Modern science is an international activity; today’s scientific community is a global fellowship of interacting researchers, laboratories and teachers. I should not say modern as this has been the case for nearly a century. There is no longer any such thing as Western science, Arab, Chinese, Indian, or Eastern science. I have been a part of this international technological and scientific network starting as an engineering student in 1959; and now when my PhD students (Lankan, Chinese or Thai by tribe) go off to present a paper in New York, Shanghai or Timbuktu they are communing with an internationalised knowledge exchange process. Maxwell’s equations and the kinetic theory of gasses have no Eastern and Western versions, and no culture to suit the prejudices of nationalist ideologues and religious bigots. I have not heard of reports in Nature or Annalen der Physik suggesting that gravity works differently, upwards, sideways or at an angle, in the vicinity of sacred sites or symbols of national culture.

RMB Senanayake is a good man when he takes on the likes of Nalin de Silva and Aelian de Silva in the Island of September 4, but it is not necessary to accept outdated categories such as Western, Chinese and Indian science in order to refute their poppy-cock. If the Silvas glorify indigenous science, the answer is not to reply that ‘Western’ science is superior. Sure there were splendid civilisations in ancient and medieval times - Egypt, Greece and Roman, the Chinese, and the Arabs, to name a few of the greatest, and sure they made grand inventions; the Chinese are credited with the four most important inventions of the medieval world. But, the splendour of the past does not weigh heavy on the daily routines and practices of modern scientists and technologists, even in remotest locations. When I want to know about combined cycle technology, obviously, I don’t consult the aforementioned Silvas. But nor do I turn to ‘Western’ science; I look up the relevant Transactions and Proceedings for results that are international and methods that are universal.

RMB is right when he locates the intellectual change and scientific revolutions (and social revolutions that he forgot to mention), impelling the breakthrough that culminated in modern global science, in post-Renaissance Europe. Yes, the origins of modern science were in that sense Western, or to be more accurate Enlightened European, and nurtured by mathematics and scientific practices preserved and improved by the Arabs immediately prior to their unfolding in Europe; but now it is universal, no longer European.

The wonderful Roger Bacon (1220-1292) and later Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), burnt at the stake by the Church for challenging scholastic and Aristotelian rigidity, were the methodological forerunners of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Galileo is popularly remembered for the heliocentric view of the solar system, but this is incidental; what is important about him for scientists is the experimental method – experiment, observation, repeatability and validation as the method of discovering the facts and laws of nature. You see I said ‘facts and laws’; post-modernists, and nonsense writers preaching that the real world is an excretion of the mind like faeces from the gut, were dismissed as cranks by practising scientists nearly five centuries ago. Why is RMB wasting his time with these oddballs now?

In the unsurpassed genius of Isaac Newton (1642-1727) the scientific revolution reached its apogee. But remember, all the names I mention symbolise armies of working scientists, at that time largely European, but even then prescient of an emerging global community. This is where Chandrasoma Rajapakse (Island Midweek Review 10th September) goes off at an irrelevant tangent; which practicing scientist cares one jot, in the midst of his active scientific practice, about Purusha, Prakiriti, Thathagatha-Garbha or any other such obsolete and irrelevant metaphysical bull? I looked up the terms in the well recognised INSPEC science citation index which returned a nil response!

Another thing was happening at the same time as these scientific revolutions and philosophical breakthroughs; science was turning to application and a new bourgeois class was using the applications of science and the rational world view that triumphed in that period to revolutionise industry, commerce, the state, and indeed the world itself. Instead of trying to say this in my own words there is a marvellous passage in the Manifesto which I have much shortened as follows.

"The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known. Steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world market. The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. Wherever it has got the upper hand it has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

It is "putting an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations, drowning heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour and ancient and venerable prejudices" that lies at the root of the conflict between RMB and the Silvas. My immediate point, however, is that it was not only the enlightenment vision and scientific revolution in post-Renaissance Europe, but also the social revolution that carried these to the farthest corners of the globe, that made modern science a universal human practice. Not only did the bourgeois’s assimilation of the whole world give to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, it also created an intellectually unified scientific practice.

All societies in deep crisis produce crack-pot ‘knowledge systems’; the anti-modernism of Islamic fundamentalism (I mean the philosophical fundamentalists, not the vilification of every Muslim ant-imperialist as a terrorist) and the fundamentalism of Lanka’s bigots and nationalists (yes, this too is an anti-modernist philosophical fundamentalism) arise from the same causes; the collapse of ancient society in the face modern industry, a global economy and internationalised knowledge systems. This is the crisis of the Silvas, the Weerawansas and the Bin Ladens. It is also the crisis of the poor, the exploited and the producers of surplus value serving modern capitalism. I will not push the latter line of reasoning any further today as it will turn into a debate about political practice, historical materialism and the dialectic; rather I will stay with my theme, science, indeed all knowledge, as a global enterprise.

Let us take fusion, the Holy Grail of energy research, as an example. If only the El Dorado of controlled nuclear fusion could be reached the world would have an unlimited source of energy modelled on the interior of the sun; hence every claim relating to the topic ignites intense excitement everywhere, in all lands, among scientists, policymakers and the informed public. Cold fusion was one such claim until it was discredited by repetition of the experiments in many different laboratories in the West and the East.

More recent was the possibility of fusion in a jar. Sono-luminescence is now established. That is, if sound waves are passed through the liquid in a jar in the presence of bubbles, the bubbles absorb the sound and resonate; they grow and collapse inwards. Under certain conditions they can be steered to collapse with such force (implode) that the colliding atoms give out bright, sharp, bursts of blue light. The temperature at the bubble surface was so high that it was hoped that the temperature in the interior would be much higher and enough to ignite bursts of nuclear fusion.

A team from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA and the Russian Academy of Sciences, led by Dr Rusi Taleyarkhan (B Tech from IIT, Madras) carried out the experiment in a jar of deuterium (the type of hydrogen found in heavy water) because deuterium is one of the best fusion fuels. If fusion was occurring as the bubbles imploded, the telltale sign would be emission of a neutron, the crucial by-product of this reaction. In experiments in 2002 the Americans detected neutrons and there was huge excitement, and inevitably equal controversy; the debate about the experiment was international. Unfortunately when the experiments were repeated elsewhere in the world it was found that the neutrons were from background effects. The burst of light and the neutron release had to be within a billionth of a second if they were to be causally related, and it was found that the American were not using detectors tuned to such a fine discrimination.

Taleyarkhan joind Purdue University as a professor in 2003 but in July 2008 was judged guilty of "research misconduct" for "falsification of the research record" by a Purdue review board responding the protests from many parts of the world. In August he lost an appeal before a Purdue panel. I tell these stories to repeat that avant garde science, with all its achievements and controversies, is an international practice, intellectually alien to nationalist insularities and cultural particularisms.