(Introduction) Why didn't China have a (modern) scientific system?

Why didn't the (modern) scientific system come into being in China (draft framework)? Key words: 1, geography, climate and environment, Mediterranean, Greece, exchange, commerce, coins, transportation, ocean 2, writing, Phoenician alphabet, hearing, Chinese characters, vision, literacy, language grammar, independent language family, way of thinking, logic, science, democracy 3. Improvement of visual environment: China's economy and technology used to be in the leading position in the world for a long time, but in modern times, the natural science system did not come into being in China, but fell behind the west in modern times. Why? This is the famous Needham puzzle. When discussing "Why didn't modern natural science system come into being in China", we can first discuss why modern natural science came into being in Europe, and the origin of European science can be traced back to the scientific ideas produced in ancient Greece. In the early 1980s, the reform and opening-up policy opened the eyes of China people, and the highly developed economy in Europe, America and Japan shocked China, admired China and made China people feel ashamed. In the past, China people were always proud of China's long and glorious history. This superior sense of history has made China people (including me) bear the heavy burden of history and have a very sensitive national self-esteem, which makes people think all the time and find out why-why did China fall behind in modern times? 199 1 years ago, when I was discussing the reasons for China's economic backwardness, I heard and saw some controversial statements about the determinism of geographical environment. At that time, I also felt that the theory of geographical environment was very reasonable. I used to be very interested in languages. Besides studying English in college, I also learned some Japanese, French, Russian and German before I went to Germany. Because I have always insisted on learning English, I often meet foreign tourists and scholars, and I often hear many foreigners think that Chinese characters are the most difficult in the world. When I arrived in Germany, I began to study German at the Goethe Institute in Frejborg and had the opportunity to meet people from many countries in the world. When it comes to language, almost everyone thinks that China's Chinese characters are the most difficult to learn in the world. Indeed, Chinese characters in China are much more difficult to recognize and remember than pinyin letters, because it has nothing to do with pronunciation. Even if you learn to speak Chinese, it won't be much help to recognize Chinese characters at an early stage. It's not related to pinyin and pronunciation, but it will help pinyin spelling and memory. Therefore, comparatively speaking, it is more difficult to know Chinese characters, which slows down the popularization of China culture. So I am more interested in the function and influence of language and writing, and think deeply about the influence of language and writing on the development of human society. I think language may be another very important factor affecting the development of science, technology, culture and economy. Besides studying professional knowledge (principles of renewable energy utilization), I often read news and comments about China, and I often read books about China when I go to the library. Studying the causes of China's backwardness in modern times has become my amateur interest. It has been tracked intermittently for nearly twenty years. After coming back from Germany, the greatest advantage of Guangdong is that Hong Kong has English TV channels. Therefore, watching TV, surfing the Internet and reading books will sensitively capture relevant information, such as: earth environment, human evolution, character development, historical stories, animal world, intellectual development of human brain, early childhood education and so on. Through various channels, I also purposefully read about world history, China history, language history, linguistics, the generation of letters, English education and so on. Besides, due to my work, I also read books on international trade, management and finance. Although Needham's puzzle involves many complicated factors, I have a very systematic thinking framework through a lot of reading and thinking. At present, I just want to find more and deeper information and evidence to improve and complete my own thinking logic system. At present, I think I have found the answer to Needham's puzzle. Historically, there were many scientific discoveries and inventions that influenced human beings in China and brought brilliant technical and economic achievements to China, but the modern scientific system did not come into being in China. There are several basic decisive factors. It plays a leading role in different stages of human development: 1) geographical, climatic and environmental factors 1, the dependence of life on the environment 2, the biological species and ethnic differences caused by the division of climatic environment and water 3, the differences between plants and agricultural products and the influence of the development of large-scale commercial and trade activities 4. Differences in organizational forms and laws between human activities of water control and exchange of material production 2) Invention of letters, influence of language, writing and grammar on thinking mode 3) Spread of writing carrier (paper) and printing 4) Religion (philosophy) and war 5) Social factors such as social culture, social system, law and education caused by the above basic factors. With the development and progress of human society and the improvement of subjective initiative, the above factors gradually rise to the main influencing factors and interact with each other. In the early stage of human development, the environment is the decisive factor; With the appearance of language, language has also become an important factor affecting the progress of human society, followed by the carrier of language and its printing; With the emergence and spread of different religions, religion has become an important factor affecting human social conflicts, movements and wars; Then the way of thinking, cultural traditions and habits, social system and legal