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[Marxism] People's History of Science
Louis Proyect
Cliff Conner's A People's History of Science
by Louis Proyect
Book Review
Conner, Cliff: A People's History of Science: Miners, Midwives and
'Low Mechanicks', Nation Books, New York, 2006, ISBN 1-56025-748-2, 554
pages, $17.95 (paperback)
(Swans - February 27, 2006) Cliff Conner's A People's History of Science:
Miners, Midwives and 'Low Mechanicks' does for science what Howard Zinn did
for American history. It is an altogether winning attempt to tell the story
of the ordinary working person or peasant's contribution to our knowledge
of the natural world. Just as scholars like Zinn remind us that a slave,
Crispus Attucks, was the first casualty of the American Revolution, so does
Conner show that humble people were on the front lines of the scientific
revolution.
Over the course of this 500 page encyclopedic but lively effort, we learn
about unsung heroes and heroines, like Antony Van Leeuwenhoek, a
seventeenth century Dutch linen draper who began using magnifying lenses to
examine fabrics but went on to pioneer the use of microscopy in the
scientific laboratory. He was looked down upon by the scientific
establishment as "neither a philosopher, a medical man, nor a gentleman...
He had been to no university, knew no Latin, French, or English, and little
relevant natural history or philosophy."
In addition to telling their stories, Conner challenges conventional
thinking about how science is done. At an early age, we are indoctrinated
into thinking that science starts with pure ideas and then descends into
the practical world. In reality, many of the greatest breakthroughs in our
knowledge of the world were a result of the practical need to solve a
pressing problem, some of which were related to mundane matters of trade
and bookkeeping.
Perhaps no other example in Conner's book dramatizes this as perfectly as
the rise of numeric symbols, which came out of the "routine economic
activities of farmers, artisans and traders." Specifically, Sumerians
devised symbols to keep track of grain. Rather than repeating the symbol
for each grain multiple times, they devised a shortcut where the grain
symbol would be drawn once, and prefixed with a numeric symbol. This
technique was developed in lowly counting rooms rather than in the court
hierarchy.
The next big breakthrough, positional numeration, also had common traders
as midwives. This technique makes a digit's value dependent on its relative
position in a number. For example, "9" in the number 2,945 means nine
hundred but it indicates "90" in 2,495. Imagine how difficult it would be
to do simple calculations without such a system. Try adding the Roman
numerals MMCMXLV to MMCDXCV without cheating (converting to positional
numbers) and you will see how difficult it is. This is not to speak of the
daunting task of multiplying them!
The introduction of the place-value system (together with the symbol of
zero to hold "empty" columns) is particularly relevant to Conner's mission
in creating a people's history of science. To begin with, it democratized
arithmetic by making it accessible to all levels of society. Secondly, it
did not originate with elite mathematicians but with anonymous clerks --
perhaps ordinary accounting clerks -- in India between the third and fifth
centuries AD. Finally, this revolutionary innovation relied not on
mathematics journals or other scholarly venues, but was transmitted by
merchants pursuing their trade on routes between India and the rest of the
world.
full: http://www.swans.com/library/art12/lproy34.html
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