Science
Cultural mix
Bernard Dixon
Are scientists who are born in different societies so influenced by the cultural and social climate of their time that they think differently about their work and thus make characteristically different types of discovery? Many scholars believe not. Science, they would argue, is relatively insulated from such external influences. Indeed, its very success stems from a language and conceptual structure which (like the latin Mass) is equally meaningful and accessible to all men at all times. That's why science is essentially an international activity.
Earlier this year, a Japanese historian of science, Masao Watanabe, published an article in the American journal Science challenging this view. It was based largely on "positive and unique contributions to science that were related to the intellectual and spiritual traditions of Japan that
Spectator June 8, would not likely have been made by Western scientists." Whether he intended to or not, Watanabe started something with his article and he has attracted a continuing flow of supporters and critics. Perhaps the most intriguins example yet to be offered in surr, port of Watanabe's thesis is tha; of the 'non-conservation of Parit.,?':. Remember the furore when tilt.' was announced back in 1957? T11e work involved some sophisticate' physics, but the central notion concerned the symmetry th°t seems to characterise nature with, for example, right hancie and left handed screws, and rigbt handed and left handed molecules Scientists used to assume without' question that, whatever changes occurred within a system, th° parity would be conserved. Then, in 1957, Dr Tsung-11 Lee of Columbia University Dr Chen Ning Yang, of the Instr tute for Advanced Studies Princeton, produced a theory slig' gesting that parity is not CO served in certain subatomic dea'f processes. Dr Chien-Shiung Columbia University, did t'" necessary d that experiments, Lee deannts , Yang wer? correct. Nature, it seemed, was n°1 symmetrical after all. The scieir tific world acclaimed proof of the non-conservation of parity a„,s major research achievement. PA° many people, scientists inclutle'' felt surprised and uneasy that the natural world had turned out top! less neat and orderly than we llnu supposed. It is the biologist Dr Robert Livingston — or rather his wife. who has introduced the POT, demonstration into the Watanai'' debate. "My wife, who is an artist observed at that time that creative departure from deal); rooted assumptions of conteni; porary science might be InOrr likely to occur in the minds persons who grew up in a radical different cultural tradition, a° that it would be more likely to be assumed worthy of testing bY 8 like-minded individual," he writes in this week's Science. Lee, Yang, and.Wu were indeed all born in China, whose artistic and cultural tradition differs full; damentally from that of the We There is, for example, less of a" obligation, in traditional Chinese, art, to writing i s b a'baly daniceedopgircatu and w prties, rather than by horizontal, left-to' right stripes. It is at least possible' as a consequence, that ChineS,,e physicists were more open-minde' about the conservation of pant/ than scientists reared amid tile Western cultural climate.
If Watanabe is right, his the
certainly supports the value greater cross-cultural exchang' within the scientific communitY' as a spur to creativity. Constru„c: tive thinking could greatly bole; by what Dr Livingston calls "til" utilisation of schemes of cons" ciousness that have only tenon; credentials in our own tradition 0, thinking." Perhaps this, rathel than a shared currency of guage, explains the creativitY international interchange in science.
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