system, and education based on the above factors have become the factors that affect the complex social system of human beings. Humans are social animals, and the advantage of social animals lies in division of labor and cooperation. One of the most important basic factors for the development and progress of human society is the reduction of communication cost (information and material) and the improvement of communication efficiency. Nowadays, human society is a highly developed networked information society, and it is of great practical significance to study how to reduce communication costs. Since human beings created language, language has had a far-reaching impact on the development of human society. Language is a tool for brain thinking, and animal brains can be compared to modern advanced computers, and only when there is input can there be output. A Japanese engineer from Toshiba once told me that China people call computers "computers", which is a wonderful name. The computer you just bought needs an operating system, and so does the human brain after birth. Language is equivalent to the operating system of human brain. China, a native of China, is naturally equipped with the Chinese operating system, while Germany, a native of China, is naturally equipped with the German operating system. What kind of language grammar creates what kind of thinking habits and ways. The imprecision of Chinese grammar leads to the imprecision of China people's thinking, among which the imprecision of Chinese grammar is closely related to the inequality of Chinese parts of speech. Chinese characters evolved from ancient hieroglyphics. Although some pictophonetic characters have also evolved, in general, Chinese characters have nothing to do with pronunciation, listening and writing. Each word is a whole by visual memory, which cannot be deformed (unlike pinyin, which has suffix changes), but it can be changed (for example, "labor" can be nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on). In Chinese, the predicate verb does not change with the subject, and the predicate verb has no logical connection with the subject. According to my research and analysis, human beings created letters in analyzing and decomposing the pronunciation of language, which promoted the emergence and development of pinyin writing system and brought great development of human thinking in analyzing and decomposing; Predicate verbs change with the change of subject, and predicate and subject establish a logical relationship, which promotes the development of logical thinking. These two points are lacking in China's written language. The grammar and writing system of China's ancient language led to China's lack of two basic ways of thinking, one is analytical thinking and the other is logical thinking. China's traditional thinking is used to seeing the whole from the outside, observing the phenomena, images and appearances of things, studying the laws at the phenomenon level, and relying on perceptual experience and understanding, such as traditional Chinese medicine. Western thinking developed on the basis of ancient Greek scientific thought is based on analytical decomposition thinking (such as atomism) and definition, axiom and logical reasoning (Euclid's geometric principle). The scientific thought of ancient Greece was formed after the appearance of Greek letters, which were formed by adding four vowels to Phoenician consonants. So I think letters are the "catalyst" to promote the birth of ancient Greek scientific thought. The birth of Phoenician letters originated from the communication needs of Phoenician businessmen engaged in large-scale trade activities along the Mediterranean coast. It can be said that large-scale, cross-regional commercial and trade activities have promoted the emergence of modern alphabet system. The Mediterranean Sea is surrounded by land, which makes the early sailing environment not afraid of getting lost even without a compass provide great convenience for large-scale and cross-regional business activities. The emergence of western scientific ideas is fundamentally related to the Mediterranean environment, and further, the way of early ancient human activities is related to the distribution of water and the geographical environment of water division. Therefore, the reason why modern natural science system didn't come into being in modern China lies in China's objective environment and China's language and writing, that is, the early environment in ancient China didn't promote large-scale cross-regional commodity exchange activities and the resulting pinyin writing. Of course, the language is still developing, and Chinese is gradually improving itself by absorbing some specialties of other language families (such as punctuation marks), grammatical analysis methods and foreign words. 1) Geographical climate environment and large-scale commodity exchange activities (around the Mediterranean) 1. Life can be produced on the earth, which is a lucky event closely related to the earth environment. Human beings are also born in order to adapt to the evolution of the earth's environment. Therefore, geographical climate environment is the most fundamental factor affecting the formation and development of human society. 2. After human beings came into being, different commodities were produced due to different geographical climate and land. In order to get what they needed, commodity exchange activities naturally took place. In business activities, we not only exchange goods, but also exchange ideas and even ways of thinking, because language is a tool of thinking, and thinking is a subtle language in the brain. Using different languages is equivalent to using different ways of thinking. Around15th century BC, there were many races in the Middle East in the middle of the two civilizations-the Mediterranean. The first alphabet was invented by Semite merchants in Sinai Peninsula. They use some Egyptian characters that they are very familiar with to express consonants, and many other symbols are used to mark words and syllables, so their writing has not developed into strict phonetic symbols. The real phonetic symbols were written by Phoenicians, who developed the original script into a letter system consisting of 23 consonant phonemes in 13 BC. This phoneme alphabet system was further improved