China on my mind

Color me boggled! I was all set to write about ionizing radiation from your CRT (still in the works, I promise) and then I got some really cool news: I'm going to China for a month to teach English! Now, aside from being a great opportunity to see a new country, about which I (shamefully) know next to nothing, and meet new people, I have a hunch this will have some major ramifications for Cocktail Party Physics, or at least my contributions to it. Turns out the place I'm going to be teaching English is Harbin Institute of Technology, in Harbin, Heilong Jiang Province, 881 miles northeast of Beijing. I'm told by my grad school pal who was there last year that HIT considers itself the MIT of China. Whether it's got quite as many quirky and creative people as MIT remains to be seen, but I'm very excited to have the chance to interact with some of China's scientists. Cuz, it turns out, I'll be "teaching" the faculty sections. *gulp!* These are conversation classes, primarily, so I'm going to try to take a page from Jen's stint at KITP and focus on improving presentation skills, which I hope will give me a crash course on what kind of research is going on in China. Sadly, I'll be too far north to catch the total solar eclipse on July 22nd, but maybe we can take a field trip. That would definitely be cool!

As I said, what I don't know about China could and has filled volumes. What I know about science in China, well, I think the sum total probably involves gunpowder, printing presses, and paper, which is pretty pathetic considering how old China's civilization and technology are. (Although I'm pretty excited about the paper and printing parts, being a book and letterpress nut.) Jospeh Needham wrote an exhaustive 7-volume history of science in China, but I'm not going to get to a fraction of it before I leave in July. A quick browse through Wikipedia (I know, I know; I'm slapping myself upside the head for you) gives me the compass, drydocks, the escapement mechanism, the first observations of a supernova, the first comet atlas, some wonderful feats of engineering not the least of which is the Great Wall , and extensive research in medicine and anatomy. This doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. I have a lot of background reading to do.

I think it's safe to say that one thing that sets Chinese science apart from western science, historically at least, is the lack of a unified scientific method. Science developed quite differently in China than it did in the west. Patricia Ryaby Backer explains it this way, in a text published by AAAS: "According to traditional Western scientists, the roots of science and the scientific method is in Greece and Greek thought. There is a tendency among scientists to claim that not only modern science, but science in general, was characteristic of European thought. The accompanying argument in that all scientific contributions from non-European civilizations were technology-based, not science-based (Needham, 1993)." In other words, it was the concept of the cosmos as a rational system that was unique to western science, and this sprang out of the Greek development of "Euclidean deductive geometry and Ptolemaic astronomy." This might, as Needham points out, be defining science far more narrowly than it can be defined. Certainly China was not without scientific developments, many of them far ahead of concurrent western technology. Certainly one of the things that helped science advance and grow in the west was the development of bodies like the Royal Society and the dissemination of information on experimental methods that led to a standard philosophy. In short, it's hard to separate the development and progress of science from the society in which it takes place.

And that said, it's hard to contemplate Modern China without thinking about Tienanmen Square. Today is the 20th anniversary of the pro-democracy protests that took place there, and the horrific images of a lone student facing down tanks have become iconic and representative in the same way photos of the Kent State shooting did, which is to say that every country has its repressive atrocities. In a country that values cooperation over individuality, it will be interesting to see how science happens. Teamwork is always important in research, but not infrequently it's an oddball out on a limb somewhere who comes up with real innovations. Or maybe that's just my personal prejudice speaking. I'm looking forward to having more data with which to form more complete conclusions.

Since I'm conducting conversation classes, I'll need conversation topics. Are there things that you'd like to know about Chinese research or even Chinese culture in general? Send me your questions and ideas and I'll work them into the conversation and the upcoming blog posts.

Comments

[Diandra Leslie-Pelecky]

Lee - Magnetism! The Chinese have a long tradition of research in magnetism, not to mention the fact that the vast majority of the rare earth materials are in China. Why is that important? Rare-earth permanent magnets are needed for motors. Motors are necessary for electric vehicles...

[David Thalenberg]

Not physics, but I recently learned that in China, people are taught that they evolved from an earlier human than the rest of the world (except Africa, presumably.) It's not supported by tracking the genome, and is purely based on analysis of skull fragments. Can you ask about this?

[Christine]

I am in Korea as an English teacher. I am sure you will like China.

[Captain Skellett]

That's pretty aweseome news! Can't wait to hear about all the things you learn about old China science, that stuff is pretty facinating and one of the things I'm woefully low on knowledge about too.

[Lee Kottner]

Diandra, ooo, that's a good one! I'll definitely follow up on that. David, I think I'll be dealing with engineers and physicists, but that's a fascinating question and I'll try to get an answer. Christine. Thanks for the encouragement. Keep ya'll posted.