Cosmological outlooks and technological transfers

a comparative view from Eastern periphery

Shigeru Nakayama

pp. 225-233

in: Kostas Gavroglu, John Stachel, Mark W. Wartofsky (eds), Physics, philosophy, and the scientific community, Berlin, Springer, 1995

Abstract

In the following article, we shall use the dichotomy of East-West in the course of the history of science as defined in the following fashion. Namely, the shift of the center of the history of Western science took place from Babylonia, to classical Greece, the Hellenistic World (India), the Arabic world, the medieval Latin West, Renaissance Europe, seventeenth century England, eighteenth century Paris, nineteenth German universities, twentieth American laboratories and so on, while in the East the center remained in China until European expansion, Korea, Japan and Vietnam remaining satellites. Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia were interesting meeting places of East and West in this historical mapping, to be explored further with profit in future.