by the Greeks adding vowels to form Greek letters. Later, the Romans borrowed Greek letters to form their own Roman letters. [1]4. Similarly, Greece is located in the middle of two major civilizations and consists of many islands in the Mediterranean. Due to the special geographical characteristics, commodity exchange is also very prosperous, which prompted Greece to produce the earliest metal coins, thus promoting more prosperity and larger trade scale, greatly exerting the respective advantages of Greece itself and its surrounding colonies and even further regions, greatly improving productivity and revolutionary changes have taken place in the economic base. Especially after Greece invented the Greek alphabet with reference to the Phoenician alphabet, it became extremely readable, and the characters were mastered by more ordinary people (such as businessmen). It has greatly promoted the prosperity and popularization of philosophy, science and other knowledge, making writing and knowledge no longer the exclusive rights of the upper-class minority, thus triggering social and political revolutions. In addition, Greece was originally composed of many relatively independent city-States, so parliamentary democracy was born. Phoenician Trade Route Therefore, the special geographical environment around the Mediterranean and the large-scale commodity exchange activities in the middle of the two civilizations promoted the variation of characters and gave birth to letters. Greece and commercial society with special geographical environment, which is composed of many islands in the Mediterranean, provide the soil for promoting the development of science and democracy, while letters are the catalyst for promoting the birth of scientific ideas and the effective development of democracy. Among them, the Mediterranean itself is a very important geographical and environmental factor. Three quarters of the earth's surface is covered by oceans. According to scientists' research, the earliest life was born in water, and then some of it climbed ashore from the water. The ocean not only breeds life, but also creates basic conditions for human beings to use the largest means of transportation-ships. Large-scale commercial and trade activities are inseparable from large-scale transportation. The Mediterranean is flat and long, surrounded by the mainland. It's neither big nor small. Sailing in it is not afraid of getting lost, because sailing in any direction will find land. The Mediterranean not only provides a channel for large-scale transportation, but also provides an environment that human beings need technical knowledge and courage to challenge, but it will not make the early human society invincible like the ocean. The Mediterranean not only promotes large-scale trade activities, but also provides a place for human beings to learn and master high-tech navigation technology for practice and exercise. In addition, commercial trade has also created rich countries and merchant families, and some people can concentrate on natural science without worrying about food and clothing. Second, the invention of letters, language, grammar and way of thinking. Secondly, language has the greatest influence on human beings. Language is a tool for thinking and communication. We say that if we want to learn a language well, we must learn to think in that language. This is a fact. Language and logic are closely related. The emergence of philosophy and science is closely related to logical reasoning, and even the legal system is based on logical thinking. The inheritance and development of science and the dissemination and popularization of knowledge are closely related to the difficulty of writing and the social literacy rate. (Of course, it is also related to the text carrier (such as paper). ) China has always used ideographs evolved from hieroglyphics, which have no direct relationship with pronunciation (although there are many pictophonetic characters, the radicals of ideographs are more complicated, more difficult to remember and need visual memory than pinyin letters). To know Chinese characters, you have to find a teacher to teach and rely on visual memory. Chinese grammar is an independent language family, in which Chinese characters are arranged in order according to their original forms. No matter where, whether it is subject, object or attribute, the Chinese characters in the sentence keep their original form. Chinese characters in sentences can often be decomposed and combined in different ways, resulting in different meanings and ambiguity (especially in ancient times, even without punctuation). Although the ideographic function of Chinese characters is very general, the integrity and independence of Chinese characters (some words are even rigid, such as Japanese and Japanese, which cannot be changed at will) make Chinese characters unable to be deformed in sentences. No matter the part of speech, the words in a sentence have different meanings, which leads to inaccurate expression, imprecise grammar and imprecise logic, which leads to China people being good at representation, macro-thinking and paying attention to the overall situation. The way of thinking is rough and vague, and the thought pursues chaos and nothingness. The ancients in China were used to ideographic, integrated and independent Chinese characters, lacking the way of thinking of decomposing and analyzing things like the ancient Greeks who used pinyin characters, and often took the appearance of things as elements, such as gold, wood, water, fire and earth. One of the core reasons for the stagnation of China culture for thousands of years is that representation is often used as a basic concept to explain another phenomenon, and a vague concept is used to explain another vague concept. It is impossible to enter the micro level of things or substances, and to accurately explain the composition and reasons of things or substances can only be circled at the macro level of things or substances. Phonetic symbols are composed of letters, which are related to language pronunciation. They decompose people's speech into syllables and even phonemes. As long as you remember dozens of memorable letters (for example, there are 26 in English), most words can be spelled with familiar pronunciations, which is easy for most ordinary people to