Getting discovery to stick: 1421, 1434, and why the Great Scientists we adore are actually not that adorable.

• Newton Discovered Gravity.
• Columbus Discovered The Americas
• Einstein Discovered Relativity

The people above are those credited with the description of the phenomenom that has stuck in the present canon of history. But for someone to get credit for a discovery, it actually needs to get discovered a number of times, over many years, and then for some reason one version 'sticks' in the historical record and that makes that person a Great Man (or more rarely Great Woman).
I conjecture that the Great Discoveries, and more specifically our adoration of the 'genius' people who made such Great Discoveries, are simply the most recent version.

On an individual basis, we all need to learn things several times before they stick. Ever tried to teach yourself to juggle? Try it, it's fun, and apparently good for your peripheral vision and thought speed. You will 'get the hang' of' juggling several times, and then weeks or months later you will have forgotten it and have to re-discover it. I remember needing to learn how to dive about 4 times in consecutive summers before it stuck. Our brains need to learn, and practice, and lose it, and learn again, and lose it again, and learn it again and again before the new thing is integrated into our being, before the synapses are established and co-opted properly into their new job.


I don't think discovery in the collective mind is any different. I think we have to learn things many times, each generation, in order to bring it into the collective body of knowledge. And the collective contribution is only what the collective mind can tolerate.

I have just finished a pretty torrid but nevertheless interesting book called 1434; The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance.
Poor Gavin Menzies is the punching bag of a series of well-read academic types in a number of fields. His book is not a properly peer-reviewed cross-referenced and footnoted dissertation. He likes maps, and astronomical navigation, and Leonardo da Vinci, and talks a lot about all of them. . Neither does the author clearly differentiate between speculation and well-evidenced historical factoid. I found some of his 'minor' evidence quite compelling: genome haplotypes on certain Dalmatian islands, sudden changes in the depiction of stars on chapel roofs etc. But I got bored and bogged down in all the map/globe stuff and endless comparisons between long-shelved drawings of river locks and extracts of ancient metallurgy texts. repetitive map footnotes talking about 47 carts of pepper per day consumed in Canton (now Guangzhou), and a series of Renaissance Men.

His main point, however, is that Chinese travellers to Italy caused the Renaissance. His theory is the conjunction of three historical factoids.

• In 1434, the Chinese Ming dynasty had maps and navigation and astronomical and mathematical  knowledge way ahead of the Europeans (this is more or less historically established); 
• The Europeans (specifically Florentines) made massive rapid leaps in science and technology at about the same time as a substantial number of sexy Asiatic slave girls messed with the Florentine social order; 
• Just about all of the major documented technological, agricultural and military advances of the early Renaissance can be cross-referenced to some Chinese texts which are about 100 years older. To illustrate, he traces every one of Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions back to an old Chinese booklet, which he alledges was copied by the Sienese engineer Mariano Taccola.

Given this - and scraps of genetic evidence and folk stories - Menzies proposes that one particular Chinese admiral took his fleet to Europe, handed out a whole bunch of booklets, traded slave girls, and left in his wake the explosion of the Renaissance.

Whether or not Menzies is "right" about this Chinese fleet, he raises an interesting point. The history of discovery is quite different to the reality of discovery.


Chris Stringer, in The Origin of Our Species (which I found very much more engrossing than Gavin's book, sorry mate) talks about genetic evidence for wave after wave of migration, conquest, decline and elimination worldwide, of pockets of humanity. Technology and architecture develops and grows and then in spots it collapses and then it is sparked again and grows again. We rebuild on genetic ruins as well as the ruins of old cities. Mitochondrial (maternal) DNA mutations show dramatically different migration patterns to Y-chromosome (male) DNA mutations. For example, in New Zealand, evidence suggests that Polynesian conquerors came in from a different direction to the previous immigraiton wave from Australia,  and killed many of the men and took many women as wives, and now a high proportion of Maoris carry mitochondrial Australian Aboriginal DNA, but Polynesian y-chromosomes. Their genes carry the 'sins' of the long-forgotten forefathers. As do we all.

But back to Gavin and the Renaissance. Menzies' long-winded book. Menzies seems to want to 'set History right' and give the Chinese fleet more credit. SO credit is the issue of discovery.

