20 The Poetry of Physics and The Physics of Poetry
practical science as it occurs in ancient China, Mesopotamia, Egypt
and the remainder of the world is a universal activity that has been
pursued by all cultures, literate and non-literate, as part of their strategy
for survival. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1960) in The Savage Mind gives
numerous examples of elaborate classification schemes of preliterate
cultures, based on their empirical observations and demonstrating their
rudimentary concrete scientific thinking.
China created the most sophisticated form of technology and
nonabstract science that the world knew before the science revolution in
Europe during the Renaissance. Technological sophistication by itself,
however, does not guarantee the development of abstract theoretical
science. Other factors (social, economic, and cultural), obviously present
in the West and not the East, must have played a crucial role as well. In
fact in the next chapter we will show that the critical difference was the
difference of the Western writing systems based on the phonetic alphabet
of 20 to 30 characters as opposed to the Chinese writing system that
contains thousand of characters and makes use of pictorial elements and
a limited amount of phonetics.
Before delving into the impact of the Chinese writing system, let
us first review the fundamental elements of Chinese science. According
to classical Chinese scientific thought the universe consists of five
elements: earth, water, fire, metal, and wood. The five elements are ruled
by the two fundamental universal and complementary forces of yin and
yang, which represent, respectively, the following pairs of opposites:
cold and warm; female and male; contraction and expansion; collection
and dispersion; negative and positive. The five elements and the two
forces of yin and yang form a blend of opposites in which a unity
emerges more through harmony than through the fiat of preordained laws
(Needham 1956). Chinese scientific thought always had a mystical
and mysterious aspect to it. The Confucians and Logicians, who were
rational, had little interest in nature. The Taoists, on the other hand, who
were interested in nature were mystics who mistrusted reason and logic.
Chinese science was colored by the Taoist attitude toward nature, which
is summarized by the following passage from the Huoi Nan Tzu book:
“The Tao of Heaven operates mysteriously and secretly; it has no fixed
slope; it follows no definite rules; it is so great that you can never come
to the end of it; it is so deep that you can never fathom it (ibid., p.16).”
It is not difficult to understand how the Taoist mystical attitude
toward nature might preclude the development of abstract science. We