Why there has been no one from mainland China who won the Nobel Prize has become the contemporary Needham's Question. These two questions are inter-related and quite similar and deserve further reflections. During the anti-Japanese war, Joseph Needham had been the Science Counselor in British Embassy in China. He wrote a book titled “Science Outpost”, in which he was fully confident in the future of the Chinese science. It is a pity that there is no Chinese translation of the full text of this book. The objective attitude that Joseph Needham had shown in the study of the Chinese history of science was highly commendable.
It is well-known that Confucianism has exerted the greatest impact on the thinking and behavior of the Chinese people. The conservatism in Confucianism is regarded as the biggest reason that western scientific thinking was difficult to be absorbed in China in the past 300 years. In the traditional Chinese culture, great importance has been attached to conformity. This value has impeded the innovative spirit of the Chinese people. The Chinese people has been brainwashed by ideas such as stressing the past instead of the present, accepting one’s fate, being content with the status quo, and going with the stream for a considerable period of time. Moreover, the thinking mode of the Chinese people tends to be empirical. Therefore, the natural phenomenon has been personified and compared to morality. Practicability was overly stressed in research. And there was a lack of in-depth exploration on the theories and laws of the objective things.
Most of the so-called theoretical innovation in China is just the interpretation of the theories of some politicians instead of real innovation. There is some free academic atmosphere in China compared with the situation before the reform and opening-up. However, the mentality of “the ruler guides the subject; the father guides the son and the husband guides the wife” has existed in China for thousands of years, which has severely imprisoned scholars and resulted in the fact that top priority is given to seniority and authority. There is no academic equality, which is not conducive to the full play of the creativity of middle-aged or especially young researchers.
When talking about why there has been no one from mainland China winning the Nobel Prize, Yang Zhenning explicitly pointed out: “the Golden Mean Doctrine is not the best for scientific development. The reason that the Geometric Law of Euclid was not developed in China is that the inquisitive scientific attitude revealed in it deviates from the Chinese cultural tradition which advocates the mean and impugns the maverick. This cultural mechanism is not conducive to the cultivation of maverick scientific talents.”
The survey on the American Nobel Prize winner shows that the prize winning is closely related to the continuity of several generations. That is to say that the accumulation and creation of knowledge is not only related to the work of forefathers, but also the intellectual relay of several generations. Some research done abroad have proved that the birth of a Nobel Science Prize winner requires the knowledge acquisition of at least three generations, showing the important role of the social, educational, and research environment including the family education. The impact of the “knowledge heritage” is mainly manifested in the unconscious inheritance of the academic attitude, research methodology and thinking habits of their predecessors.
There are some prominent problems in China such as the insufficient knowledge acquisition of the Chinese scientists and the shortage of scientist groups. Some sampling estimates have done on the middle-aged and senior academicians in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The result shows that less than 39% of them were born in professional families, and less than 10% of their children are engaged in high-level scientific research. There is a lack of team spirit among Chinese research workers. Many of them look down upon each other and are hard to cooperate with, which is greatly incompatible with the tendency of collective efforts in scientific study. Before Ding Zhaozhong won the Nobel Prize in 1976, not many researchers participated in the experiments of finding the evidences of beauty quark. By 1995, more than two experiment groups comprising of more than 800 people were searching the evidences for top quark. The world in the future is turning into a “research village” where some Chinese phenomena will be hugely unfit, such as the facts that priorities given to seniority and many people would rather be the tail of a lion than the head of a dog.
Nobel Prizes are awarded to the original innovative science and technology which can exert huge impact on human civilization and social progress. Three factors are crucial in the winning of the Nobel Prize: efforts, opportunity and team spirit. Many scientists have realized that cooperating with the Nobel Prize winner or masters of the same level, becoming their students, earnestly study their papers, or make further explorations based on their output is shortcut in winning the Nobel Prize. However, this goal cannot be reached if there is a lack of team spirit.
Editor: Dong Lin
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