It is still difficult to find the position of ancient China amid anxiety and embarrassment. As Professor Chen said, China was not without mathematics in ancient times, but the development of mathematics was not to understand the nature of numbers or the spatial relationship itself.

Objective: Pure mathematics characterized by strict proof; It's not that China didn't explore the laws of nature in ancient times, but it didn't combine this exploration with mathematics. While we are proud of China's first astronomical classic, Zhouyi ·suan Jing, which combines the ideas of mathematics and astronomical model, we also have to regret to see that it failed to continue to develop in the cultural soil of China, and the pioneer even became a masterpiece. Therefore, when Alexander's mathematical science appeared, even when Pythagoras Plato's mathematical and philosophical traditions were formed, the real division between western and China's science was decided.

Needham once regarded the Su-Song water clock in the Song Dynasty as a mechanical timepiece, juxtaposed with several "great inventions" that Chinese people have long been familiar with, such as compass, gunpowder and printing. This is particularly marked in the schematic diagram comparing the contributions of Chinese and Western civilizations to "Cosmic Science". But Price, who once studied the Su Song water clock together, has discovered an equally complicated and exquisite Greek mechanical clock, and its age is thousands of years earlier than that of the Su Song water clock. In his book Time Revolution: Clocks and the Construction of the Modern World, Landers, who studies the history of the development of timekeeping instruments, demonstrated from the structural principle that the Su Song water clock did not affect the pendulum timepiece in Europe, and concluded that the Su Song water clock is a technical "dead end" with no future development. The bumpy fate of Su Song Water Bell is very painful for China people to read. In the long years after the Northern Song Dynasty, later generations tried desperately and vainly to restore the lost clock-making technology, which may not prove that China's science developed intermittently, and it was even difficult to be forgotten. But the title of the chapter about this paragraph in Landers' book is undoubtedly the best portrayal of the views and mentality of many western historians on the development of ancient science and technology in China: a grand dead end.