DICK TERESI

Lost Discoveries  by Dick Teresi; Published by  Simon & Schuster; Pages 464 ; Price  U.S.$27.00.

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                         Dick Teresi is the author of several books about science and technology. He has written for Omni, Discover, the New York Times Magazine and Atlantic. His arguments are persuasive, giving credit where credit is thousands of years overdue. Science is believed to have originated with the Greeks around 600 BC, developed in the European Renaissance, and found perfection in the modern West. In the early 1990s Dick Teresi accepted an assignment to expose and document faulty multicultural science being taught in American schools.

“I began to write with the purpose of showing that the pursuit of evidence of nonwhite science is a fruitless endeavour. Six years later, I was still finding examples of ancient and medieval non-Western science that equalled and often surpassed ancient Greek learning. I had the pleasure of discovering mountains of unappreciated human industry, four thousand years of scientific discoveries by peoples I had been taught to disregard."

                                      Teresi recounts his voyages into the worlds of  mathematics, astronomy, cosmology, physics, geology, chemistry, and technology, discussing contributions from Egypt, the ancient Near East, Islam, India, China, ancient America, and Oceania. His manuscript was reviewed for factual accuracy by nine prominent scholars whose comments- even at variance- find a place in the notes given at the end of the volume. This innovative history proves once and for all that the roots of all science were established centuries, some instances millennia before the births of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. The bibliography provides a starting place for further research on specific topics.

                                    The important discoveries that make up nearly all the book are several in mathematics; the ancient Egyptians worked on the idea of the lowest common denominator and formulated a fraction table that required 28,000 calculations to develop. The Babylonians devised the first written math and used a place-value number system. Ancient East Indians invented the numerals 0 through 9 and made important contributions to geometry and trigonometry. The ancient Indians  correctly identified the relative distances of the known planets from the sun; the Chinese reported and recorded eclipses between 1400 and 1200 BCE; and the Arabs built the first observatories . Five thousand years ago, the Sumerians said the earth was round and a Hindu astronomer taught that the rising and setting of the sun were based on the earth's daily rotation on its axis. In the eleventh century, Avicenna of Persia asserted that outward qualities of metals were of little use in classification (he stressed internal structure--well before Mendeleyev's periodic table of elements) and in 1041, Pi Sheng invented movable type. In South America the Quechuan Indians of Peruwere the first to vulcanize rubber and Andean farmers were the first to freeze-dry potatoes. And, in Kashmir, iron suspension bridges were being developed. Indian mathematicians not only used the zero and devised algebra, logarithms, trigonometry, and the ancestors of our current numerals, but also developed a form of calculus centuries before Leibnitz and Newton. These discoveries were adopted and expanded by medieval Moslems, who among other accomplishments invented decimal fractions (e.g., .5 for 1/2). Again, all three of the discoveries that Francis Bacon credited with marking the beginning of the modern world -- gunpowder, the magnetic compass, and printing -- came from China. When Gutenberg set the Mainz Bible in print in 1456, Chinese libraries already held editions of numerous books printed in movable type, a technology developed in the 1040s. The Chinese still preserve thousands of printed texts from every period going back 2,000 years.

                             Dick Teresi divulges forbidding quantity of information, and asserts that the observations and intuitive conclusions of ancient thinkers who lacked modern scientific technology are remarkable. Lost Discoveries offers a fascinating and enthusiastic introduction to the rich scientific history of non-Western cultures. This is a story of time-binding and cultural diversity at its best.

P.P.Ramachandran

05/05/2019.