Could the West be consigned to history? Without superior science there would be no Western superpower today. But it wasn’t always like this. A thousand years ago it was the Muslim world that was at the cutting edge of science. Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: Is the West History? II, Channel 4 2011
For the Ottoman empire it was the beginning of the end. A moment of imperial overstretch with disastrous consequences. It was actually the first time the Ottomans had had to accept a peace treaty from victorious Christian adversities. ibid.
In stark contrast the Ottomans’ progress was severely hampered by religion. In the words of one Muslim cleric: ‘It is rare that someone becomes absorbed in this foreign science without renouncing religion and letting go the reins of piety within him.’ ibid.
Muslim scientists could not even access the latest research from Europe. Because their religion now prevented them from reading printed books. For the Ottomans script was sacred. ibid.
In Ottoman schools science yielded to narrow religious study. ibid.
Abdul [Hamid] was determined to emulate Western civilisation in every respect. ibid.
Fourteen tons of gold leaf were used to guild the palace ceilings, from which hung a grand total of thirty-six chandeliers ... This place is so wildly over the top it’s a like a cross between Grand Central Station and the Grand Paris Opera. But it shows just how far the Ottomans was prepared to go to imitate the ways of the West. ibid.
The Ottomans still didn’t really get it. Because if they were serious with catching up with the West they needed so much more than just a Western-style palace. They needed a new constitution. A new alphabet. A whole new state. And the fact they ended up getting all of these things was thanks in very large part to one man: his name was Kemal Ataturk. His mission was to be Turkey’s Frederick the Great. ibid.
For six centuries the Christian West and the Ottoman empire in the Muslim east had been locked in conflict. Now under the rule of Kemal Ataturk in the early twentieth century that conflict would finally come to an end. For centuries, Ataturk argued, Turks had been walking from the East in the direction of the West. Now under his leadership they would finally reach their destination. Here on the banks of the Bosphorus, East would meet West. Not just geographically but culturally. Central to the Western orientation of Turkey was the introduction of a secular form of government. No longer would religion be allowed to dominate the political arena. There would be secular laws for a secular state. ibid.
In the West science and enlightened government worked in tandem. And no monarch understood this better than Frederick the Great who offered scientists cash prizes for solutions to unsolved problems. Yet rulers like Frederick were interested in science for more than intellectual reasons. ibid.
The Eastern world is finally acknowledging that there is no power without brain power. ibid.
For more than 1,500 years Christians saw the Bible as the primary source of knowledge. But in the seventeenth century a new movement emerged that challenged the Christian view of the world. What we now call science emerged about 400 years ago through the work of a group of European thinkers who discovered new ways of interpreting the world. They no longer relied on the delivered word of God. The scientific revolution put individual curiosity, enquiry, reason, and experiment above religious dogma. And to my mind science is quite simply the biggest challenge that Christianity will ever have to face. Professor Colin Blakemore, Christianity: A History: God and the Scientists s1e7, BBC 2009
The Vatican realised that Capurnicus’s speculations contradicted the Biblical view that the Earth is stationary. At the centre of the universe. But it was willing to tolerate his ideas for now. Capurnicus’s new theory soon pitted Christianity and science against itself. In the scientific revolution’s darkest hour. ibid.
Galileo Galilei was one of the most respected scientists. He helped the Vatican set up its first observatory in Rome and taught astronomy at the finest universities in the Catholic world. ibid.
Thinkers such as Isaac Newton and John Lock realised that the laws of the universe were there to be discovered not read about in the Bible. It was the Age of Enlightenment. Democracy, freedom and science replaced religion at the heart of society. For me the person who epitomises the Enlightenment is an American: Benjamin Franklin. ibid.
Unlike religion, science can change its views if the evidence demands it. That’s the power of science. ibid.
I believe that science will increasingly make religion redundant. And will eventually provide us with an understanding not only of creation but also of ourselves. ibid.
Mathematics seems to permeate Nature ... almost as if God is a master mathematician who has constructed the universe in mathematical forms. Horizon: A Mathematical Problem, BBC 1984
French engineers and scientists are building a great scientific machine. It’s a nuclear accelerator called the Vivitron. It’s cost eight billion pounds. And part of it has come from Britain. Horizon: An Expensive Theology, BBC 1992
They’re working with the nucleus of the magnesium atom. The magnesium atoms are accelerated down this huge tower ... The nuclei are fired into a target also of magnesium. ibid.
