Charles,

Thanks fot that! Just what I needed to plug a tiny hole in my anti-dialectic
thesis.

Rosa L


----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles Brown" <cbrown@mich...>
To: "'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx
andthe thinkers he inspired'" <marxism-thaxis@list...>
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2006 8:21 PM
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] People's History of Science


>
>
> ________________________________
>
>
> [Marxism] People's History of Science
>
> Louis Proyect
>
> Cliff Conner's A People's History of Science
> by Louis Proyect
> Book Review
>
>     Conner, Cliff: A People's History of Science: Miners, Midwives and
> 'Low Mechanicks', Nation Books, New York, 2006, ISBN 1-56025-748-2, 554
> pages, $17.95 (paperback)
>
> (Swans - February 27, 2006)   Cliff Conner's A People's History of
> Science:
> Miners, Midwives and 'Low Mechanicks' does for science what Howard Zinn
> did
> for American history. It is an altogether winning attempt to tell the
> story
> of the ordinary working person or peasant's contribution to our knowledge
> of the natural world. Just as scholars like Zinn remind us that a slave,
> Crispus Attucks, was the first casualty of the American Revolution, so
> does
> Conner show that humble people were on the front lines of the scientific
> revolution.
>
> Over the course of this 500 page encyclopedic but lively effort, we learn
> about unsung heroes and heroines, like Antony Van Leeuwenhoek, a
> seventeenth century Dutch linen draper who began using magnifying lenses
> to
> examine fabrics but went on to pioneer the use of microscopy in the
> scientific laboratory. He was looked down upon by the scientific
> establishment as "neither a philosopher, a medical man, nor a gentleman...
> He had been to no university, knew no Latin, French, or English, and
> little
> relevant natural history or philosophy."
>
> In addition to telling their stories, Conner challenges conventional
> thinking about how science is done. At an early age, we are indoctrinated
> into thinking that science starts with pure ideas and then descends into
> the practical world. In reality, many of the greatest breakthroughs in our
> knowledge of the world were a result of the practical need to solve a
> pressing problem, some of which were related to mundane matters of trade
> and bookkeeping.
>
> Perhaps no other example in Conner's book dramatizes this as perfectly as
> the rise of numeric symbols, which came out of the "routine economic
> activities of farmers, artisans and traders." Specifically, Sumerians
> devised symbols to keep track of grain. Rather than repeating the symbol
> for each grain multiple times, they devised a shortcut where the grain
> symbol would be drawn once, and prefixed with a numeric symbol. This
> technique was developed in lowly counting rooms rather than in the court
> hierarchy.
>
> The next big breakthrough, positional numeration, also had common traders
> as midwives. This technique makes a digit's value dependent on its
> relative
> position in a number. For example, "9" in the number 2,945 means nine
> hundred but it indicates "90" in 2,495. Imagine how difficult it would be
> to do simple calculations without such a system. Try adding the Roman
> numerals MMCMXLV to MMCDXCV without cheating (converting to positional
> numbers) and you will see how difficult it is. This is not to speak of the
> daunting task of multiplying them!
>
> The introduction of the place-value system (together with the symbol of
> zero to hold "empty" columns) is particularly relevant to Conner's mission
> in creating a people's history of science. To begin with, it democratized
> arithmetic by making it accessible to all levels of society. Secondly, it
> did not originate with elite mathematicians but with anonymous clerks --
> perhaps ordinary accounting clerks -- in India between the third and fifth
> centuries AD. Finally, this revolutionary innovation relied not on
> mathematics journals or other scholarly venues, but was transmitted by
> merchants pursuing their trade on routes between India and the rest of the
> world.
>
> full: http://www.swans.com/library/art12/lproy34.html
>
> --
>
> www.marxmail.org
>
>
>
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