The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science (PDF)

ARUN BALA is a visiting professor at the University of Toronto in Canada.

"Readers interested in multicultural scientific contributions before Galileo will enjoy this book immensely . . . Highly recommended." - Choice"What Bala and others are offering is a view of history very different from the one Westerners are taught . . . Love it or hate it, our world is neither the exclusive heritage of the West nor is it something the West has imposed on the rest of the world, as reactionary fundamentalists insist. Rather, it is the result of a dialogue of civilizations - the efforts of very different people, in different places, coming together to share their curiosity about the world and their common interest in understanding and improving it." - The Toronto Star"Erudite . . . What Bala has conclusively demonstrated is that the Scientific Revolution could not have been accomplished in early modern Europe on the basis of ancient Greek ideas alone." - Literary Review of Canada"Bala's book is a marvelous combination of high speculation and deep rigor. From astronomy to mathematics, no one, after the work of Needham and others, could doubt the significant contributions of non-Western cultures (Arab, Chinese, Egyptian, Indian) to the making of modern science. But the nature of those contributions has often been misunderstood, and even the most sympathetic multiculturalists frequently fail to grasp the main message of the ongoing dialogue. The great value of Bala's work consists in the careful attention to detail applied to some strikingly novel ideas. Modern science, its past and its prospects have come into sharper focus." - James Robert Brown, author of Who Rules in Science: An Opinionated Guide to the Wars"The major strength of this book is its convincing demonstration that modern science is neither the unique product of Europe nor a process of merely grafting insights from diverse cultures onto a body of growing knowledge . . . This book is a sustained and closely argued narrative where the style of the author is characterized by occasional wit