NY Times, Dec. 1, 2002 'Lost Discoveries': The Non-Western Roots of Science By STEPHEN S. HALL LOST DISCOVERIES The Ancient Roots of Modern Science -- From the Babylonians to the Maya. By Dick Teresi. 453 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $27. In the early 1990's Dick Teresi went to Portland, Ore., where the county school board had started a politically correct and ill-starred program dedicated to ''multicultural science.'' Among the curriculum tools it devised, he notes in ''Lost Discoveries,'' was a series of essays explaining how the ancient Egyptians used sophisticated gliders for travel and recreation, how the Incas floated above the Nasca plain in hot-air balloons and how the Egyptians had also mastered advanced skills in precognition and psychokinesis. Teresi was promptly dispatched by a magazine to debunk these claims, which he did with relish. As he writes in his book, ''One can only wonder why this ancient civilization, with airplanes and telekinesis at its disposal, bothered with swords and spears to fight its battles.'' It was wise of Teresi, a science writer and former editor of Omni magazine, to establish his bona fides as a skeptic at the outset. He calls ''Lost Discoveries'' a book of ''unkempt historical details,'' but in surveying the non-Western roots of science he has created a very neat chronicle -- and a timely reminder -- of how much of the foundation of modern scientific thought and technological development was built by the mostly overlooked contributions of Arabs, Indians, Chinese, Polynesians and Mesoamericans. How timely? A dozen pages into the text, I found myself wondering how many publishers would have been courageous enough, after Sept. 11, 2001, to take on a book that documents, among other things, the superiority of Arab intellect and Muslim science in ancient and medieval times. The ''standard model'' of the history of science locates its birth around 600 B.C. in ancient Greece, where the dramatis personae typically include Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, Aristotle and other sages, who laid the modern foundation for math and the sciences. It was this foundation, buried during the Middle Ages, that was rediscovered during the Renaissance. What were the peoples of India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, sub-Saharan Africa, China and the Americas doing all this time? ''They discovered fire, then called it quits,'' Teresi observes sarcastically. He admits starting this exercise ''with the purpose of showing that the pursuit of evidence of nonwhite science is a fruitless endeavor. . . . Six years later, I was still finding examples of ancient and medieval non-Western science that equaled and often surpassed ancient Greek learning.'' full: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/books/review/01HALLLT.html first chapter: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/books/chapters/1201-1st-teresi.html Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org