Anaximander

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A reasonable person can deduce that proper analysis of physical phenomena utilizing physical phenomena arrives at truth. 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’.

Anaximander assimilated Thales’s ideas, treated them with due respect, but then rejected and improved on them and came up with more exact theories of his own. In this book Rovelli presents his view of science and why he believes Anaximander deserves the credit for starting the enterprise. 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. 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. That something, physicist Carlo Rovelli argues in this enjoyable and provocative little book, occurred in the interaction between two of the place’s greatest minds. The first, Thales, one of the seven sages of ancient Greece, is often credited as the pioneer in applying deductive reasoning to geometry and astronomy; he used his mathematics, for example, to predict solar eclipses. These factors have an urgent relevance, he suggests, for the scientists and citizens and policymakers of today. This new freedom to doubt received wisdom was crucial in Anaximander revealing what it took Chinese stargazers – advanced in many other respects – another 2,000 years to acknowledge: that the Earth was suspended in space.

For instance, the sun is and will be the center of the solar system because all known planetary bodies revolve around it. It was implicit in Miletus’s geography as a trading city in which Greek and Egyptian and Babylonian cultures met.As a stand-alone proposition, it is the least bit enlightening, but after reading this book I can appreciate that Anaximander’s contribution to scientific inquiry and analysis was monumental, as Carlo Rovelli teaches. With his extraordinary charm and sense of wonder, bringing together science, philosophy and art, Carlo Rovelli unravels this mystery. If I understand Carlo Rovelli’s position, there are absolute truths in each of these findings that cannot be undone even by following the type of scientific inquiry unleashed by Anaximander. 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. Wintering is a poignant and comforting meditation on the fallow periods of life, times when we must retreat to care for and repair ourselves.