“Panta Rhei” Parts 1 and 2

Date/Time: Wednesday, 4/8, 9:00 PM online

Participants: Jayu, Mori, S, Bonturun, Tiberius

Book Title: Panta Rhei

Author: Min Taegi

Publication Year: 2021

Publisher: Science Books

Assigned Reading: Parts 1 and 2

Summary:

Min Taegi’s Panta Rhei is a history of science book that, based on Heraclitus’s philosophy that “everything flows,” traces the development of fluid dynamics (vortices, whirlpools) from the Renaissance to the modern era alongside its political and cultural background. [1, 2, 3]

The key points of Parts 1 and 2 are as follows.

Part 1: This Will Kill That Building (Revolution & Vortex) [1, 2]

Main theme: the printing revolution and Descartes’s vortex cosmology

Key contents:

Victor Hugo’s insight: Quoting Notre-Dame de Paris, the book presents Gutenberg’s printing press (“the book”) as a scientific-historical turning point that undermined the authority of the cathedral (“the building”) and led to the popularization of knowledge.

The etymology of “revolution”: It explains how the word, originally meaning “rotation” and stemming from Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, came to mean political “revolution.”

Descartes’s vortex: It discusses Descartes’s fluid cosmology, according to which cosmic space is filled with a subtle substance called “ether,” and celestial bodies move through its swirling motion.

Conflict with Newton: Newton rejected Descartes’s vortex cosmology and explained celestial motion through the law of universal gravitation, laying the foundations of modern science.

Part 2: It Was the Age of Wisdom, It Was the Age of Foolishness

Main theme: the establishment of the first and second laws of thermodynamics and the flow of energy

Key contents:

The Industrial Revolution and energy: The concept of vortex (fluid) from Part 1 develops in Part 2 into a new technological current centered on steam engines and thermodynamics.

The caloric debate: It covers the transition from the caloric theory, which treated heat as a flowing substance, to the understanding of heat as a transformation of energy.

The discovery of entropy: Like the philosophy that everything flows, it explains the historical process through which the second law of thermodynamics was established—the idea that energy, too, constantly flows from a usable state to an unusable one, that is, toward increasing entropy.

In summary, Part 1 deals with the scientific revolution that began with the “rotation of celestial bodies (vortex),” while Part 2 addresses the industrial and scientific paradigm transformed into the “flow of energy.”

Impressions / Implications:

Science and technology played an important role in the process of modernization that has shaped modern human life. Yet in studying modernization, we have mostly encountered fragmented histories that separate the development of science and technology from the development of politics.

I had come across broad references to how social change spurred scientific and technological development, but in most cases I was left with the impression that political activists and scientists or engineers, as if inhabiting separate worlds, each built the world on their own.

But this book vividly shows, in a tightly woven pattern of warp and weft, how social change and the development of science and technology influenced one another and advanced together.

As you read, you find yourself wondering whether Korea has ever had a writer like this. Setting aside the author’s knowledge of connections to political and social change, I had never encountered a work that threads together the development of science and technology so coherently as a continuous flow.

Learning that the author is a Ph.D. who participated in the development of a Korean launch vehicle engine also makes you think that there was indeed a reason behind the strength of Korea’s defense industry.

Of course, I do not understand every detailed point of each scientific theory mentioned in the book. But even grasping, at a basic level, what the major issues in the scientific world were at the time seems to build a broader image in my mind of the era undergoing modernization.

It struck me as the kind of book worth keeping close at hand and consulting from time to time like a timeline of the period.

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Original title: <판타 레이(Panta Rhei)> 1,2부

Author: Jayujuui Ipmun Dokseotoronmoim

Date: 2026-04-13

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=reading01&pn=1&idx=28800