Science is universal

“IT is only by standing on the shoulders of giants that I have seen further.”

These famous words were said by the 17th century physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton. This neatly encapsulates the view that the accumulation of scientific knowledge is collaborative and worldwide.

Whilst most inventions are generally attributed to the individuals who most recently published their discovery, the invention would not be possible without the thousands of years of accumulation of the underlying knowledge.

A good example is the concept of zero. The early Babylonian counting system was based upon units of 60, rather than units of 10. The symbol for zero looked like what we would call a comma made at the appropriate point in a clay tablet. Around 2000 BC, Greek mathematicians developed this concept further, however, it was never adopted within the Roman counting system.

During the seventh and eighth century AD, it was Indian mathematicians who developed the concept of zero as we understand it today. This counting system was adopted by Arab traders and by the 12th century AD it had found its way to Western Europe, where a mathematician called Fibonacci realised its importance and began using it in his calculations. Today the concept of zero forms the very basis of logarithms to the base 10, used commonly in many mathematical calculations.

As I tried to show in the example of zero above, all science is built upon what has been learnt before. I accept that much of the teaching of science at our universities in South Africa seems to emanate from the West. The fact that it is taught from books published in the West, often by Western-oriented lecturers, does not detract from the universal nature of this knowledge.

Removing what the “Fees Must Fall” movement deems as Western science will leave very little behind. After all, the binary system upon which cellphones and computers operate was developed by Gottfried Leibniz, a European, in 1679. If the students are sincere about removing the influence of Western science from the curriculum, they need to be consistent and throw away their cellphones. Anything less will be total hypocrisy. John Cowlin Noordhoek