被蒙蔽的視野

Résumé du livre

The history of science as it has never been told before: a tale of outsiders and unsung heroes from far beyond the Western canon. When we think about the origins of modern science, we usually begin in Europe. We remember the great minds of Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein. But the history of science is not, and has never been, a uniquely European endeavor. Copernicus relied on mathematical techniques that came from Arabic and Persian texts. Newton's laws of motion used astronomical observations made in Asia and Africa. When Darwin was writing On the Origin of Species, he consulted a sixteenth-century Chinese encyclopedia. And when Einstein studied quantum mechanics, he was inspired by the Bengali physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. Horizons tells the story of science from a global perspective, uncovering its unsung heroes and revealing that the most important scientific breakthroughs have come from the exchange of ideas from different cultures around the world. This ambitious, revisionist history recasts the narrative of scientific discovery and acknowledges the vital contributions from scientists in Africa, North and South America, Asia, and the Pacific Islands.