master. The method of speech decomposition gives people an important way of thinking to study nature and analyze and decompose problems. For example, in the early Greek theory, matter was made up of atoms. In addition, with letters, it provides a favorable tool for people to express mathematical formulas. For example, the early Pythagorean Theorem was described in a long paragraph in China, in which three letters represent three sides of a right triangle and other mathematical symbols, which can be simplified as a2+b2 = c2. After a comprehensive study of history from multiple disciplines and angles, I believe that letters are the catalyst for the birth of scientific ideas and the effective development of democracy in ancient Greece, and the invention of letters is the most important invention in human history. The invention of characters is actually closely related to the special geographical environment and the commercial activities it triggered. 3) The carriers of writing (paper) and printing are social animals, which have accelerated the communication between different nationalities through commercial activities and wars. However, the wider spread of knowledge is also related to the carrier of words. With cheap text carriers (such as paper) and advanced printing, we can accelerate the spread and popularization of knowledge, greatly reduce the communication cost of society, improve the division of labor and cooperative production efficiency of human society, and accelerate social progress. Religion (philosophy) and ancestor worship of war, totem worship and nature worship are a way for human beings to deal with their relationship with nature that is still incomprehensible during the period of barbarism. When human beings encounter many natural phenomena that they can't understand and control, they feel that there is a supernatural god at work, so people create all kinds of gods and try to influence and control the nature that they can't understand and control through the worship of gods. In order to achieve this fantasy goal, primitive people created various ways to communicate with God, such as ancestor worship ceremony (including sacrifice and sacrifice), ritual ceremony, witchcraft, incantation, wearing protective gear, and drawing lots for divination. In the consciousness of primitive people, different things are managed by different gods, and there is a division of labor between gods, so the general primitive religion is polytheism. In China, religion is secular and practical polytheism. I want to fill my stomach and worship the kitchen god; Want to get rich, worship the god of wealth, and so on. In ancient Greece, people believed in many gods, such as the sun god, Venus god and so on. Later religions such as Christianity and Islam were monotheistic. In fact, the emergence of monotheism also has its objective social factors. The basic principle of western Christianity is the theory of original sin. Everyone is born guilty, so no one is supreme, and everyone must repent before God. Therefore, there are no infallible saints in the world, and it is not easy to form a long-term totalitarian concept. In addition, after the Roman emperor approved the spread of Christianity among the people, the western religious forces gradually became very powerful, especially in the Middle Ages, which sometimes could balance the state rights. In China, however, the emperor always has supreme power. The emperor's power has no boundaries, which offends the emperor and may often lead him to be completely humiliated. In addition to the emperor, no one else's private rights and private property can be truly protected. The bigger the official, the safer it is, and it is easy to form autocracy and official standard. The legal system to protect private property and give voters equal and balanced opportunities and conditions to know about candidates is the basic condition to ensure the effective implementation of democratic system. In the latest constitutional amendment of modern China, only when private property is legally protected can democracy in China really begin to be effectively implemented. Wars are often caused by the failure of normal and fair commodity exchange to compete for resources, or by religious and cultural conflicts. The war promoted the application, learning, exchange and development of technology, and also promoted the exchange and integration of religion, culture and race to a certain extent, such as the Crusade and Mongolia's conquest of Eurasia. (5) Other secondary factors, such as social system, law, education, etc., are evolved from the lifestyle and organizational style formed by adapting to the environment, and interact with the surrounding environment and social groups, affecting the subsequent development of the social system. China's long-term feudal monarchy is related to the geographical and climatic environment in the inland plain of China and the long-term use of unified characters evolved from hieroglyphics. There are many ethnic groups and dialects in China, most of which use Chinese characters, because Chinese characters have nothing to do with pronunciation. Using the same language ensures the unity of culture and national characteristics. For China's education, China's writing has no longer evolved into hieroglyphics, and it can only be learned by learning from teachers and memorizing by vision. Every word needs to be memorized by rote, thus forming an indoctrination education tradition that adapts to the writing. This kind of education mode is easy to cause students to learn and accept knowledge passively in class, which inhibits students' creativity. Compare English education in America with examples. In the United States, preschool children can easily master 26 letters through a variety of game-based teaching methods. After that, they will listen to adults and the media in a natural language communication environment, distinguish pronunciation syllables according to pronunciation, exercise spelling ability, summarize and master pronunciation rules, memorize words through spelling, and rarely memorize words by rote. Every year, the United States holds a national spelling competition to promote the spelling ability of children and teenagers. Thus, the autonomy of children and students' learning is promoted, and the education method is flexible and vivid.