra Nath Bose was a Bengoli physicist he was born in late 19th century Kolkata in British India and the cool thing about him is the Bose on his name after him so I don't remember nearly 10 years ago now but the Higgs boson Peter Higgs won the Nobel Prize in 2013 for his earlier prediction of the existence of the Higgs boson and the Higgs boson is just one of a number of these fundamental particles that are called bosons but bosons are named after Satyendra Nath which I don't think who knew many people outside of India or who are up on the history of Indian science know about in parts because it's not capitalised it's very weird actually because most other proper noun particles would be like this Higgs or the capital H you don't write it with a little H but the boson never gets capitalised so people easily forget I was thinking it's because Bose rather inconveniently is obviously a Bengoli surname but also a German name and Bose in fact published in various German periodicals so I think people do see Sn Bose they probably think it's a German Bose as well but he developed a very complex statistical account of particles that showed that classical accounts of particle physics and thermodynamics were incorrect that quantum mechanics showed that this was all wrong and you needed a new quantum statistics to account for certain fundamental particles that were later named a boson and he was someone again who was very well known at the time so I want to emphasise actually these aren't hidden figures per se they're hidden from us but he worked with Albert Einstein he sent his paper to Albert Einstein and said I sent this to a journal in Britain they rejected it said it was no good what do you think and Albert Einstein wrote back and said this is fantastic come to Germany hang out with me and we can talk about it and Einstein actually was very collaborative another person who was far from a lone genius he worked with lots of people and he made a big point actually of working with people from around the world including in India so the two collaborate in Berlin Einstein helps Bose get his paper published and the statistics that they developed is called both Einstein statistics so another really significant physicist of the 20th century who was quite well known in the 1920s and 30s but now again outside of people who are specialists in that field of physics or specialist historians of science isn't really talked about a lot interestingly someone who also had a really forthright politics and lots of the figures in 20th century science aren't just meek scientists doing their bit particularly in India many of the prominent scientists are also anti-colonial activists so Bose was committed to anti-colonialism he took part in the Swadeshi protests against the partition of Bengal in 1905 collecting clothes imported British cotton goods and burning them and he actually saw his work as part of anti-colonialism to show the British that Indians could do science on their own that they were capable and actually that the new exciting science of relativity of quantum mechanics that this was a break from the past break from all the old 19th century Victorian physics that they were taught that someone like him would have been taught at the university in Kolkata and instead actually this was exciting new German science it was kind of Swadeshi science the other cool thing about Bose is he was the first person in the world to translate Albert Einstein's book on special and general relativity into English so the thing I've got on the right is the first English translation of Einstein's papers on special and general relativity that him and his even more radical physicist friend Meghnaud Sahar translated into English so it's another I think a really nice example of that forgotten side to the history of science that the first English translation of Einstein's work from German into English was done by two Bengalis in Kolkata that kind of encapsulate something about the world of early 20th century science and they were doing it because they believed they could build a better world that wasn't so reliant on the British and wasn't so reliant on old Victorian physics there's a quote that you have in the book there's no reason why the Europeans will be so supreme in everything and I think that's a really interesting idea that science can be a tool of compelling freedom of changing the politics when I move more into the 20th century people around the world particularly in the first half of the 20th century during the period that the fight for the end of colonial rule around the world is at its height when there had been revolutions in China the nationalist revolution in 1911 the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War people see science as the royal road to a better future one that's free from oppression not to get depressing again but after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that vision is kind of exploded but there's this brief moment of optimism in the 1930s that people think they could build a better world through these new sciences I'm going to phrase it as a question no, I'm going to phrase it as a statement and then you can disagree or agree with me I think that maybe we'll go that way now about science that there is a possible bright future that is scientific that is based on something that feels without us Yeah, I agree Discuss No, I agree, I think that's the vibe that the book kind of ends with I do I think that anti-science at all I studied science No, I don't think we think you are But I am angry about science and I do think science has problems and that it's wrapped up with politics I think we've denied that particularly in Europe and America for the last 20, 30 years with the end of the Cold War the end of history we were told things can only get better that we should wonder at science actually, things didn't get better things got worse and science wasn't always wonderful but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad thing it means we've got to work a bit harder to use science to make the world a better place and I think that is how people like suchendronath boast felt that's like how people at Einstein felt at a time when things were very, very difficult clearly for someone like Einstein who left Germany because of