A salute to the enigmatic ancient Greek who laid the framework for modern scientific thought
ANAXIMANDER AND THE NATURE OF SCIENCE by Carlo Rovelli
240pp, Allen Lane, T£14.99 (0844 871 1514), £16.99, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
Some things are obvious. It is common sense, for instance, that the stars are above us, just as the ground is below us. Look up, sky; look down, ground. Further deductions are possible: things fall but the ground itself does not; so there must be something that stops the ground from falling. It might be, as the physicist Carlo Rovelli suggests, “an immense turtle on the back of an elephant”, “gigantic columns”, or, less fancifully, “more earth”. But that is speculation. The observable truth is that the Earth is below the sky, that it does not fall, and that the celestial lights above illuminate it in well-appointed order. This is obvious.
From a modern standpoint – on the same Earth, beneath the same sky – this seems daft. But it is worth dwelling on because, as Rovelli points out in Anaximander and the Nature of Science, every civilisation seems to have conceived the world this way. And almost all of them have found that conception, with the addition of a few explanatory deities, completely satisfactory. Except, after a certain point, the ancient Greeks. Or rather, one Greek:
Anaximander of Miletus, born c610 BC. Discarding the obvious, Anaximander promoted the idea that the Earth was, in fact, suspended in the firmament. After all, if the sun goes down in the east and rises in the west, doesn’t it make sense that it is travelling beneath the Earth? If that is so, then perhaps there is nothing holding the Earth up at all.
It defies common sense but it happens to be true. Anaximander held that the Earth was a flattened cylinder, which is less true but does not undermine his achievement. As Rovelli argues, it is the conceptual shift that opens the questions of the Earth’s shape and size in the first place (the former firmly established as a sphere within a century after
Anaximander, and the latter measured quite accurately by the third century BC). It is the power to produce such a shift that makes Anaximander special, and which, in Rovelli’s view, makes him the father of scientific thought. It is with him that “a search for knowledge based on the rejection of any obvious-seeming ‘certainty’” begins. He is, in short, Rovelli’s hero, and Anaximander and the Nature of Science sets out to show how important he was.
The interest here, though, is less biographical than historical and philosophical. We know little about Anaximander beyond the city and time of his birth, and of his thought we have only scattered summaries and references. Of his only treatise, On Nature, just a single fragment survives, preserved in a commentary on Aristotle written a thousand years after Anaximander’s death. “All things originate from one another, and vanish into one another/ According to necessity/ They give each other justice and recompense for injustice/ In conformity with the order of time.” It is mysterious stuff but it combines with other testimonies to show Anaximander as one of the first thinkers to attempt to understand the world in naturalistic, rather than religious, terms. His was a universe of “necessity” rather than of gods, something that in Rovelli’s hands becomes material for a small-scale feast of a book about what exactly this thing we call science is.
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.