FANGLIZHI
659
earth's radius, yielding results very close to modem measurements.
In contrast, Chinese astronomers, while realizing that this discrep–
ancy in the sun's angle indicated that the earth was not perfectly flat,
came up with a compromise model. They hypothesized that the cities in
which they dwelled indeed rested on a somewhat curved surface but that
the earth as a whole was still flat. According to the Chinese model, the
land was a slice of a hemisphere floating in a flat ocean. Therefore, even
though Chinese measurements of the difference between the angles of the
sun in the northern and southern sky were no less accurate than those of
the Greeks, the Chinese never used these measurements to calculate the
radius of the earth, since they never actually envisioned the earth as being
spherical.
It is clear that creativity in scientific thinking depends much upon
one's image of the world, and one's image of the world is influenced by
one's cultural background.
It
is precisely in this way that cultural con–
cepts of beauty can exert a shaping influence on scientific progress. The
Austrian physicist Ernst Mach wrote:
In studying nature, we cannot help but apply our knowledge of the
interrelationships between the various phenomena under investigation.
What we imagine to be the underlying causes for the observed phe–
nomena is limited by our understanding of the world.... The fact
that observed phenomena often appear random or arbitrary to us
makes our perception particularly susceptible to the vagaries of our
cultural background.
The theory of the round earth is the first famous triumph of the
culturally-influenced world view that perceives the universe as fundamen–
tally beautiful and harmonious. Another famous example is the heliocen–
tric view of the universe. A long-standing popular view of epistemology
is that the course of human knowledge rather consistently follows the
sequence, "experience
->
understanding
->
further experience
->
greater understanding." Throughout the literature subscribing to this
epistemological model, the development of the theory of the heliocen–
tric solar system has always been attributed to the fact that the earlier
earth-centered model ran into difficulty in explaining and predicting the
observed movements of celestial bodies, and that thus the heliocentric
view was developed. Such an account, however, is simply not historically
accurate.
What compelled Copernicus to develop the heliocentric model ac–
tually had nothing to do with any supposed superiority of the sun-cen–
tered model in explaining the movements of the celestial bodies. In fact,
all of the observations explained and predicted by the heliocentric model
