A Panoramic View of Chinese Culture by Wu Dingming

Author:Wu Dingming
Language: zho
Format: epub
ISBN: 9787544712255
Published: 2010-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

There were many famous inventors and early scientists in the Song Dynasty. The statesman Shen Kuo is best known for his book known as the Dream Pool Essays. In it, he wrote of the use for a dry dock to repair boats, the navigational magnetic compass, and the discovery of the concept of true north (with magnetic declination towards the North Pole. Shen Kuo also devised a geological theory for land formation, or geomorphology, and theorized that there was climate change in geological regions over an enormous span of time. The equally talented statesman Su Song (1020—1101 AD) is best known for his engineering project of the Water-driven Astronomical Clock Tower of Kaifeng, by 1088 AD. The clock tower was driven by a rotating waterwheel and escapement mechanism, the latter of which did not appear in clockworks of Europe until two centuries later. Crowning the top of the clock tower was the large bronze, mechanically-driven, rotating armillary sphere. In 1070, Su Song also compiled the Ben Cao Tu Jing (Illustrated Pharmacopoeia) with a team of scholars. This pharmaceutical treatise covered a wide range of other related subjects, including botany, zoology, mineralogy, and metallurgy.

Chinese astronomers were also among the first to record observations of a supernova, in 1054, making the Crab Nebula the first astronomical object recognized as being connected to a supernova explosion. Arabic and Chinese astronomy intermingled under the Mongol rule of the Yuan Dynasty. Muslim astronomers worked in the Chinese astronomical bureau established by Kublai Khan, while some Chinese astronomers also worked at the Persian Maragha observatory. (Before this, in ancient times, Indian astronomers had lent their expertise to the Chinese court.)

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