Anaximander: And the Nature of Science

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Carlo Rovelli’s first book, now widely available in English, tells the origin story of scientific thinking: our rebellious ability to reimagine the world, again and again. Rovelli has improved hugely since his early super-waffly titles - if you have an interest in where science came from, this is arguably his best so far.

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”. He emphasises, for instance, that despite their impressive mathematics, astronomical observation and technological developments, Chinese philosophers and scientists never came up with the insight of a non-flat Earth floating in space, only switching to this viewpoint when they received information from missionaries in the seventeenth century.

Wondrous as this was, it was the reaction of the second man, Thales’s fellow citizen, Anaximander, 11 years his junior that, Rovelli argues, changed the world. It was implicit in Miletus’s geography as a trading city in which Greek and Egyptian and Babylonian cultures met. He then goes on to discuss how, over the ages, society started to base knowledge on empirical evidence, rather than on the sayings of devine kings or ancient books.

Admittedly, Carlo Rovelli relies on one sentence left by Anaximander and some additional findings and analysis attributed to him. ACT Contact / FAQ About Events / Videos Merch / Subs Sign in/up Anaximander : And the Nature of Science Carlo Rovelli More by this author. The rest of the book (about half of it) concentrates on what science is, the dangers of cultural relativism and understanding the world without gods.He examines Anaximander as a scientist interested in shedding light on the deep nature of scientific thinking, which Rovelli locates in his rebellious ability to reimagine the world again and again.