Anaximander: And the Birth of Science

Product Information

I came away buzzing and reassured that we still have in this century a wide ranging community fascinated not just by famous authors (I’ve rarely seen so many concentrated in one place) but by challenging ideas and questions. Carlo Rovelli on why time is not what it seems". BBC Radio 4. The Life Scientific. BBC . Retrieved 30 January 2020. In 2023 he was one of the firmataries of the International Peace Conference manifesto which accuses USA-NATO-EU of being the aggressor in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In my experience, working scientists often get history of science wrong - in this case, as it's arguably more history of philosophy, I can't say whether or not Carlo Rovelli is straying far from what's known to make his point, but what he has to say about the Greek philosopher Anaximander from the 6th century BC is fascinating.

Abold and persuasive case that this ancient Greek philosopher scientist was… the founder of critical thinking.”— Adam Rutherford, Start the Week Anaximander was one of the world’s first scientists and had some amazingly modern theories, as Carlo Rovelli reveals As Rovelli’s fans will expect, this book is excellent. It is also a chance to see a slightly different Rovelli in action. Just hitting English shelves now, it was in fact published seven years before his million-copy-selling Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (2014) made him a star. Compared to his later books, Anaximander is both a little more guarded and a little more combative – and a little less convincing, when he strays into arguments about myth and religious thought – but it is never less than engaging, and enviably compendious. Despite its modest length Rovelli finds room for everything from a brief history of ancient Greek colonialism to critiques of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, with disquisitions on religion, myth and Chinese astronomy thrown in for free. It also has the merit, for those of us who just cannot quite grasp quantum gravity, of leaving the Earth solid beneath our feet. What Anaximander does is remarkable. But I’m not convinced by Rovelli that Anaximander’s thought traces the beginning of a solid line toward modern science. The Sun, the Moon, and the stars rotate around the Earth, forming complete circles. Immense wheels, similar to wagon wheels, carry them along. They are hollow inside (like a bicycle tire), filled with fire, and pierced along their inward-facing surface. The Sun, the Moon, and the stars that we see in the sky are the fire visible through these holes. The wheels are probably meant to explain why the planets don’t fall. The stars are on the wheels closest to us, the Moon on the middle wheel, and the Sun on the wheel farthest from us. Their distances from Earth are in the proportion 9:18:27.Every literary festival stays in an author’s mind for slightly individual reasons. I shall remember the Oxford festival for: The multiplicity of things that constitutes nature derives from a single origin or principle, called the apeiron (απειρον), the “indefinite” or “infinite.”

Anaksimandros’un çağının mitos’larından arınmış ve ancak çok sonra anlaşılabilecek saptamalarını ve daha da önemlisi insanlığın gelişiminde rol oynayan düşünce tarihinde nasıl bir devrim yarattığı üzerinde durulmuş. The Oxford Literary Festival has in my mind become the leading literary festival of the year. The organisation, the roster of speakers, the ambience and the sheer quality of it all is superb. May it now go from strength to strength each year stretching its ambition more and more. I believe it will. Carlo Rovelli has written a book about Anaximander who was born around 610BCE in Miletus in modern day Turkey and then goes on to discuss the nature of science and how progress is made by people reimagining the world on a continual basis.A celebration of the scientific spirit of inquiry and the remarkable achievements of one man more than 2,500 years ago.” —Times Literary Supplement (UK) Actually, I never wanted to be a writer. It just happened. I have always been writing, and at some point somebody decided to print my scribbling.

ItalianPostNews (23 November 2022). "Belladonna are auctioning off a song with Carlo Rovelli as Nft". Italian Post . Retrieved 27 November 2022. In the science fiction novel Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, set in a future century, Rovelli and Lee Smolin appear as historical characters in the history of physics. In the novel, Loop quantum gravity has merged to string theory to give a comprehensive physical theory of the world. van Fraassen, Bas C. (11 July 2009). "Rovelli's World" (PDF). Foundations of Physics. 40 (4): 390–417. Bibcode: 2010FoPh...40..390V. doi: 10.1007/s10701-009-9326-5. S2CID 17217776. A large part of the book is concerned with the question of what "science" is, and in what ways it differentiates itself from religion. Rovelli's central argument is that the distinguishing mark of science is that it is always willing to question established authority. This, above all, is why he wants to argue that Anaximander should be considered the founder of the scientific tradition. Anaximander's teacher, according to later authors, was Thales of Miletus; but rather than simply accepting his master's ideas as holy writ and further developing them, Anaximander changed them in many important ways. Even if the story is just a myth - Rovelli is happy to admit that the facts are extremely uncertain - I think he has a good point. This way of reasoning about things is historically unusual. The philosophical/scientific tradition may not have started exactly here, but it began around this point in time, and, if nothing else, Anaximander is a nice way of symbolizing the break with what had gone before. 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.Higgins, Charlotte (14 April 2018). " 'There is no such thing as past or future': physicist Carlo Rovelli on changing how we think about time". The Guardian . Retrieved 10 January 2022. This position led him to face the following problem: if time is not part of the fundamental theory of the world, then how does time emerge? In 1993, in collaboration with Alain Connes, Rovelli proposed a solution to this problem called the thermal time hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, time emerges only in a thermodynamic or statistical context. If this is correct, the flow of time is not fundamental, deriving from the incompleteness of knowledge. Similar conclusions had been reached earlier in the context of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, in particular in the work of Robert Zwanzig, and in Caldeira-Leggett models used in quantum dissipation. [14] [15] Relational quantum mechanics [ edit ] For Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, all citizens of Miletus, a Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia, doubt was a birthright. Positioned between the more ancient civilisations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and possessing all the natural curiosity of a young, mercantile society, the residents of Miletus were exposed to a variety of beliefs. They could test one doctrine against another, while being beholden to none and sceptical of all. “Civilisations flourish when they mingle,” Mr Rovelli says. “They decline in isolation.” Written by Rovelli, whose author himself is a visionary in the field of theoretical knowledge, specifically his research in quantum gravity. As there were limited resources on Anaximander, Rovelli put the pieces together with a plan to bring it to light. Suitable with Anaximander role in the history of natural science, taking into account social factors that led to the "big bang" moment for logical thought. Alan Lightman (14 May 2018). "Benedict Cumberbatch Meets Albert Einstein in Carlo Rovelli's New Audiobook". The New York Times . Retrieved 1 October 2019.