User:Jjc2002
Hi, Jjc2002. Friendship & Rainbows here. Sorry for creating a User Page for you, but I noticed that our entire discussion was deleted by a moderator. I've been trying to figure out how to reach you, and I think this method should work. Hopefully, we can continue our discussion here undisturbed.
Errors In Human Accomplishment
while they showed how rainbows are made Newton showed how a spectrum could be recomposed into white light, deduced that there was a problem of chromatic aberration and invented the reflecting telescope to overcome the problem.
This is not relevant to what Murray wrote: "1672 England: Isaac Newton describes the light spectrum, and discovers that white light is made of a mixture of colors." Hmm… discovered "that white light is made from a mixture of colors"? I thought he wasn't the first to discover this.
With respect to Freud and Koller Murray said that they used cocaine as a local anesthetic. He didn’t say they invented or discovered its use.
I spoke with some medical students, and they pointed out that Freud and Koller mostly just rediscovered cocaine as anesthetic, as well as made some minor improvements. But, this pales in comparison to the Inca's discovery of cocaine as anesthetic, one of the first, if not the first, reliable sedatives that allow surgery to be performed without having to perform surgeries quickly (due to having a patient that is likely to be awake and screaming), thus revolutionizing surgery, allowing surgeons to work more slowly and carefully on the patient. Besides, didn't you pointed out that the Chinese's experiments of heavier-than-air flying were not nearly as significant in comparison to Cayley's?
With respect to vulcanization much might depend on its definition. Olmecs processed rubber but that doesn’t meet every definition of vulcanization. Either way the Olmecs didn’t make tyres because they didn’t have the wheel.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but the point isn't that the Olmecs didn't make tyres, but that they, besides tapping and utilizing rubber, had invented a process of curing rubber using acetic acid and phenols, long before Goodyear patented "his" discovery (which the Olmecs had known for millenia by then).
I think Murray is basically correct that, unlike Europe, China wasn't a learner. That's not to say that China learnt nothing nor that there weren't individual Chinese willing to learn but that there wasn't a culture of learning. Take what I consider the most important and influential textbook of all time in any culture, Euclid's Elements, a textbook that was in use for over 2000 years. The first half of it was translated into Chinese by the Jesuit Matteo Ricci and his Chinese helpers. Now China had been in contact with the Islamic world for nearly a millennium at that point and Islamic scholars new their Euclid. In my opinion the Elements would have been a more useful an acquisition than "Muslim blue". Islamic scholars also knew that the Earth was a sphere, something that had been known in Western Eurasia for nearly two millennia before the Jesuits brought this late-breaking news to the Chinese elites. These events predate the Qing conquest.
May I ask, have you studied Chinese history? No offense, but you sure seem to be lacking in that particular area. What you and Murray seem to be implying was that imperial China was a civilization with little interest in learning from others (which, as I've said, is true for the elites, but not for the average intellectual), while Europe conversely was a "learner" (which wasn't necessarily the case).
For example, during World War II, Chinese forces, who had more experience in fighting the Japanese than the British, tried to impart some ideas to the British. The British scoffed and turned down the offer, saying they don't need to learn from "yellow people". That attitude lead to the lost of some British colonies, such as Singapore, to the Japanese.
Also, contrary to what you seem to be implying, the Chinese had absorbed many European ideas from the Muslims, such as Aristarchus' theory of heliocentrism. So why did they not improve on it? The answer was not because the Chinese had no interest in learning from others, but because due to the dominance of Confucianism in Chinese thought (which remained unchallenged until the Ming dynasty), the Chinese were very practical, not theoretical, minded. They were largely disinterested in the heliocentric vs geocentric or round Earth vs flat Earth debates then raging in India, the Middle East, and Europe. They just wanted to be able to predict eclipses and other astronomical phenomena with good accuracy. The Chinese also had access to Western chemical nomenclature, such as the Greek Four Element theory: air, water, fire, and earth. So why did they still used the wuxing theory (water, wood, fire, earth, and metal) by the 19th century CE? Again, it was due to cultural differences, not a haughty disdain of non-Chinese ideas. While some Muslim and European scholars had tried to convince the Chinese that their wuxing theory was flawed, they made the mistake of missing the point: the wuxing were never regarded by the Chinese as "elements" in the Greek sense of pure materials from which all other substances are made. Instead of abandoning their traditional wuxing theory entirely, the Chinese used the Greek Four Element theory alongside wuxing, as during that time, the Greek theory was not superior to the Chinese one in terms of explaining phenomena.
You mention that the Chinese already had things that the Macartney brought with them. But there were things you don’t mention, things the Chinese didn’t have such as hot-air balloons and diving equipment. A half-century later the British came with steam-powered gunboats to force the opium trade on China. Balloons would have been handy to spot them coming and the diving equipment would have been helpful to see if anything could be salvaged. My understanding is that the reply to Macartney had been drafted before he arrived i.e. the establishment had made its mind up in advance.
Again, this is simple ignorance of Chinese history. The ruling power in China at the time was the Manchus, not the Han Chinese. The Manchu emperor Qianlong was the one responsible for rejecting the Macartney Embassy in advance. Also, the backward Manchus, in their zeal to crush any opposition to their rule, restricted the Chinese from much new knowledge and technology, such as cannons and firearms. Most Chinese simply weren't aware of the new ideas; they thought the British only brought things they already had. While a few Chinese, such as Dai Zhen, who were aware of the new European advancements had expressed interest in learning from the foreigners, they were largely powerless in stopping the Manchus from prohibiting the new inventions and discoveries from flowing into China; because the Manchus were worried that the knowledge can be used by the disgruntled Han Chinese against them. In fact, so ferocious was their censorship that even a Chinese scholar named Zhu Fangdan was executed because he had adopted and expanded upon Galenic medical science and came to the conclusion that the brain, not the heart (as is traditionally believed by the Manchus), is the center of thought.
It would have been better had Murray used a different term to "Dark Ages", but it's hard to know what to use in its place, "Early European Middle Ages" perhaps?
Murray's claim that Europe was backwards, stuck in a "Dark Age", is completely false. Fact is, the so-called "Dark Ages" was actually a period of great thought (see The Twelfth-Century Renaissance by R.N. Swanson), such as with the invention of Carolingian miniscule, Occam's Razor, eyeglasses, and the adoption of gunpowder. Also, Murray's claim that China was more advanced than Europe during medieval times is also untrue. As you probably know, Europe had Archimedes' screw, concrete, concept of Earth as sphere, heliocentrism, and many other inventions and discoveries that China didn't had until Muslims or Europeans introduced the Chinese to them.
I would be surprised if Murray was unaware of Aristarchus's theory. He should have said something like "restatement" or "modern statement"
Yes, but what Murray said was Copernicus's was the first statement of the heliocentric theory. He had shown his ignorance again and again, and yet you continue to defend him and his book Human Accomplishment. Why? Friendship & Rainbows (talk) 11:08, 19 January 2020 (UTC)