the rise of the Nazi party travelled round the world trying to promote international cooperation in the sciences I think the thing that leaves me with a little bit of the post-pandemic pessimism is of course that moment of optimism did not end well and so how you transform that optimism into a brighter future rather than one that the second half of the 20th century looked like that's the thing I think is a challenge for all of us and for my generation for the students I teach particularly I will say the students I teach do give me hope actually they're much more interested and engaged in making the world a better place than I was in the Nauties at university Just unpack for us a little bit we're coming towards the end for people in the room as well as those at home think about what questions you might want to ask James unpack for us what is it what do we need to do what is it that science or scientists or society it's not science because science is simply a scientists scientists or society what do we need to do to well fix science I wish I had the idea I'm resisting saying I can't read my book but there's a kind of longer version of read my book which is I think develop more of a historical sensibility about the relationship between science and the modern world today and it's past and by that I don't mean learn lots of historical facts I don't actually know lots of historical facts it's that we were trained particularly during the cold war and even more so afterwards I think that history didn't matter so much I'm guessing people attending this don't have that problem I think if scientists and society and the people involved in the governing of science developed a much deeper historical sensibility then that would be the first step to addressing some of the many legacies of the histories I tell so I did actually submit evidence that right now there is a diversity in STEM parliamentary inquiry so I submitted a piece of evidence to this and the gist of it was what I've just described that actually yes diversity in STEM is a big problem but thinking of it as a problem ahistorically you're not going to solve it you can there are well meaning diversity initiatives but the first step should be to think about well how do we get to the place where only 2% of scientists in Britain are black how do we get to the place where you're twice as likely to train in the scientists if you're a white man than if you're not well yeah so the statistics are different for women but we can get on to that and the answer is history we've lived through and that I think requires much more active addressing that's more for us to do at the end of the book I also talk about the new cold war so I think there's good reason to think about Britain we're in Britain it's probably where we can act but the rest of the world the rise of a kind of nationalist science is going to be a problem for us too and balancing those things I think is very difficult in terms of there is a very posturing nationalist science coming out of places like China like India like Turkey when you say nationalist science what do you mean I mean on the one hand they see science as the royal road to not necessarily a better future for the world but for restoring what they see as the rightful place of their respective in their cases they would see it as civilisations in the world so China's got the clout to do this the narrative that Xi Jinping has developed over the last decade or so is that is exactly the kind of golden age one that China was humiliated in the 19th century by the west and that we need to the Chinese need to double down into the world of science and technology to create hard power to displace the west so it combines a historical narrative with a present nationalist power kind of narrative so in a sense actually outside of the west there's much more historical sensibility just not the kind of historical sensibility I would encourage us to develop they should read your book too Xi Jinping's welcome to read it it's under contract actually in Chinese but I'll be interested to see if if it ever comes out because there's some certainly unpublishable material in there in the context of contemporary China but there's also going to be a Taiwan edition so I encourage Chinese readers to read that one there you go I think James this has been absolutely fantastic let's go to some questions if we're ready with some microphones and I shall pick up my iPad press home to unlock come on I can do it any questions in the room while I'm okay we're going to start with one okay Abdul Raheem Modan online asks what work can be done besides awareness and education to change this Eurocentric narrative and to ensure the voices and achievements are not erased now I mean we've touched on that just now haven't we if I don't know if we have educators if we have people who I don't know have young people in their lives or might want to sit around the dinner table having a conversation about the history of science what kind of specific things would you want us to be saying and doing I like the point about the present actually so partly I think there's loads of work to be done in terms of teaching at school teaching the sciences, teaching history and actually that's next on my list to do is to work out how to feed more into that I talked a lot about how we apportion credit and I think that is a big thing actually in the world of science about who gets credit for doing what because one of the biggest problems actually with diversity in STEM today is less about diversity in terms of who takes a science degree at undergraduate but more about the pipeline problem the same with women in science as well about the problem is about the number of people say black British students who take a science degree but then go on to do a PhD and those that then do a PhD who go on to become a professor and so on and so on and I think a lot of that is to do with partly about who we see as who embodies scientific excellence but but also just to how credit is apportioned in that it is still this model of the individual genius scientist someone's got to be a principal investigator someone's got to win a Nobel prize someone's got to get the big grant funding I think you need to diffuse the credit a lot more given that science itself is