Anaximander: And the Birth of Science

Product Information

I was looking for the author’s brief lessons in physics and spotted this book as well. To be honest, I thought this one sounded more interesting than the lessons book, so I grabbed it too. It’s a curious little book. These factors have an urgent relevance, he suggests, for the scientists and citizens and policymakers of today. For a start, the Miletus of 2,600 years ago was a time and place in which the ability to read and write moved beyond a limited circle of elite scribes. The effect of extending education far and wide was instantaneous. 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. Once people started seeing power as negotiable then everything else became debatable too. “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.” When Anaximander was born in Miletus in 610 BCE, the Golden Age of Greek civilization, the time of Pericles and Plato, was still nearly 200 years in the future. Tarquin the Elder, according to tradition, reigned in Rome. At around the same time, the Celts founded Milan, and Greek settlers from Anaximander’s Ionia founded Marseille. Homer… had composed the Iliad two centuries earlier, and Hesiod had already composed the Works and Days, but none of the other Greeks’ illustrious poets, philosophers, and dramatists had begun writing. Sappho, still a girl, was living on an island near Miletus … Rovelli won the second prize in the 2013 FQXi contest "It From Bit or Bit From It?" for his essay about "relative information". His paper, Relative Information at the Foundation of Physics, discusses how "Shannon's notion of relative information between two physical systems can function as [a] foundation for statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics, without referring to subjectivism or idealism...[This approach can] represent a key missing element in the foundation of the naturalistic picture of the world." [19] In 2017, Rovelli elaborated further upon the subject of relative information, writing that: Ancora una volta Rovelli conferma il suo grande talento di divulgatore, non tanto di argomenti scientifici concreti, in questo caso, quanto di storia del pensiero.

Premio Pagine di Scienza di Rosignano for the book Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity [34]Ma non si spaventi il lettore digiuno di studi umanistici (come, per dire, me): la lettura scorre sempre facile, il dibattito non si fa mai sterilmente accademico, animato com'è dalla prosa energica dell'autore, e dal suo ottimismo di fondo. I have a few quibbles on the history, though. First, Anaximander's theory of the origin of humankind doesn't seem to imply an evolution of humans from fish-like creatures. When I read the English translation on Wikipedia, for example, it seems like humans (in their current form) were in the fishes and thrown on land when land was made available (also The Dream of Reason by Gottlieb says the same thing about Anaximander not having thought of evolution even in the proto-form of animals changing into other animals). Second, Hypatia and the state of religion vs. science after the Fall of Rome is mentioned in a way that I think is a bit unfair. Hypatia was murdered, but it seems more for being associated with a rival bishop than for her scientific achievements, so it's not really a science vs religion issue, and while I agree that science wasn't achieving great advances during the Middle Ages, it wasn't as stark as it is sometime made out (see the Oxford calculators for example). At first this seemed like hyperbole from someone championing a particular favourite, but by the end of the book I was convinced. 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.

The multiplicity of things that constitutes nature derives from a single origin or principle, called the apeiron (απειρον), the “indefinite” or “infinite.” Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations , because at first reading I could not make much sense of it, but I expected it to be a mine of ideas. I am slowly advancing into it, and this time it is not disappointing. The premise of this short book seemed unpromising: a physicist with no formal training in classics or history was apparently claiming that Anaximander, a Greek philosopher about whom almost nothing is known, is the spiritual father of modern science. But, in the event, it was much better than I'd expected. Rovelli is certainly not a historian, but he appears to know Latin and Greek, has read widely, and had enough interesting things to say that he kept me thoroughly entertained. I started this afternoon at Luton airport, and didn't put it down until I finished just now in Geneva. In 1994, Rovelli introduced the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, based on the idea that the quantum state of a system must always be interpreted relative to another physical system (like the "velocity of an object" is always relative to another object, in classical mechanics). [16] The idea has been developed and analyzed in particular by Bas van Fraassen [17] and by Michel Bitbol. Among other important consequences, it provides a solution of the EPR paradox that does not violate locality. [18] 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.Alan Lightman (14 May 2018). "Benedict Cumberbatch Meets Albert Einstein in Carlo Rovelli's New Audiobook". The New York Times . Retrieved 1 October 2019. What is time, what is space? (interview), Di Renzo Editore, 2006 / Che cos'è il tempo, che cos'é lo spazio?, Di Renzo Editore, 2004. Carlo Rovelli was born in Verona, Italy, on 3 May 1956. He attended the Liceo Classico Scipione Maffei in Verona. In the 1970s, he participated in the student political movements in Italian universities. He was involved with the free political radio stations Radio Alice in Bologna and Radio Anguana in Verona, which he helped found. [7] In conjunction with his political activity, he was charged, but later released, for crimes of opinion related to the book Fatti Nostri, which he co-authored with Enrico Palandri, Maurizio Torrealta, and Claudio Piersanti. [8] Adnkronos (18 October 2023). "√ Musica, i Belladonna e Carlo Rovelli nel ballott dei Grammy Awards". Adnkronos (in Italian) . Retrieved 18 October 2023.

The effort to reconstruct Anaximander's ideas from indirect sources has been extensive, but does ultimately show that this man was the first to undertake scientific thinking as we know it today. Anaximander was always searching for knowledge to progress his understanding of the world. There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness, Penguin Random House, 2020 / Ci sono luoghi al mondo dove più che le regole è importante la gentilezza, Solferino, 2020. ItalianPostNews (23 November 2022). "Belladonna are auctioning off a song with Carlo Rovelli as Nft". Italian Post . Retrieved 27 November 2022.Books discovered in drawers by publishers should often have been left there…Anaximander?… Shouldn’t he stay in the dusty cabinet too? Absolutely not: Anaximander is a delight and so is this book” —Sunday Times (UK) For one thing, Rovelli says explicitly, in the very first chapter, that this won't be a historical reconstruction of Anaximander's thought, and that he is not aiming at historical-philosophical accuracy in his presentation of the Milesian philosopher - also in light of the fact that he is neither a philosopher nor an historian, and therefore this kind of work doesn't fall within his training and capabilities as a scholar. What he does, instead, is discuss what we know, or believe to be accurate, about Anaximander's thought (and his sources are quite rich in this respect), to discuss this information in terms of why and how this is relevant for understanding the development of the scientific enterprise, and of scientific, naturalistic rationality, as we understand these concepts today. Anaximander drew up the first map of the known world. In the generation following him, another Milesian, Hecataeus, expanded this map. Hecataeus’s map served then as the basis for all other ancient (and hence modern) maps. Our world is understood to be non-deterministic and essentially unpredictable; moreover it works in ways that often strike us as non-intuitive. Quantum theory invites us to see the world as a giant cat’s cradle of relations, where objects exist only in terms of their interaction with one another. Ultimately, says Rovelli, Heisenberg’s is a theory of how things “influence” one another. It forms the basis of all modern technologies from computers to nuclear power, lasers, transistors and MRI scanners. 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.