原文见刊日期：2022年3月26日
We are usually told that modern science was invented in Europe sometime between 1500 and 1700. This was an era in which a small group of European pioneers overturned ancient superstition and developed the first modern scientific theories. Think of Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus and his heliocentric model of the universe or English mathematician Isaac Newton and his law of universal gravitation. This was the scientific revolution and it set the stage for what was to come: Europe continued to make incredible advances, leaving much of the rest of the world to catch up.
我们通常被告知，现代科学是在1500年到1700年间的某个时候在欧洲发明的。在这个时代，一小群欧洲先驱者推翻了古代迷信，发展了第一批现代科学理论。想想波兰天文学家尼古拉斯·哥白尼和他的日心宇宙模型，或者英国数学家艾萨克·牛顿和他的万有引力定律。这就是科学革命，它为即将到来的一切奠定了基础：欧洲继续取得令人难以置信的进步，让世界其他大部分国家在后面追赶。
You are probably familiar with this story. It features in almost every popular account of the history of science. There is, though, one big problem with the idea that modern science was invented in Europe: it just simply isn’t true.
你可能对这个故事很熟悉。它几乎出现在科学史的每一个通俗叙述中。然而，关于现代科学是在欧洲发明的观点有一个大问题：它根本就不正确。
Over the past decade, historians have pieced together a very different account of the origin of modern science. It wasn’t a product of a unique European culture. Rather, it depended upon a global cultural exchange.
在过去的十年里，历史学家们拼凑出了一种关于现代科学起源的非常不同的叙述。它不是独特的欧洲文化的产物。相反，它依赖于全球文化交流。
We now know that many of the pioneers of modern science in Europe relied on theories and observations borrowed from elsewhere. In his 1543 book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Copernicus cited no less than five Muslim scientific writers. Most importantly, Copernicus made use of a mathematical technique first developed by the Persian astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Known as the Tusi couple, this allowed Copernicus to model the movement of the planets around the sun. Copernicus’s book even features an uncredited copy of a diagram taken from al-Tusi’s Memoir on Astronomy from 1261.
我们现在知道，欧洲的许多现代科学先驱依赖于从其他地方借鉴的理论和观察。在1543年出版的《天体革命》一书中，哥白尼引用了至少五位穆斯林科学作家。最重要的是，哥白尼利用了波斯天文学家纳西尔·丁·图西首先开发的数学技术。该技术被称为图西双圆，这使哥白尼能够为行星围绕太阳的运动建模。哥白尼的书中甚至出现了一份从图西1261年的《天文学回忆录》中摘取的图表，但没有注明出处。
Copernicus is just one example of a much wider trend. Almost all the famous figures from the history of science in Europe relied on their global connections. When Newton was writing about gravity, he cited experiments conducted in Asia, Africa and the Americas. When Charles Darwin was collecting evidence for evolution, he consulted a 16th-century Chinese encyclopaedia. And when Albert Einstein began developing a new statistical account of quantum mechanics, he teamed up with the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose.
哥白尼只是一个更广泛趋势的其中一个例子。几乎所有欧洲科学史上的著名人物都依赖于他们的全球联系。牛顿在写关于引力的文章时，引用了在亚洲、非洲和美洲进行的实验。当查尔斯·达尔文收集进化证据时，他查阅了一本16世纪的中国百科全书。当阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦开始创建一种新的量子力学统计解释时，他与印度物理学家萨特延德拉·纳特·玻色合作。
Europe certainly drew on the knowledge of the rest of the world. But there are also plenty of examples of scientists whose breakthroughs have been forgotten, just because they didn’t fit into the existing Eurocentric narrative. Take the Japanese physicist Hantaro Nagaoka. In 1903, at a scientific meeting in Tokyo, Nagaoka proposed a new model of the atom. Based on his calculations, Nagaoka established that the atom must consist of a group of negatively charged particles orbiting a large positively charged nucleus. He was right. But today, we tend to remember only Ernest Rutherford, the New Zealand physicist whose article on the structure of the atom was published nearly a decade later.
欧洲无疑借鉴了世界其他国家的知识。但也有很多科学家的突破被遗忘的例子，只是因为他们不符合现有的以欧洲为中心的叙事。以日本物理学家长冈半太郎为例。1903年，在东京举行的一次科学会议上，长冈提出了一种新的原子模型。根据计算，长冈确定了原子必须包含一组带负电荷的粒子，这些粒子围绕着一个带正电荷的大原子核旋转。他是对的。但今天，我们往往只记得新西兰物理学家欧内斯特·卢瑟福，他那篇关于原子结构的文章的发表比此次会议晚了近10年。
By understanding the true history of modern science and celebrating those whose contributions have been underappreciated, we can help to shape its future in a more inclusive way.
通过了解现代科学的真实历史，并表彰那些贡献被低估的人，我们可以用更包容的方式塑造科学的未来。