much more diffuse now I think it's probably pertinent to ask you what your origins are as a researcher you started off as a scientist didn't you? I studied computer science and natural sciences at Cambridge and then did a degree and a PhD in the history and philosophy of science afterwards as I discovered I wouldn't say that wasn't good at science but it felt like it didn't feel creative so I moved into the history of science and also I think I've probably given off the vibe maybe too much that I am a bit grumpy about all this so I was quite I got more and more grumpy about science and doing history and philosophy of science is a good way to to relieve that feeling or at least to channel that feeling so yeah that's my kind of intellectual background do you feel like that gives you a quite a unique perspective I guess it means that you can understand the science when you're writing about someone like Bose's work yeah I think it is important to a degree the book is not science it takes the science seriously but is not you don't need to know any science whatsoever to read it or enjoy it but it does mean I can read Bose's papers and understand them and I think just in terms of the rhetoric of it is important in the public sphere in terms of authority basically that if a historian comes along and says oh global history of science everyone will say well you're a historian what do you know it's kind of harder for scientists to turn around to turn around and say well what the hell do you know although my grandma actually said James what does he know about science but she's passed away now but she was a wind up maybe that's where I get it from but it's harder for people to say that no doubt somebody will I don't think anyone in this room do we have any questions here before I go to more that are online yes yes the lady here with the green and then do we have two mics no just one okay that's fine let's start here on this row and then we'll go up thank you still trying to figure out how to phrase the question so it's kind of to do it like where you're talking about kind of a portioning credit and kind of the struggles with that and I was wondering what how much you feel there's a huge trend kind of to dismiss the arts in favour of science and kind of the erasure of like wondering what how you kind of feel like that of the conversation of science and the separation of it from the arts through kind of the 18th century how much kind of I guess blame that has for kind of this forgetting of other people who are maybe exist outside the official academy yep I think it's a wonderful question really and the short answer is I agree entirely that if as I believe that modern science is a product of global cultural exchange there's actually lots of particularly earlier stories I'm telling are people who are artists, writers naturalists that blending of the science and the arts and culture is at the heart of the making of a lot of this then if you've separated the arts and the sciences in such a strict way then the history of science tells you that's a bad move and I also agree it's why it's harder to look at someone like Martin de la Cruyth and say oh he's a scientist because he doesn't fit the model of a late 20th century scientist interestingly you're right that this starts to happen from the late 18th century but famously the two cultures kind of divide is one that's massively reinforced also in the Cold War that that's the kind of strict divide between east, west art, science arts is a waste of time invested in the sciences that's also part absolutely of the problem so I couldn't agree more I wonder is one of the challenges of embedding a history of science into scientific understanding and I guess literacy around science understanding how scientific knowledge is produced and shared does it feed into people who would have the death of the expert and say well hang on a minute if you're putting scientific knowledge into a historical context and you're saying you can't understand it fully outside of understanding the history of how it was produced and who was doing it and who was in these kind of these power frameworks does it make people go well the science isn't valid then oh yeah I see people were worried about this before Covid because you're right there was all people don't like experts kind of vibe I think that went away with once George Osborne went away George Osborne so I think there's less problem with experts in the public sphere now in fact I think my view actually is part of the problem is that we hold up experts as kind of like gods in that you can trust an expert but you don't have to think that science is infallible at the same time or that science isn't political and I think that is also part of the problem that we present science in the public sphere as essentially unpolitical that the expert speaks and the politicians make the decisions and that again neat divide seems to serve a rhetorical purpose but people see straight through it that's why they don't trust anyone because they realise that the expert is also doing politics and in a way the politician is also doing science so I'm not so worried about that in terms of the arts I think that is a problem in that expertise in the arts and humanities isn't always recognised as such again I'm slightly preaching to the choir hopefully but it's non trivial to train as a historian or as an anthropologist and that kind of expertise should also be reckoned with recognised there's a kind of classic saying historians of science like which is you meet a brain surgeon and they say I've retired I think I'm going to take up a bit of history of science in my retirement and the historian of science says I just retired too I think I'm going to take up brain surgery so there you go so no we'll take the question here in the room please thank you thank you that was fascinating you've spoken a lot about modern science what exactly do we mean by modern science and how do we distinguish it from what came before where do we draw that line on the question in part I talk a lot about modern science for for rhetorical reasons in that I deliberately start the book around 1500 with the scientific revolution talk about modern science so that this what I say is a myth this idea that modern science was invented in