Anaximander: And the Nature of Science

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At first this seemed like hyperbole from someone championing a particular favourite, but by the end of the book I was convinced. It was implicit in Miletus’s geography as a trading city in which Greek and Egyptian and Babylonian cultures met. These factors have an urgent relevance, he suggests, for the scientists and citizens and policymakers of today. If Newton characterised himself as “standing on the shoulders of giants”, then the two men near the very base of that human pyramid were Anaximander and Thales of Miletus. He explains some of the most conceptually difficult and densest areas of physics lightly and breezily.

Now widely available in English for the first time, this is Carlo Rovelli's first book: the thrilling story of a little-known man who created one of the greatest intellectual revolutions. He suggests that it was the combination of having the first fully phonetic simple alphabet, the lack of dominant royalty and the independence of the city states that enabled this revolution in thinking in Miletus where Anaximander was based. In this, Rovelli suggests, he sends perhaps his most potent message through the ages, “one that can serve as a warning to us today”.That something, physicist Carlo Rovelli argues in this enjoyable and provocative little book, occurred in the interaction between two of the place’s greatest minds. In this book Rovelli presents his view of science and why he believes Anaximander deserves the credit for starting the enterprise. Anaximander's legacy includes the revolutionary idea that the earth floats in a void, that the world can be understood in natural rather than supernatural terms, that animals evolved, and that universal laws govern all phenomena. Continued scientific inquiry will reveal those aspects of the theories provided by Einstein and Heisenberg that are absolute truth. And it was no coincidence that Anaximander’s revolutionary thinking also coincided with the birth of the polis – the nascent democratic structures built on debate as to how best to govern society.

In this elegant work, acclaimed physicist Carlo Rovelli brings to light the importance of Anaximander's overlooked legacy to modern science.Anaximander assimilated Thales’s ideas, treated them with due respect, but then rejected and improved on them and came up with more exact theories of his own.

That message, as relevant in Rovelli’s native Italy as in contemporary Britain, is this: “Each time that we – as a nation, a group, a continent or a religion – look inward in celebration of our specific identity we do nothing but lionise our own limits and sing of our stupidity. By contrast, what Rovelli proposes is that Anaximander came up with a number of steps forward that were effectively foundational for the scientific method. Something very startling happened in Miletus, the ancient Greek city on the modern Turkish coast, in about 600BC. Essentially he claims that Anaximander was the first person who looked for explanations of natural events, rather than crediting spirits of one sort or another with such effects . To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.This is the way forward, and everyone who cares about science should support their national organisation. What Rovelli attributes to Anaximander are the idea of a non-flat Earth floating in space - surrounded by the heavens, rather than a flat Earth with the heavens above; building on Thales' example as the first known explanation for physical processes without divine intervention; introducing the concept of natural law; and challenging his master's ideas rather than simply building on them.