I propose that the history of discovery is more about claiming the credit. That is not to say that the discoverer didn't do anything; just that they overstated their case. When Google Scholar's startup page offers that you can "Stand on the Shoulders of Giants", they are recognising that this is what Great Discoverers have done for all of recorded Western history. And they are offering you the opportunity to do it too.

SO my original conjecture.

Newton did not discover gravity. Every child who has ever dropped food off their high chair has discovered gravity and is running experiments.
Newton did described gravity mathematically for the first time in Western historical memory, and this was an important contribution. He also claimed the glory wth great gusto, by publishing through the Royal Society the Principa Mathematica (isn't that a somewhat arrogant title?) and by standing over the next generation of physicists as a President and Grand Old Man of the Royal Society, knighted by the Queen, member of Parliament, standardising the amount of silver in the currency, and prolifically corresponding with anyone on anything.
However, the astrophysicist who conceptualised the gravity well, and spat space and time into more dimensions, is not remembered by name at all.

Columbus is credited with the discovery of the Americas because he was the key person in the last wave who claimed the discovery. He had a mindset, not of curiosity, but of claiming credit in order to get the Spanish royalty to make him Admiral of the new world and give him a knighthood. In contrast, if Gavin Menzies is indeed "right" about China discovering the Americas in 1421, perhaps they didn't attempt to claim it is that they didn't frame it as a discovery. They assumed that it was already ruled by someone else, and didn't plan to interfere, knowing the administrative nightmare of taking it on.There was no big social advantage in China of conquest, so why bother?

Einstein is put forwardas the ultimate genius of the modern age. As a child, I remember being fascinated by a documentary about a pathologist who had dissected Einstein's brain and found an extra fold in the right frontal lobe. This was supposed to make him the genius that he was. My modern reading on neuroscience shows how woefully inadequate this explanation is.
So what did Einstein actually do?
He had a very clever original idea about the photoelectric effect, which was indeed revolutionary. In and around other scientists' discoveries, Einstein also came up with some maths to reframe space and time as the same thing - except we can only travel in one direction in the time dimension. But it was a very generative time in physics in general, and Einstein's big interest was in claiming a great discovery. Even Wiki says he wrote 300 technical papers and 150 non-technical works in his effort to make a comfortable living from simply being a smart fellow. Titles included, "On the General Molecular Theory of Heat", "A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions",  "On Science and Religion". They don't sound like humble scientific papers. They sound like blog titles. In any case, I am sure you can see that he was a big fan of his own genius.

So how come, in the 21st century, we can 're-discover' the 'truth' of prior discovery, and bring DaVinci,  Newton, Columbus, and Einstein down a peg or two in the collective firmament?

I propose that any society is very careful to forget or ignore known historical achievements that are beyond what we can conceptualise doing. We hate to feel inferior to the long-dead. We only look at the technology of the past when we can safely say "Oh look, they were still grunting and spit-roasting rats and picking each others' fleas". So Menzies' proposal only gets published because we now have widespread use of Newton's calculus, and GPS, and nobody needs to calculate longitudes using stars or clocks anymore.

So the tricks to being a Great Discoverer:
1) Find a new-ish idea and have a really good reason to take credit for it. Like a knighthood or a Nobel Prize. Market it to the scientific masses. Iterate the idea a few times, and draw a fabulous picture.
2) Quietly forget to mention your sources. Pretend it all came from your own brain.
3) Target your market. If in science, pick an idea just a little bit more complicated than the current cutting-edge. Don't try to propose anything too radical - the scientific community might feel inferior come after you with pitchforks. For example, don't try to propose planetary orbits to 12th-century Papists. Don't try to propose hygiene to 19th century Dutch obstetricians. Don't try to propose energy medicine and reiki to 21st century orthapedic surgeons.
4) Be a bit more fluent in academic structures, paradigms and language than Gavin Menzies. Newton had equations. Columbus had maps and charts - the academic structure of the time. And Einstein got very slick at producing papers.
5) Live a long time, get important, and dump on anyone younger than you who challenges your ideas too much. History is not written by the victor so much as the survivor.

Dear Gavin,
Your books 1421 and 1434 have certainly achieved 1) and 2). You are not comfortably established in your target market of academia, but you have great traction in the fiction-reading web-researching public (says me haha). But you do need to get your 4) sorted out, your peer-reviewed academic credentials. The real test of whether you get to keep your discovery is whether you live long enough to defend it. Good luck with that, buddy.
Sincerely
Lexskigator.