Carlo Rovelli - Anaximander: And the Birth of Science

Human civilizations have always believed that the world consisted of the Heavens above and the Earth below (figure 1a). Beneath the Earth, to keep it from falling, there had to be more earth; or perhaps an immense turtle on the back of an elephant, as in some Asian myths; or gigantic columns like those supporting the Earth according to the Bible. This vision of the world was shared by the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Mayans, the peoples of ancient India and sub-Saharan Africa, the Hebrews, Native Americans, the ancient Babylonian empires, and all other cultures of which we have evidence.

All but one: the Greek world. Already in the classical era, the Greeks saw the Earth as a stone floating in space without falling (figure 1b). Beneath the Earth, there was neither more earth without limit, nor turtles, nor columns, but rather the same sky that we see over our heads. How did the Greeks manage to understand so early that the Earth is suspended in the void and that the Heavens continue under our feet? Who understood this, and how?

The man who made this enormous leap in understanding the world is the main character in this story: , Anaximander, who lived twenty-six centuries ago in Miletus, a Greek city on the coast of what is now Turkey. This discovery alone would make Anaximander one of the intellectual giants of the ages. But Anaximanders legacy is still greater. He paved the way for physics, geography, meteorology, and biology. Even more important than these contributions, he set in motion the process of rethinking our worldviewa search for knowledge based on the rejection of any obvious-seeming certainty, which is one of the main roots of scientific thinking.

The nature of scientific thinking is the second subject of this book. Science, I believe, is a passionate search for always newer ways to conceive the world. Its strength lies not in the certainties it reaches but in a radical awareness of the vastness of our ignorance. This awareness allows us to keep questioning our own knowledge, and, thus, to continue learning. Therefore the scientific quest for knowledge is not nourished by certainty, it is nourished by a radical lack of certainty. Its way is fluid, capable of continuous evolution, has immense strength and a subtle magic. It is able to overthrow the order of things and reconceive the world time and again.

This reading of scientific thinking as subversive, visionary, and evolutionary is quite different from the way science was understood by the positivist philosophers, but is also different from the fragmented, sometimes dry image of science provided by some more modern philosophical reflections on science. The aspect of science that I seek to illuminate in these pages is its critical and rebellious ability to reimagine the world again and again.

If this reimagining of the world is a central aspect of the scientific enterprise, then the beginning of this adventure is not to be sought in Newtons laws of motion, in Galileos experiments, or in Francis Bacons reflections. Nor even in the early and mathematical constructions of Alexandrian astronomy. It must be sought in what can be called the first great scientific revolution in human historyAnaximanders revolution.

There is no doubt that Anaximanders importance in the history of thought has been underrated. I believe that this has happened for several reasons. On the one hand, in the ancient world, his contributions were recognized by authors of a scientific bent, including Pliny (as quoted in the epigraph to this book), but Anaximander was generally seen by the ancients, including Aristotle, as the proponent of a naturalistic approach to knowledge that was fiercely opposed by other cultural currents and that had not yielded much in the way of results. The naturalistic project, indeed, had yet to bear the rich fruits it would bear with modern science, after a long process of maturation and numerous methodological adjustments.