Europe to unpack that to challenge it you're right that actually once you've reached the end of this and if you end up accepting it it then might make you think well what is modern about modern science is the distinction between the early modern the medieval is 1500 such a big dividing line for instance and I thought about this quite a lot actually when writing it so I could have written this book as something like 1000 to present I decided not to for the reasons I just said I think you could also tell a more general coherent narrative about how scientific ideas were produced through global cultural exchange as the world became more connected from around the year 1000 onwards but I was very wary of people reading this exactly as Marianne introduced that what people already know as oh it's about the golden age of Islamic science I wanted to really strictly separate them to then bring them back together thank you we'll come to you in just a moment a question from Bandit Queen great name I hope that's their real name surely it is, surely have any of the people in your book been recognised by those who give awards today yes some of them so CV Raman is in the book and he won he was the first Indian scientist to win a Nobel Prize in the early 20th century so he was recognised he discovered something called Raman Spectroscopy or he developed something called Raman Spectroscopy from Raman Scattering that explained how basically explained why the sea is blue in fact he realised this when he was on a ship back from a conference crossing the Mediterranean and he realised that the traditional tale he'd been told by Victorian scientists was wrong that actually the sea is not blue because it reflects the light it actually scatters the light in a particular way due to quantum mechanics and that's why it's blue so he was recognised often these individuals are known within their particular national context where they're sometimes held up as kind of nationalist heroes so if you asked any physicist in India or Calcutta particularly they'd know all about SN Bose, the statues of him but everyone has their own national story so the Chinese aren't talking about SN Bose Indians aren't talking about Martin de la Cruz so the point of the book is to connect all those stories to show that the nationalist version of those heroes that story doesn't quite work they're all exceptional individuals but they're exceptionally connected individuals so they've been they've received credit often within their own national context but it's the encounter and the connection that's the missing part of the story exactly yes do you have the mic with you? sorry, thank you very much for that I guess my question was more around how you chose which examples to highlight and if you had any difficulties with the different data that might have been available because you mentioned something with a written and oral tradition and also with a kind of different geographic or time spread and whether because you're weaving together kind of maybe disparate is the wrong word whether it was a selection bias or how was there any kind of issues around that that would be really interesting so partly I had to research a lot and then select so that you get a genuinely global history I could have easily written every chapter about China or India but that wouldn't be a global history of science so I needed to select so that places come in and out of the book as you move through in terms of what was difficult or that I so the thing that I spent a lot of time going back to and rewriting was to integrate the story of African sub-Saharan African science into the book more and particularly before the period of the transatlantic slave trade so I talk about the history of astronomy in early modern Timbuktu what's today Marley and talk about a kind of scientific revolution in 16th, 17th, early 18th century Africa in West Africa particularly because like lots of historians particularly historians of Africa now this is recognized as much more important than it was at least in the mainstream a decade ago I didn't want the history of African science to just be a history of grassy in the history of slavery so that was more of a challenge because a lot less has been written about that and the sources they're kind of fragmented in different places and not super accessible the other thing that I was very conscious of was the place of women in science so a lot has been written about the place of European women in science but documenting the history of non-European women in science that's even harder and there's been less written about and there are less sources because of all the kinds of biases you might expect than writing about European women so I did a lot of work going back to integrating those voices but that again was just quite difficult in terms of the volume but I do talk about Russian Indian Chinese particularly more in the 19th and 20th century when women begin to be able to enter formal scientific institutions in some places even then actually I think there's a story to be told about how these global connections actually marginalise women in science so again it's not a happy story of globalization I think one of but clearly not the only mechanism through which women have been marginalised in the sciences is this increasingly globalised international world in the European case you basically had to work for an East India company to make a scientific breakthrough in the 17th or 18th century well that literally legally most cases excludes all women in terms of international travel that was either more difficult for cultural reasons for reasons to do with assumptions about care for women to travel and become an international scientist and even more so for say an early 20th century Indian women to become a scientist than someone like Marie Curie who's always wheeled out so those are the kind of the bits that I think there aren't blind spots in the book but aren't as representative as I would have liked them to be but I really focused on them because I really didn't want those stories to be completely missing I'm mindful that we picked six men to talk about yeah we did we'll take it on the chin we'll feed the book great answer and ladies and gentlemen please join me in thanking James Poskett thank you very much