Science and Civilization in China

What Hacker News says

1. jaimeogAug 2016
   For most of human history China has been the most innovative country in the world. It has only been over the last several hundred years that this has not been the case. So claiming lack of cultural foundation for innovation is just wrong. "Gunpowder, the magnetic compass, and paper and printing, which Francis Bacon considered as the three most important inventions facilitating the West's transformation from the Dark Ages to the modern world, were invented in China" Joseph Needham points this out magnificently in his magnum opus, "Science and Civilization in China". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Needham#Science_and_Civ...
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2. megaman22Sep 2015
   Needham's Science and Civilization in China volumes are a fascinating resource. Particularly interesting, and somewhat inexplicable, is that China was poised on the verge of an industrial revolution during the Song dynasty, in the 12th century. Steel production reached levels not surpassed until the English and American mills ramped up in the 19th century. The Grand Canal was possibly the greatest transportation project ever completed, before the invention of railroads. The banking system used by Song merchants may have been the most complex before the modern era.

   Much of this progress was destroyed by the combination of the Mongol conquest and the subsequent wave of rebellions that unseated them and brought about the Ming dynasty. It's possibly the most destructive series of wars in history.

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3. eesmithOct 2026
   As the article characterizes it:

   "Eventually, early capitalists in Europe invested in Johannes Gutenberg’s business venture—the one that combined technology quite like the movable type innovated by Choe Yun-ui with a screw-threaded spiral mechanism from a wine or olive press to ratchet up printing to commercial speeds."

   where

   "Choe came up with an alternative. Building on earlier Chinese attempts to create movable type, he adapted a method that had been used for minting bronze coins to cast 3-dimensional characters in metal. Then he arranged these pieces in a frame, coated them with ink, and used them to press sheets of paper. When he was done, he could reorganize the metal characters, eliminating the need to persistently chisel blocks."

   When viewed through a pedant's lens, where do you set the line which says something is the first printing press?

   As the article points out, Jikji ("Anthology of Great Buddhist Priests' Zen Teachings") was printed on metal movable type long before Gutenberg, and yes, using a method different than Gutenberg. How does the lack of a screw make it not a printing press?

   (I tried looking for more details about how that press worked, but failed, with most people referring to the Wikipedia page, and the academic publications behind paywalls.)

   But really, my comment is centered on "The printing press is often said to have been created by Gutenberg ... this is how the story is rendered in most books".

   I, perhaps naively, though that most books mention that printing presses existed before Gutenberg, but Gutenberg greatly transformed it capabilities. Indeed, the author specially says that "The Lost Gutenberg" does not claim that Gutenberg created the printing press and mentions the earlier efforts, albeit in passing.

   I really do not like the comment "The fantastical idea that Gutenberg alone invented the printing press ignores an entire continent and several centuries of relevant efforts and makes no effort to understand how or why technology might have spread". It sounds like a a diffusionist argument to say there must be a connection when we know many examples of multiple independent inventions - as I recall from a history podcast, Needham started his studies when he learned that grafting plants in China was done differently than he learned it in England.

   Oh, and "the scholar Tsien Tsuen-Hsien wrote in Science and Civilization in China in 1985" is the author of the book from the Needham series I linked to.

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4. connorboyleJun 2026
   I gave it a question I've been trying to answer for a long time: "What star designation system does Joseph Needham use in Science & Civilization in China? What star is referred to by the designation '4339 Camelopardi' in that book"?

   Fable blew me away with its detailed answer[0] showing a chain of references going from J. E. Bode's 1801 catalogue Allgemeine Beschreibung und Nachweisung der Gestirne to Gustave Schlegel's 1875 work Uranographie Chinoise. I was excited, until I checked scanned copies of the cited books and did not actually find any star with the designation "4339 Camelopardi".

   Upon following up with Claude, I was forced to downgrade to Opus, which admitted that Fable's answer was likely a hallucination. Ah, well!

   [0]: https://claude.ai/share/0252a3f6-3d29-4de8-a893-010181d8b4e7

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5. mihaicSep 2024
   I recently went through Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China, and in the second volume he skimmed a bit too quickly through Xunzi.

   As a western analogy, my overall impression was of a Chinese Plato, broad and nuanced in many aspects.

   I think all his teachings were lessons for that time and place, as he for instance rejected a deep understanding of the natural world that didn't provide immediate benefits -- that made sense back then, but would have failed to give us science as we know it. In the end, we have to look to ourselves to get us out of the mess we're in today.

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