Lost Discoveries : The Ancient Roots of Modern Science--from the Babylonians to the Maya
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.49 (827 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0684837188 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 464 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-06-06 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"Fascinating ancient beliefs with tenuous modern connections" according to D. Cloyce Smith. The author of "Lost Discoveries" claims he began to write "with the purpose of showing that the pursuit of evidence of nonwhite science is a fruitless endeavor," but his goal changed when he kept finding "examples of ancient and medieval non-Western science that equaled and often surpassed ancient Greek learning." The book he wrote instead is a compendium of miscellan. "An innaccurate, poorly written, worthless book on a fascinating subject" according to Procopius. This book is about the scientific achievements of non-Western peoples such as the Babylonians, Arabs, Mayans, Chinese and others. This is a fascinating subject that is given inadequate attention, and thus this could have been a great book. Unfortunately it's trash.The book's author, Dick Teresi, is formerly from Omni magazine, a "science" magazine best known for its c. Poorly Written and Full of Inaccuracies C Wheat I bought this book because I liked its premise. However, I was thoroughly disappointed before I could even finish the first chapter. The book is filled with repetitious statements on the one hand and inconsistancies on the other. If you can get over the poor writing style, you will come up against the flagrant factual errors. For example, Teresi denegrates the Greeks
Did Nicolas Copernicus steal his notion that the earth orbited the sun from an Islamic astronomer who lived three centuries earlier? "The jury is still out," writes Dick Teresi, whose intriguing survey of the non-Western roots of modern science offers several worthy arguments that Copernicus in fact ripped off Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Common belief is that Westerners have been the mainspring of most scientific and technical achievement, but in Lost Discoveries Teresi shows that other cultures had arrived at much of the same knowledge at earlier dates. Sometimes he is a bit overeager to ascribe great thoughts to long-dead people (he casually suggest
Chinese alchemists realized that most physicalsubstances were merely combinations of other substances, which could be mixed in different proportions. Islamic scholars are legendary for translating scientific texts of many languages into Arabic, a tradition that began with alchemical books. The mathematical foundation of Western science is a gift from the Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Babylonians, and Maya. Chinese and Arab scholars were the first to use fossils scientifically to trace earth's history. Iron suspension bridges came from Kashmir, printing from India; papermaking was from China, Tibet, India, and Baghdad; movable type was invented by Pi Sheng in about 1041; the Quechuan Indians of Peru were the first to vulcanize rubber; Andean farmers were the first to freeze-dry potatoes. Most of the names of our stars and constellations are Arabic. In the sixth century, a Hindu astronomer taught that the daily rotation of the earth on its axis provided the rising and setting of the sun. European explorers depended heavily on Indian and Filipino shipbuilders, and collected maps and sea charts from Javanese and Arab merchants. The Babylonians developed the first written math and used a place-value number system. The Chinese observed, reported, dated, recorded, and interpreted eclipses between 1400 and 1200 b.c. Five thousand years ago, the S