Anaximander

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The next step Rovelli takes is to try to understand why 6th century BC Greece was pretty well the only such starting point. He makes a polemical case that the culture in which the Greek’s wisdom of doubt was nurtured contained, for the first time, all the elements necessary for scientific advance. A reasonable person can deduce that proper analysis of physical phenomena utilizing physical phenomena arrives at truth. 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.

Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist who has made significant contributions to the physics of space and time. He explains some of the most conceptually difficult and densest areas of physics lightly and breezily. 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.In this formative book, published in English for the first time, he clearly senses Anaximander as a kindred spirit, though his claims for the Greek are based on scattered traces of evidence. In this book Rovelli presents his view of science and why he believes Anaximander deserves the credit for starting the enterprise. Time flows at a different speed in different places, the past and the future differ far less than we might think, and the very notion of the present evaporates in the vast universe.

I found this a lot less interesting, partly because I'd seen most of it before, and partly because it is more a matter of paddling in the murky waters of philosophy of science rather than the more interesting (to me) origins of the history of science. Alongside the desacralisation and secularisation of public life,” Rovelli argues, “which passed from the hands of divine kings to those of citizens, came the desacralisation and secularisation of knowledge… law was not handed down once and for all but was instead questioned again and again. Photograph: Lanmas/Alamy View image in fullscreen An engraving of Anaximander: ‘the first human to argue that rain was caused by the observable movements of air and the heat of the sun rather than the intervention of gods’. Half of the book is a collection of thoughts of Rovelli about the role of science and its main characteristics: simple but important concepts.It was implicit in Miletus’s geography as a trading city in which Greek and Egyptian and Babylonian cultures met. For instance, the sun is and will be the center of the solar system because all known planetary bodies revolve around it. He exercises that faith in an understanding that Anaximander was a naturalist; a man that expressed his knowledge of this world wholly independent, if not in contrast to, a metaphysical or religious understanding of the world.

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.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. He describes how the Greeks established that the Earth was not flat using a nearly identical scientific inquiry used by the Chinese to establish that the Earth was flat.