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Q: chinese invented gunpowder
Chinese Dude:Chinese invented gunpowder
Me:Americans invented Nuclear Reactor
Chinese Dude:Chinese invented compass
Me:Germans invented Jet engines
Chinese dude:Chinese invented....umm(thinking for while)paper
Me:British invented Railways,Electricity,Telephone
Chinese Dude: Chinese invented .....umm....Noodle,Silk,
Chinese are so great people.
Me:.....grrrrrr...Caveman invented Fire, Apeman invented Stone ,Neanderthals man invented stick
Chinese Dude: .................Finally Silent !!!!!!!!
Is this the only way you can silent a them???By throwing more primitive argument?
What's the point in making that kind of conversation last anyway?
"My dad is stronger than your dad !" "My dad knows karate !"
Errr... Better be proud of what *you* actually did *personally* *by yourself* or with *people still alive*, rather than being proud for being descendant of a group of people born and dead since generations. Maybe your grand-father was a badass, does not makes you a badass. Define yourself by what you do. Yes, it's harder... But it's all about what you are, not how you look, right ?
Plus, inventions are pretty much never a single man accomplishment, more like a chain of innovations and people tinkering.
expatlife26:
Right most inventions are very logical progressions from previous ones...a lot of the time you'll have 3 people who all invent something independently within a very short time frame (the telephone for example, it didn't come out of nowhere, it was a logical upgrade to existing telegraph systems to carry a sound wave instead of a pulse) it's just that you'll have the one person who either did it first or was able to popularize it before the others.
Like that guy Meucci who invented the telephone. He did it ONE YEAR before Alexander Graham Bell according to Joe Montegna.
KimOnach:
Unrelated: is it you posting on the TGWTG NC website, or just a coincidence of avatars?
DrMonkey:
@Kim It's a coincidence. But in the movie, Dr. Strangelove appears only in the War Room, mostly sitting in his wheelchair saying stuffs and smocking, so yeah, screen captures of his face kinda look the same.
There is no point .We all are part of human civilization....I don't care who invented what.
But the point is the pride Chinese often associates with their "ancient" invention and equates them to modern invention to justify China's eternal greatness and how much world owes to China.That conversation was just part of an incidental debate anyway.
Indeed meaningless !
I'd recommend Chinese people to watch "Cosmos" (the new series with Niel deGrasse Tyson)
Scandinavian:
of course not, but doesn't everyone else automatically watch it ?
Well, that isn't quite correct. Chinese invented exploding powder (like for fireworks).
Then Europeans took it and learned to weaponize it into gunpowder. Obviously, if Chinese would have thought of it first... we would probably all be speaking Chinese...
It's like Windows... Bill Gates didn't invent it. He bought it, optimized it and then resold to IBM as their OS and got rich. You snooze, you lose!
DrMonkey:
Early gunpowder weapon were available in China first as well
Robk:
Hmmm... I stand corrected. It says the tried to use them to invade Japan during the Yuan dynasty...
NOW I see why Chinese are not taught ancient history... cause it looks like they attacked Japan first (in modern times they play the victim)... So why weren't they able to conquer Japan when they had guns and cannons? And why weren't they able to easily defend off foreign invaders with their guns?
DrMonkey:
There's many things that can be improved with gunpowder. Just the way you store it and grind it makes a huge difference in gun power. Then, the gun design is also important : if you can make a strong tube with just the right size, you'll maximize the potential power. Being able to predict the trajectory of the shell is important too (a parabola, if your gun is reliable). Even a bullet have a lot of design work, which makes a very large difference (look for "Minie ball" for instance) on the field. So it's not just "have gun"/"do not have gun" :)
I read that *Mongols* tried to invade Japan, to no avail. They were not exactly the best navigators in the world (steppe horse riders...), while Japan, an island kingdom, had lots of experience in that domain (hahem... pirats...) already. You can imagine the supply chain problems, if a swarm of pirats is pillaging your convoys, defended by inexperienced sea officers.
DrMonkey:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasions_of_Japan
Apparently, a ginomous storm did a good part of the job as well.
I think those are more just examples of how stagnant this society got over the millenia; how they squandered a pretty substantial lead to fall irrevocably behind the west by the 19th century.
I guess my response to that is kind of a "well what have you done for me lately?"
Also those weren't really contributions to the world. China was completely closed off for millenia. They didn't invent this stuff and let it spread around the world, like the glorious USA did with nuclear energy, they kept it for themselves and then it was independently invented later by people who did more with it.
DrMonkey:
I quote Wikipedia on gunpowder
Quote 1
The Muslims acquired knowledge of gunpowder some time between 1240 and 1280, by which time the Syrian Hasan al-Rammah had written, in Arabic, recipes for gunpowder, instructions for the purification of saltpeter, and descriptions of gunpowder incendiaries. Gunpowder arrived in the Middle East, possibly through India, from China. This is implied by al-Rammah's usage of "terms that suggested he derived his knowledge from Chinese sources" and his references to saltpeter as "Chinese snow", fireworks as "Chinese flowers" and rockets as "Chinese arrows".[28] However, because al-Rammah attributes his material to "his father and forefathers", al-Hassan argues that gunpowder became prevalent in Syria and Egypt by "the end of the twelfth century or the beginning of the thirteenth".[29]
Quote 2
Several sources mention Chinese firearms and gunpowder weapons being deployed by the Mongols against European forces at the Battle of Mohi in 1241.[34][35][36] Professor Kenneth Warren Chase credits the Mongols for introducing into Europe gunpowder and its associated weaponry.[37] C. F. Temler interprets Peter, Bishop of Leon, as reporting the use of cannon in Seville in 1248.[38]
As for nuclear for power generation, it was developed in parallel in various nation during WWII and after. Germans were building a power plant during WWII, even managing to have a pretty bad accident with it. USSR developed their own, independently and by double checking what they spied on USA, corutesy of Beria. Others did it pretty much on their own too post WWII.
I think it's completely acceptable to be proud of your nation's history. Obviously within reason. I think it shows awareness of the past, I'm sure a lot of people don't know what has come out of their country.
My home country gave the world:
JRR Tolkien
Nelson Mandela
Charlize Theron
The world's first heart transplant
CAT Scans
I'm proud of that, but not to the extent that I would argue with a person from another country about which is better, just in an informative way.
China accidentally stumbled upon the mixture for gunpowder during one of their less palatable cookery attempts. Unable to figure out its use in projectile propulsion during an age riddled with warfare, they attempted to make use of it for intimidating people with a flashy, imposing display. As the novelty wore off, the embarassingly unpalatable recipe made its way west, where for better or worse, it found a more practical application.
DrMonkey:
Well, I'm not sure it's a very fair satire :p Let's take the discovery of phosphorus, a very important chemical element. Circa 1670, Hennig Brand, alchemist (ie. complete bullshit full of mysticism) decided that if pee is mostly yellow, it's because there's gold in it. So Hennig started to collect his own pee (lots of it, around 5000 liters) and distillate all that pee. From the residue of the distillation, no gold, but ... some glowing powder that reacts with pretty much anything. Of course, Henning was a complete crank and had no idea of what he found. He kept tinkering with his pee and the resulting phosphorus to make gold, to no avail. He kept his method secret for a very long time. His method was awfully inefficient, and because he was very bad at reasoning, he never tried to improve it. Lololol laowais boiling his pee.
I think you took the wrong line of reasoning...
Chinese Dude:Chinese invented gunpowder
Me: then why did they get their butts kicked when the French, English and Portuguese came knocking?
