Some epistemologists define the beginning of (western) science when researchers stopped writing in Latin and switched to their native languages. But for centuries only a couple of languages dominated, like German and French. Since mid 20th century you can’t do serious science anymore without writing papers in English.
Until a couple of years ago, the best Chinese scientists worked in the US or in Europe, but that has changed. Microsoft research for example has only three offices, and guess where? Seattle, Cambridge, and Beijing.
I do peer reviews for a couple of journals, and the number of (English) papers from Chinese scientists I see passing by (and getting published) has skyrocketed in just about 5 years. Some international journals have almost been “taken over” by Asian scientists. We have now Asian conferences with very high reputation on the same subjects as we had international and European conferences.
I saw the first references to papers written in Chinese recently appear in papers submitted to international journals.
So, what do you think - do we need to learn Mandarin soon?
Even if it was coincident in time, I fail to see how this is a great advance. Scientists need to be able to communicate with each other, no matter where they’re from, and the easiest way to do that is for everyone to use one common language. One can certainly argue over what that one language should be, but I can’t see any benefit to everyone writing in their own native tongue: That would require everyone to learn a dozen languages each, instead of just one or two.
Well, I did not define it that way, but I think that point was that science could finally be understood by “common people” because even in the middle ages Latin was not commonly spoken anymore. Latin was basically spoken by monks and a handful of elite “scientists”, and that’s it.
I’d say the answer is “never”. From everything I’ve ever heard it’s both difficult to learn and awkward to write with. The Chinese are willing to put up with that difficulty because it’s their language; outsiders have no such sentimental attachment.
Well, believe me, most English papers I read and which have been written by Chinese are terribly written, sometimes hardly understandable - the initial not yet published versions I mean. The Chinese put up with English because they need to, its a necessity for a career.
We will put of with Chinese if it will be necessary in order to get published in the best journals.
Btw, slightly off topic, Bobby Fisher learned Russian to be able to read Russion books on chess. Russian apparently is one of the most difficult languages based on letters, if not the most difficult.
As a spoken language, I suppose the Chinese could take over as the #1 science country and I suppose they could force their language to become the lingua franca of science. But I don’t think they could ever force non-Chinese to learn the written language. They would have to write either in a Roman or other alphabetic script or else in something like the Japanese kata kana.
I would have thought that scientific communication was enhanced when everyone wrote in Latin.
As technical editor for a mathematics journal, I might ask a non-English-speaking author to have his paper edited by someone who is fluent in English, but generally speaking they are understandable even when the English is not elegant.
Of course, in mathematics (and to a lesser but still significant degree in physics), the real meat of the work isn’t in English (nor Chinese nor Latin) anyway, but in the mathematical symbols.
There’s a quantity/quality issue as well. There may be tons of papers coming out of China, but the high impact journals are still filled with papers from the US and Europe.
When I go to conferences and talk to scientists from China, I’m struck by how little science they can do due to lack of funds and infrastructure. Experiments I take entirely for granted are terribly difficult to run in Chinese institutions.
I just don’t see a lot of quality biology coming out of China yet. Not to say that there aren’t tons of Chinese doing great and important science, but most of those have come to the U.S. to do it, and hence have sort of accepted a move toward English.
I also heard from someone who is Chinese that there is something about alphabet languages over pictographic languages that lends them to logical formats more readily. So even if Chinese became dominant science would likely still not be written in Chinese.
That might be true in your domain, which seems to be biology. My domain is computer vision, where the highest ranked journal [ranking list here] is IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. Looking at the table of contents of the current issue, we can see that 6 out of 12 regular papers contain at least one co-author with an Asian name (I didn’t count the Indian names as asian though), although 2 out of 12 papers have an affiliation including a chinese university.
Making computers see, for instance steering cars, detecting objects, detecting activities like theft in a super market, recognizing text characters in a scanned document or an image taken by a camera phone etc.
In one of our projects we are currently working on the detection of hand drawn objects in storyboards designed by artists for the production of animated movies. The goal is to automate the process of creating the movies.
Theoretically yes, practically only a very small fraction of computer vision algorithms try to mimic the human brain. The ones who do are mostly very low level algorithms, e.g. detecting texture in an image. We just don’t know how it works on a higher level. At least not the computer vision guys :dubious:
I clicked on that link and all the abstracts were in English. There might be a lot of Asians writing papers, but that in no way equates to the majority of scientific papers being written in Chinese or any other Asian language.
I’d say never. Why? India.
There are a lot of scientists coming out of India, they have a large population, and many of them already know how to speak English. Whatever numerical advantage China could claim due to having a large general population and a potentially large future population of upcoming scientists is counterbalanced by India’s large population and large upcoming batch of scientists. Add in the rest of the world, and there’s no reason for the community to learn Chinese instead of Chinese scientists learning English.