The funding was established by treaty. ibid.
The first Cyclotron was a giant of its day. ibid.
The collision creates a tiny fireball getting close to the Big Bang at the start of our universe. ibid.
Quarks: five have been detected. ibid.
Cern costs three hundred and fifty million pounds a year ... Cern is governed by international treaty. ibid.
Mrs Thatcher even visited Cern to enthuse over the experiments. ibid.
The particle physicists are asking for funds for the next stage of their research. ibid.
The Americans are planning an even bigger rival. Here in Texas they’ve started construction on the Superconducting Super Collider. ibid.
Science is often not the tiny progress towards truth that people think. The past frontiers of science are strewn with half-formed ideas and temporary lash-ups of equipment. These graduate students are Phds and they are building apparatus that could lead to a revolution in our understanding of science ... To pick up radiation from the edges of space. Horizon: Whispers of Creation, BBC 1994
One of science’s greatest theories – evolution – is under attack. The threat is emerging from the only scientific superpower on Earth, provoking some of the biggest names in science to hit back. Horizon: A War on Science, BBC 2006
This is the story of a battle between faith and knowledge. A defining moment in the scientific landscape of the twentieth century. ibid.
Irreducible complexity was a simple but provocative idea. It was based on the observation of natural machines whose parts are so inter-dependant that they could not have evolved. ibid.
What if the world is so strange we could never hope to understand it. And science was wasting its time trying to do so. It sounds like the sort of thing a mystic might say. But this was a suggestion made three decades ago by the most famous scientist in the world – Stephen Hawking. Horizon: The Hawking Paradox, BBC 2005
After thirty years of debate Stephen Hawking’s legacy is being called into question as never before. This is the story of his most controversial theory and perhaps his greatest mistake. ibid.
The doubts about Hawking have recently crystalised around an idea he proposed over thirty years ago. He called it the Information Paradox. It is an idea that has provoked one of the great intellectual battles of recent times. Between the most famous scientist in the world and those determined to prove him wrong. ibid.
Bits of the universe were disappearing ... Hawking was saying that a black hole would eventually disappear. ibid.
The Information Paradox, according to Susskind, was solved. Now across the world physicists raced to confirm it. Finally after ten years and hundreds of attempts a paper emerged that vindicated Susskind. ibid.
Hawking’s speech turned out to be one of the great U-turns of science. For information he now admitted was not lost in black holes after all. The idea he had defended for thirty years had been wrong all along. ibid.
In 2006 Horizon looked at what can happen when Science and the Bible conflict. Horizon: The End of God? A Horizon Guide to Science and Religion, BBC 2010
The Natural History Museum in Oxford was packed with nearly a thousand spectators. Making the case for Evolution was a young biologist called Thomas Huxley known as Darwin’s Bulldog. He was one of a new generation who thought Religion should play no part in the business of Science. Standing against the Theory of Evolution was the Bishop of Oxford, Thomas Wilberforce. ibid.
Behind Galileo’s downfall were two questions that are central to the whole story of Science and Religion: Who owns knowledge? and What makes one source of knowledge more reliable than another? ibid.
For thousands of years science has tried to understand the mysteries of the night sky. Horizon: What Happened Before the Big Bang? BBC 2010
The Big Bang is an elegant answer to the biggest question that science can ever ask. It’s a startling idea. It gives us a sense of origin. ibid.
The Big Bang doesn’t quite work. So much so that people are now starting to think the unthinkable ... It’s all effect and no cause. ibid.
The mathematical objection is that as the clock is wound back and Hubble’s zero hour is approached all the stuff of the universe is crammed into a smaller and smaller space. Eventually, that space will become infinitely small. And in mathematics invoking infinity is the same as giving up. Or cheating. ibid.
Dr [Laura] Mersini-Houghton’s idea was to manipulate the mechanics of that waveform with a branch of mathematics called String Theory. It seemed to provide an elegant solution as to why our universe emerged in the first place. ibid.
Today, there is a new kind of battle. It’s not just a clash of ideas, but whether people actually trust Science. One of the most vocal arguments currently raging is about Climate Science. Many people seem unconvinced that we are warming our planet through the emission of greenhouse gases. Horizon: Science Under Attack, BBC 2011, Paul Nurse
Science created our modern world. So I want to understand why Science appears to be under such attack. ibid.
I always tell my students and post-doctoral workers – be the worst enemy of your own idea. Always challenge it. Always test it. ibid.