Scientific Babel by Michael Gordin review – the hunt for a common language

The decline of Latin and the rise of global English - science's search for a lingua franca

If you're a working scientist and you can't read this sentence, you're in trouble. English isn't the only language of modern science, but it's far and away the most important. "If you are interested in what it would be like to live in a world with one language of communication, a world with no Babel," writes Michael Gordin, "you should look to the natural scientists. They come from there." In Scientific Babel, Gordin looks beyond the dominance of English in contemporary scientific discourse to uncover a story of scientific debate that's characterised by confusion and misapprehension as much as by collaboration and progress.

Scientists have always found ways of making themselves understood to each other. After all, without a bridging of the language gap, Archimedes is just another naked Greek man shouting in his bathroom. Science, of course, has had a shared language before, at least in Europe. Latin was the main language of medieval and Renaissance scholarship, but its empire wasn't as universal as is often made out. Historians of science and medicine have shown that much of the scientific knowledge of this period had its roots in vernacular languages.