Abstract
Albert Einstein’s friend, J. E. Switzer, asked him why the Chinese had not invented or discovered what we term modern science in spite of their obviously great creative talents. Einstein’s response, probably in part jocular, was to the effect that it is a miracle that modern science evolved anywhere.
The inquisitive spider that is called science weaves a web of its own choosing. Its ultimate pattern is never really mysterious but almost always unpredictable.
The writer, a scientist, is not a professional historian. The material presented here is derived from secondary sources which are on the whole in agreement with one another. Some of the sources used are listed in the bibliography at the end of this chapter.
This article is an abbreviated version of a manuscript prepared for a conference in London in August, 1989 on the subject “Liberal Democratic Societies: Their Present State and Their Future Prospects.”
He is grateful to numerous colleagues for comments and particularly grateful to Professor Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar of the University of Chicago and to Professor A. I. Sabra of Harvard University. The former provided him with a volume on the history of Indian science published by the Indian Academy of Sciences whereas the latter provided him with seven highly informative essays on major aspects of Islamic science.
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Seitz, F. (1992). Crucial Steps in the Evolution of Science. In: The Science Matrix. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2828-8_3
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