In order to support this thesis I would like to draw upon my research over the past thirty years into the nature of communication, informatics, and language and their interrelationship. It all began in 1970 with my decision, as a physics professor who studied elementary particles and quarks, to share the ideas from my field with high school students and undergraduate humanities students at the University of Toronto. My course, The Poetry of Physics and the Physics of Poetry, was designed to provide liberal arts students who were challenged by mathematics with some much-needed science literacy. It also had the unintended result of starting me off in a whole new research direction which I have pursued ever since. I must confess that I am a physics prof who went astray into the humanities.

The Alphabet Effect
The first mystery I encountered in preparing material for my Poetry of Physics course was a puzzle presented by Joseph Needham, the great scholar of Chinese science and author of the book The Grand Titration (1969). He pointed out that abstract science had begun in Europe despite the fact that many technologies and inventions had emerged in China, ranging from paper, ink, printing, silk, and porcelain, to clockworks, water wheels, windmills, and the stirrup, just to mention a few. My first crack at this problem was to suggest that this was due to the fact that in the West there was a tradition of monotheism and codified law that gave rise to a notion of universal law, an essential building block of abstract Western science.

Lest the reader should think that I have a Eurocentric bias, I want to briefly make a few pertinent points. First, Chinese culture and philosophy was highly spiritual, but they did not have a monotheistic tradition. As well, they had a sophisticated system of law, but not one that could be thought of as codified. Second, science is a universal activity and major contributions were not made only by Chinese and European cultures. Hindu and Buddhist mathematicians made a critical contribution with the invention of the concept of zero, completely missed by the ancient Greeks. The idea of zero led to the notion of place numbers, negative numbers, algebra, infinity, and the infinitesimal, without which modern science and mathematics would not have been possible. Third, I wish to draw the reader’s attention to the contribution of Islamic culture, which rescued the early scientific works of the ancient Greeks and transmitted this body of work to European scholars at the end of the Middle Ages. But their contribution was more than just the transmission of this body of work because they vastly improved and enriched it, especially in the areas of chemistry and medicine. They also transmitted the notion of zero and place numbers and enriched mathematics. The words chemistry, algebra, and algorithm (which are derived from Arabic), and the term Arabic numerals are monuments to the contribution of Islamic culture to modern science and mathematics.