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Anaximander: And the Nature of Science

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The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. 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.

By contrast, what Rovelli proposes is that Anaximander came up with a number of steps forward that were effectively foundational for the scientific method. Continued scientific inquiry will reveal those aspects of the theories provided by Einstein and Heisenberg that are absolute truth. Rovelli thus works in this book a little like an archaeologist sifting a burial site for clues, finding reference points in later historical accounts by Pliny and Aristotle and Herodotus among others. The beginnings of scientific thought in the centuries before Christ and its subsequent repression by the Holy Roman Empire is interesting, but the book does not address the vital question of how organised religions can co-exist with freedom of expression and good science education. 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.

And it was no coincidence that Anaximander’s revolutionary thinking also coincided with the birth of the polis – the nascent democratic structures built on debate as to how best to govern society. 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. Do recent observations of near death experiences offer valid answers to whether human beings have a soul? 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. But this book teaches me that the answers will not be obtained from pure observation of physical phenomena.

Would Carlo Rovelli’s faith in Anaximander hold up if archeological evidence established that Anaximander was not an atheist, or at least not a naturalist? This is the way forward, and everyone who cares about science should support their national organisation. What Rovelli attributes to Anaximander are the idea of a non-flat Earth floating in space - surrounded by the heavens, rather than a flat Earth with the heavens above; building on Thales' example as the first known explanation for physical processes without divine intervention; introducing the concept of natural law; and challenging his master's ideas rather than simply building on them. In this book Rovelli presents his view of science and why he believes Anaximander deserves the credit for starting the enterprise.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”.

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