Carlo Rovelli - The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy

THE FIRST SCIENTIST

ANAXIMANDER AND HIS LEGACY

CARLO ROVELLI

Translated by
Marion Lignana Rosenberg

WESTHOLME
Yardley

Frontispiece: A relief of Anaximander. (Courtesy of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, Special Superintendence for the Archaeological Heritage of Rome)

2007 Carlo Rovelli

Originally published as Anaximandre de Milet, ou la naissance de la pense scientifique by ditions Dunod

Dunod, Paris, 2009, pour la tradution franaise. ISBN 978-2-10-052939-1

English translation 2011 Westholme Publishing

The author and publisher thank FQXi (the Foundational Questions Institute) for the grant that has supported the English translation of this book.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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To Bonnie

CONTENTS

ONE
The Sixth Century

TWO
Anaximanders Contributions

THREE
Atmospheric Phenomena

FOUR
Earth Floats in Space, Suspended in the Void

FIVE
Invisible Entities and Natural Laws

SIX
Rebellion Becomes Virtue

SEVEN
Writing, Democracy, and Cultural Crossbreeding

EIGHT
What Is Science?

NINE
Between Cultural Relativism and Absolute Thought

TEN
Can We Understand the World Without Gods?

ELEVEN
Prescientific Thought

Rerum fores aperuisse, Anaximander Milesius traditur primus.

It is said that Anaximander of Miletus first opened the doors of nature.

Pliny, Natural History 2

INTRODUCTION

Human civilizations have always believed that the world consisted of the Heavens above and the Earth below (). 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 (). 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, and 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 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.

At the root of todays underestimation of Anaximanders thought, on the other hand, lies the pernicious modern separation between science and the humanities. I am aware that my mainly scientific training makes evaluating the contributions of a thinker who lived some twenty-six hundred years ago a risky proposition, but I am convinced that most if not all of todays assessments of Anaximanders contribution suffer from the inverse problemthe difficulty that specialists in history or philosophy have in evaluating the importance of insights whose nature and legacy are intimately scientific. It seems to me that even the authors quoted in the last footnote, who recognize without hesitation the greatness of Anaximanders contributions, fail to grasp the full extent of the historical importance of his multiple insights for the development of science. I seek to highlight that importance in these pages.

Therefore I examine Anaximander not as a historian or as an expert in Greek philosophy, but as a scientist of today keen to reflect on the nature of scientific thinking and its role in the long-term development of civilization. In contrast to the majority of texts about Anaximander, my goal is not to reconstruct as faithfully as possible his thought and conceptual universe. For this reconstruction, I rely on the painstaking, magisterial work of classicists and historians such as Charles Kahn, Marcel Conche, and, more recently, Dirk Couprie. My goal is not to challenge the conclusions of their reconstructions; it is to shed light on the profundity of the thought that emerges from them, and the role of Anaximanders insights in the development of universal knowledge.