Anaximander: And the Birth of Science

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Anaximander is known as the ancient master of the universe & author of the first surviving lines of Greek philosophy. He speculated & argued about "the boundless" as the origin of all that is. Apart from being one of the earliest pioneers in the fields of what we now call geography, biology, & astronomy. The multiplicity of things that constitutes nature derives from a single origin or principle, called the apeiron (απειρον), the “indefinite” or “infinite.” Consegnato a Carlo Rovelli il premio "Alassio per l'Informazione Culturale" ". Ecodisavona (in Italian) . Retrieved 6 April 2018.

The final chapter where he takes on religion is the only really weak part of the book, as anti-religious polemic usually is -- I think it's necessary, but so little is understood about the origins of religion that there is much speculation, as Rovelli admits. His choice of writers to discuss on the subject is obviously subjective and not the writers I would probably choose myself. I primarily was expecting a good explanation of the history of Anaximander, and Rovelli does a great job of explaining what we know, and also what he thinks are the important scientific takeaways. His history of Anaximander is the facts as historians know it along with the cultural milieu of ancient Greece. As Rovelli explains, it doesn't really matter if Anaximander exists for some of these takeaways, so long as the idea originated from people (or a person) of the era. The idea of the Earth floating in space, of naturalistic accounts of nature (no supernatural explanations), and of accepting uncertainty are the breakthroughs inherent in Anaximander's work, and the groundwork for much of modern science.

Likewise, Plato’s rationalist dialectic has roots in dialogue and debate of a conceptual sort, and is embedded in his idealist metaphysic of “forms”, at best a distant kin to modern science. knowledge as a progression of dialogue and debate based on questioning what has previously been thought Rovelli won the second prize in the 2013 FQXi contest "It From Bit or Bit From It?" for his essay about "relative information". His paper, Relative Information at the Foundation of Physics, discusses how "Shannon's notion of relative information between two physical systems can function as [a] foundation for statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics, without referring to subjectivism or idealism...[This approach can] represent a key missing element in the foundation of the naturalistic picture of the world." [19] In 2017, Rovelli elaborated further upon the subject of relative information, writing that: I loved the whole atmosphere of the Oxford Literary Festival. From breakfast, alongside some of the attendees, who were talking books with each other a mile a minute, to the public event at The Sheldonian where everyone was lively and engaged – I felt I had arrived in a kind of literary heaven. Rovelli has written a book on the Greek philosopher Anaximander, published in France, Italy, US [21] and Brazil. The book analyses the main aspects of scientific thinking and articulates Rovelli's views on science. Anaximander is presented in the book as a main initiator of scientific thinking.

Mr Rovelli’s book, first published in French in 2009 and newly translated into English, is not a straight biography, as little is known of Anaximander’s life and hardly any of his original writing survives. Instead, it focuses on his revolutionary idea that the best way to uncover nature’s secrets is to question everything. Anaximander built his own cosmology on the work of past sages, interrogating their theories and making corrections where needed. He invented a process that allowed knowledge to grow from generation to generation, and enabled humanity to reap the benefits.

Rovelli, a contemporary physicist, uses the accomplishments of Anaximander of Miletus, the pre-Socratic thinker who is credited with writing the first prose work and whom Rovelli describes as the first scientist, as a springboard for meditations on the nature of science and its history. The book is well-written, and although Rovelli is not a historian or philosopher of science I didn't find anything which was obviously wrong, as I often do with books about ancient philosophy. It was a privilege for me to visit the festival to receive the Bodley Medal. As an incidental blessing I saw Oxford at its most mysterious and atmospheric. It was a day of piercing cold and as I walked through the twilight from the Sheldonian to Christ Church, the streets were empty and the whole city was shutting itself away. Christ Church was silent except for the footfall of unseen persons around corners and the sounds of evensong creeping from behind closed doors. For the first time I understood thoroughly the power of college ghost stories. For example, Parmenides, certainly not a “scientist”, explicitly separated the world as it appears to us (the world of “seeming”) from the world as it really is (the world of “truth”). Aristotle refined a method of presenting the thoughts of earlier philosophers as a basis for his own arguments and positions, providing an explicit structure for progress in thought, but not a method of science per se.