I once suggested that monotheism and codified law, two features of Western culture absent in China, led to a notion of universal law, which influenced the development of abstract science in ancient Greece. When I first shared this hypothesis with my coworker Marshall McLuhan, he agreed with me but pointed out that I had failed to take into account the phonetic alphabet, another feature of the West lacking in China, which had also contributed to the development of Western science. Together we developed the hypothesis that the highly abstract thought patterns in the West that lead to abstract theoretical science developed, in part, because of the development of the phonetic alphabet.
China created what was probably the most sophisticated form of nonabstract science the world has known. But technological sophistication by itself does not guarantee the development of abstract theoretical science. Other factors (social, economic and cultural), obviously present in ...
