Spain vs Europe: why scientific knowledge fell behind

The enigma of why Spain never filled the science books

A country that completed the first circumnavigation of the globe and measured the calendar we use today across the planet produces, according to the premise that opens this discussion, twenty scientific contributions for every one from any European neighbour of similar size. The paradox is no small matter: the same nation that crossed the Pacific with naos and nautical charts when England still did not know how to cross the North Atlantic appears almost absent from the physics, chemistry and mathematics textbooks of the 19th and 20th centuries. The question hanging over everything is whether it was isolation, indifference, or simply a self-serving narrative that erased what was there.

The Black Legend and the erasure of others' merit

The first line of defence raised is that of deliberate erasure. The claim is that Spain did have its men of science, but that their origins were silenced and discoveries circulated under the name of the foreigner who spread them. The example that keeps coming up is that of Fray Domingo de Soto, the friar from Segovia credited with anticipating the fall of bodies with constant acceleration, contradicting Aristotle decades before Galileo carried out his experiments. The theory, it is argued, could not be properly tested until 1971, when an astronaut dropped an object on the Moon.

There are more examples on the list. The Gregorian calendar, according to the debate, was drawn up using measurements taken at the University of Salamanca. The decimal metric system was developed between France and Spain. And in spherical geometry —the discipline that made navigation possible— the country was a pioneer out of sheer necessity: without fine mathematics you cannot cross an ocean. José de Mendoza y Ríos and his haversine formula are mentioned, as is José Echegaray, who published works on mathematics and ended up winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The underlying diagnosis is that Spain was sidelined, just as others are sidelined today. Documentaries about olive oil are cited that name dozens of countries while omitting the world's largest producer, or about European hominids that fail to mention Atapuerca, home to the oldest remains. The Black Legend, shovel by shovel, as one contribution sums it up.

The 19th century: the black hole that explains almost everything

Here the consensus is broad, even among those who dispute everything else. Spain's 19th century was a chain of disasters: Trafalgar, the Napoleonic invasion, the British "aid" that claimed its loot, the destruction of a fledgling industrial fabric, the American wars of independence, the Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis, three Carlist Wars and the loss of the empire's last remnants. Starting from that point, entering the 20th century and adding two more civil wars —the one in the thirties and the one that trinc— leaves little room for building laboratories.

The counterpoint comes with the university figures: in the 19th century England had only ten universities, while Spain, with a smaller population, had more than double that. And the Industrial Revolution, it is recalled, was driven mostly by uneducated craftsmen. The number of campuses does not explain scientific output. What does explain it, according to another line of thought, is money: without sustained funding there is no research, and Spanish universities have spent decades on budgets that leave no room for anything serious. Talent emigrates to the US, Switzerland or Oxford, and wins prizes there under another flag.

The hostile-environment thesis and the drag of mentality

The most uncomfortable explanation is cultural. The argument goes that a Newton does not emerge simply because a genius appears, but because there is an environment where his ideas can flourish. A hundred years earlier, Newton would have been left snivelling. And Spain, in this reading, was a hostile environment: the case of Isaac Peral and the boycott of his submarine is cited as an example of a homegrown invention torpedoed from within.

Along the same lines, the Catholic mindset is singled out as a brake: the Lord wants the meek versus the Protestant incentive that wealth is a sign of divine favour. The railway is mentioned, received in many villages with legends about railway workers who kidnapped children and drank their blood. The result, it is said, is a conformist society that wants nothing to do with the new. The rebuttal is swift: confusing conviction with fanaticism is a flaw of the narrative, and the Galileo case is paradigmatic of how the Church's history is told with no respect for the truth.

What is genuinely debated: how much is myth and how much is fact

Not everyone buys the erasure narrative. The strongest objection is that anticipating isolated ideas is not the same as formulating a coherent system, and that in the history of physics Spain has not been mediocre: it has been practically nothing at all. Today, however, a comeback is under way, with groups at CERN and household names in quantum computing. The debate remains open, and the question left hanging is how many geniuses ended up as shepherds, contributing nothing, because they never had the right environment.