32 The Poetry of Physics and The Physics of Poetry
rise of modern science in Europe let us first examine the question of why
abstract scientific thinking first began in Ancient Greece.
In the last chapter we pointed out that the scientific achievements of
the ancient cultures we studied were intimately connected with their
technological activities. One is tempted like a number of authors to
conclude that the Greek achievement of an abstract science is connected
with their knowledge of the technical achievements of the people they
were in contact with such as the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians. If
this is true one wonders why the Chinese did not develop abstract
physics since their technological superiority to the Greeks is attested to
by their invention of clocks, iron casting, paper, block printing, movable
print, silk, animal harnesses, irrigation canals, suspension bridges, gun
powder, guns and porcelain to mention a few. Joseph Needham in his
book The Grand Titration claims the Chinese played an important role in
the developments of science in the West as information of their
discoveries reached Europe. I am sure to some extent this is true but one
cannot help but ask the question if technology plays such an important
role why didn’t the Chinese develop science themselves.
When I first formulated this question when I wrote the first draft of
this book way back in 1973 my answer to this question was in terms of
two influences, which were felt much more strongly by the Greeks than
the Chinese, namely codified law and monotheism. The first of these
influences, the codification of law in the West, began in Babylonian
under Hammurabi. In China behavior was guided more by tradition,
moral persuasion and social pressure than by a legal code. The Chinese
had laws but they were not codified. The law was an important part of
Greek life with a philosopher often playing the role of the lawgiver in his
society. It is not much of a stretch that the concept of human law would
lead one to develop the notion of the laws of nature. The analogy
between these two concepts of law was expressed by a number of the
early Greek physicists. Anaximander wrote: “The Unlimited (Apieron) is
the first principle of things that are. It is that from which the coming-to-
be takes place, and it is that into which they return when they perish, by
moral necessity, giving satisfaction to one another and making reparation
for their injustice, according to the order of time.”
The other influence that I identified was also felt much more strongly
in the West than the East and that was the Hebrew concept of
monotheism. Before the Jewish concept of God people believed that a
god was localized in a place such as on the top of a mountain or under