Talk:List of Chinese discoveries

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Finite element method

I have added the finite element method to the list of modern Chinese discoveries, but I'm not sure whether it belongs here. FEM was developed in China by Feng Kang, and in the West, independently of each other but at around the same time. --jftsang 19:50, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sources

Two basic problems. One is the age of the sources. I see that one source is 50 years old. Even some of the material from Joseph Needham and his Science and Civilization project is obsolete. And in particular Robert Temple is not a reliable source. "In a review of The Genius of China Peter Golas wrote that " Temple is not very good at qualifying. He seizes with, unabashed enthusiasm on any Chinese advance that might be seen to prefigure a later development in the west. In doing so, he all too often overstates or misstates the facts." Golas also notes that Temple relies almost exclusively on the work of Joseph Needham and the Science and Civilisation in China, ignoring later research which has made some of the texts Temple used obsolete.^[1] In the Beijing Review Needham himself criticized the book writing that it had "some mistakes ... and various statements that I would like to have seen expressed rather differently".^[2]" Doug Weller talk 13:30, 22 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ Golas, Peter (December 1991). "Review of Robert Temple "The Genius of China"". Chinese Science. 10: 66-68. Retrieved 22 April 2016.
^ Ling Yuan (Mar 23, 1987). "East-West: Bridging the Scientific Chasm" (PDF). Beijing Review. Retrieved 2011-02-06.

I absolutely agree when it comes to Robert K. G. Temple; the man is a kook and his 1986 book is not a reliable source. That being said, while Needham's work is somewhat old and in some specific cases outdated, it is still a reliable source, a Cambridge University Press series no less. Joseph Needham wasn't some fringe author; he was a fellow of the Royal Society, a fellow of the British Academy, and remains one of the most highly regarded Sinologists of the 20th century. Its reliability is only challenged on a minor case-by-case basis where new circumstantial evidence has surfaced in the past few decades to refute certain claims found in his rather large volume of work. To paint this entire vast corpus of writing as unreliable is an untenable statement. Regards, Pericles of Athens^Talk 05:23, 4 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Cultural context

See and comment here. tl;dr Absolutely, no question, improve sourcing and keep everything factual to the best knowledge of current scholarship. On the other hand, we absolutely should be (briefly) mentioning the traditional legends concerning early inventions. They're actually central to Chinese culture and shouldn't be impossible for WP:READERs to get to from here. — LlywelynII 15:04, 25 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

[1] Golas, Peter (December 1991). "Review of Robert Temple "The Genius of China"". Chinese Science. 10: 66-68. Retrieved 22 April 2016.

[2] Ling Yuan (Mar 23, 1987). "East-West: Bridging the Scientific Chasm" (PDF). Beijing Review. Retrieved 2011-02-06.

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