Anaximander

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These factors have an urgent relevance, he suggests, for the scientists and citizens and policymakers of today. Maybe Carlo Rovelli need not answer these questions or maybe he thinks these are questions not worth asking. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

Though part of Rovelli’s project is to grant Anaximander greater prominence in histories of civilisation, he is equally interested in examining the social factors that led to this big bang moment for rational thought. In evolving the thinking of Thales, we’re told, Anaximander was not only the first human to argue that rain was caused by the observable movements of air and the heat of the sun rather than the intervention of gods – the kind of “natural wisdom” that was heretical enough to lead to the trial and death of Socrates 200 years later – he was, crucially, also the first thinker to make the case that the Earth was a body suspended in a void of space, within which the sun and stars did not form a canopy or ceiling but revolved.The first, Thales, one of the seven sages of ancient Greece, is often credited as the pioneer in applying deductive reasoning to geometry and astronomy; he used his mathematics, for example, to predict solar eclipses. By contrast, what Rovelli proposes is that Anaximander came up with a number of steps forward that were effectively foundational for the scientific method. It was implicit in Miletus’s geography as a trading city in which Greek and Egyptian and Babylonian cultures met. This literal groundbreaking idea – inventing at a stroke the idea of the cosmos – was, as the historian of science Karl Popper suggested, “one of the boldest, most revolutionary and most portentous ideas in the whole history of human thinking”.

Carlo Rovelli implies that Anaximander was atheist, and precisely as such Anaximander altered the course of scientific inquiry by explaining physical phenomena in terms of physical phenomena. At first this seemed like hyperbole from someone championing a particular favourite, but by the end of the book I was convinced. For instance, the sun is and will be the center of the solar system because all known planetary bodies revolve around it. 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.If I understand Carlo Rovelli’s position, there are absolute truths in each of these findings that cannot be undone even by following the type of scientific inquiry unleashed by Anaximander. In my experience, working scientists often get history of science wrong - in this case, as it's arguably more history of philosophy, I can't say whether or not Carlo Rovelli is straying far from what's known to make his point, but what he has to say about the Greek philosopher Anaximander from the 6th century BC is fascinating. Continued scientific inquiry will reveal those aspects of the theories provided by Einstein and Heisenberg that are absolute truth.