Origin of History of Western Science, Was It a Barbarian Incursion?
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The history of science that we have been hearing and seeing until today and what we were taught at school was the theory that says that the origins of science are western. This is the only theory that we have known until we came to this class, according to his theory all the sciences that we know originated in the hands of the westerners or the “whites”. This theory is the one that has been spread and supported by the westerners to gain and maintain the soft power from the history of science. According to this theory all the theoretical and philosophical foundations of all the sciences we know were done by the Greek philosophers during their time, Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Socrates are given the credit for most of these things. Then came the Dark Age and during which nothing much happened and then came the days of the Renaissance during which the European countries took initiative and did major contributions to science by doing the practical applications and proving the philosophical concepts of the Greek philosophers. These include the works credited to people like Einstein and Newton. This theory is the theory that is supported by the western textual sources and sources like Wikipedia.
The alternative theory provided to us by Professor CK Raju, which says is that the Origins of western history of science and not Greek. According to this theory all sciences are universal and if so it does not make for all of them to be found and discovered by one very small group of people. This theory is much more realistic and easy to believe then the one we have been following and I would choose this theory over the Wikipedia theory to be the truth.
This theory says that during the days of the Greeks they got the knowledge they claim to be theirs through barbaric incursion. The Greek cities were barbaric cities that lied in the outlines of two highly developed civilizations that were much more advanced in terms of science, technology, knowledge. These two civilizations the Egyptians and the Persian were much more civilized and wealthy. These civilizations had been in existence for a long time and had gathered a lot of knowledge and culture. The Greeks cities however were inferior to these civilizations and the Greeks used to go to Egypt and Persia to gain education, which proves this fact that they were more advanced in term of their possession of knowledge. There is also written sources from ancient Greece accepting that even the names of the Greek gods were borrowed from the names of the Egyptian gods.
While talking about ancient Greeks, the ancient Greek civilization was a mythological civilization. they had a number of gods and their beliefs of how the world worked very closely related to these mythologies, for example the Greeks believed that the world (earth) is being held on the back of the titan Atlas, and thunder and lightning to be caused by the Greek god Zeus, and Moon to be Selene, another titan. In a place where mythologies such as this is in place I do not see a chance that someone could have done astronomy as Ptolemy is claimed to have done and to have written a book like Almagest on the subject. This claim is also further supported by the fact that the most famous philosopher of the classical Greek, Socrates himself was time was given a death sentence for defying their gods by doing Astronomy.in such a case how can someone have done so much work on astronomy and managed to escape the same fate. Furthermore, when we talk of the Almagest, the star list in the book begins with the pole star that is the current pole star, however due to the precession of earth around the sun at the time of Ptolemy the pole star was another star. This can be seen as Therefore if Almagest was not an accretive text it would have to have the old pole start and not the new pole star. If Almagest is an accretive text, Ptolemy can be given all the credit for the works in the book