The movie "Tenchi - The Samurai Astronomer" is a wonderful story of Japan's equivalent to Galileo and Copernicus - a young man whose fascination with mathematics, and eventually astronomy, leads him to a decades long struggle to reform the Japanese calendar. Along the way, he faces rejection at every step by the Imperial court, who view any interference with the calendar as a challenge to their divine right, as ordinary men are not expected to be able to understand the complex workings of the heavens. He also wins the heart of a woman who ends up working alongside him on his experiments, standing in heat and rain and snow to make observations of the stars and help him predict, amongst other things, when the next solar eclipse is likely to take place. In the end, he is able to convince the deepest of skeptics and the Japanese calendar is finally modified.
There are a few key learnings from the movie that are worth discussing. The first is the realization of how difficult the scientific method really is. All that we take for granted today is the result of the hard work, and occasional genius, of people who had a gift for observation and rational analysis, and used it to improve our understanding of the world around us. Take Archimedes, who first observed the relationship between weight and volume displacement - every school kid knows the famous story of how he jumped out of his bathtub and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse when he realized the enormity of what he had discovered. The contribution from other ancient Greeks like Pythagoras, Euclid, Aristarchus and Democritus cannot be valued (the fact that Greece today is in such dire straits is truly heartbreaking when you look at the contribution from their civilization to all of mankind). And let's not leave out other civilizations like the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, all of whom have in some small way built up the disciplines of mathematics, natural sciences and astronomy. In all cases, the methods have been painstaking - tools have had to be developed from scratch where none existed previously, theories have been invented to explain the unexplainable - and there have been constant challenges to frustrate even the most dedicated scholar.
The second learning is that the establishment (in most cases, monarchs with absolute, or divine, power, and their associated lackeys) have typically been reluctant to accept the findings from scientists when it clashes with their "view" of the world. The persecution of Copernicus and later Galileo by the Catholic Church is known to everyone - in fact, the Church did not officially accept that the earth moved around the sun till sometime in the 20th century! Evolution is still up for debate - perhaps it will be a few more centuries before they finally come around.
Of all the fields of learning, astronomy has typically being the most contentious, because it deals with objects and concepts that are "not of this world" - but of the heavens. The movement of the sun and moon, phenomena such as eclipses and shooting stars and supernova, were all used by organized religion and the ruling class as a way to demonstrate their superiority over the masses, who were told that these were omens and signs from God or some supreme being. No religion has been immune from this blindness - an entirely priestly class evolved to be able to interpret these "signs", and elaborate rituals were constructed to propagate various myths. Which is why the thought that the occurence of an eclipse is simply the result of a few simple laws of motion and the alignment of the sun and moon, which can be understood by everyone, was so dangerous an idea.
I mentioned earlier that Tenchi had a passion for mathematics and then got involved in astronomy - in fact, most of the scientists from antiquity were skilled in a diversity of areas including philosophy, poetry, mathematics, medicine and so on. It is only in recent times that the concept of specialization in one single field has become the norm, this would be quite alien to the likes of Newton, Descartes or Faraday, let alone their predecessors from two millennia ago. This cross-discipline knowledge is, however, critical for dealing with problems, as at the base level, all the sciences are fundamentally linked.
Moving forward to the 21st century, the debate over climate change is the modern equivalent of the challenge that Tenchi and others have faced in the past. On the one hand is the established order that posits there is nothing to worry about, while another group has continuously raised the alarm about the potential havoc that might be wreaked on the planet if fossil fuel use is allowed to continue unchecked. The "climategate" emails from a few years ago is balanced by the near total loss of ice cover in the Arctic. And while the methods available to us are infinitely more sophisticated than those that Tenchi used, the deep entrenchment of the establishment is that much more formidable.
There are a few key learnings from the movie that are worth discussing. The first is the realization of how difficult the scientific method really is. All that we take for granted today is the result of the hard work, and occasional genius, of people who had a gift for observation and rational analysis, and used it to improve our understanding of the world around us. Take Archimedes, who first observed the relationship between weight and volume displacement - every school kid knows the famous story of how he jumped out of his bathtub and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse when he realized the enormity of what he had discovered. The contribution from other ancient Greeks like Pythagoras, Euclid, Aristarchus and Democritus cannot be valued (the fact that Greece today is in such dire straits is truly heartbreaking when you look at the contribution from their civilization to all of mankind). And let's not leave out other civilizations like the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, all of whom have in some small way built up the disciplines of mathematics, natural sciences and astronomy. In all cases, the methods have been painstaking - tools have had to be developed from scratch where none existed previously, theories have been invented to explain the unexplainable - and there have been constant challenges to frustrate even the most dedicated scholar.
The second learning is that the establishment (in most cases, monarchs with absolute, or divine, power, and their associated lackeys) have typically been reluctant to accept the findings from scientists when it clashes with their "view" of the world. The persecution of Copernicus and later Galileo by the Catholic Church is known to everyone - in fact, the Church did not officially accept that the earth moved around the sun till sometime in the 20th century! Evolution is still up for debate - perhaps it will be a few more centuries before they finally come around.
Of all the fields of learning, astronomy has typically being the most contentious, because it deals with objects and concepts that are "not of this world" - but of the heavens. The movement of the sun and moon, phenomena such as eclipses and shooting stars and supernova, were all used by organized religion and the ruling class as a way to demonstrate their superiority over the masses, who were told that these were omens and signs from God or some supreme being. No religion has been immune from this blindness - an entirely priestly class evolved to be able to interpret these "signs", and elaborate rituals were constructed to propagate various myths. Which is why the thought that the occurence of an eclipse is simply the result of a few simple laws of motion and the alignment of the sun and moon, which can be understood by everyone, was so dangerous an idea.
I mentioned earlier that Tenchi had a passion for mathematics and then got involved in astronomy - in fact, most of the scientists from antiquity were skilled in a diversity of areas including philosophy, poetry, mathematics, medicine and so on. It is only in recent times that the concept of specialization in one single field has become the norm, this would be quite alien to the likes of Newton, Descartes or Faraday, let alone their predecessors from two millennia ago. This cross-discipline knowledge is, however, critical for dealing with problems, as at the base level, all the sciences are fundamentally linked.
Moving forward to the 21st century, the debate over climate change is the modern equivalent of the challenge that Tenchi and others have faced in the past. On the one hand is the established order that posits there is nothing to worry about, while another group has continuously raised the alarm about the potential havoc that might be wreaked on the planet if fossil fuel use is allowed to continue unchecked. The "climategate" emails from a few years ago is balanced by the near total loss of ice cover in the Arctic. And while the methods available to us are infinitely more sophisticated than those that Tenchi used, the deep entrenchment of the establishment is that much more formidable.
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