Rovelli, a contemporary physicist, uses the accomplishments of Anaximander of Miletus, the pre-Socratic thinker who is credited with writing the first prose work and whom Rovelli describes as the first scientist, as a springboard for meditations on the nature of science and its history. The book is well-written, and although Rovelli is not a historian or philosopher of science I didn't find anything which was obviously wrong, as I often do with books about ancient philosophy. Anaximander was one of the world’s first scientists and had some amazingly modern theories, as Carlo Rovelli reveals A deep-thinking, restlessly inquiring spirit’: Carlo Rovelli. Photograph: Roberto Serra/Iguana Press/Getty Images Ricardo Franco Levi, lettera di dimissioni a Sangiuliano dopo il caso Rovelli e le polemiche sul figlio", Il Messaggero 26-5-2023, 2017. Retrieved 1-6-2023 Now widely available in English for the first time, this is Carlo Rovelli's first book: the thrilling story of a little-known man who created one of the greatest intellectual revolutions

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.” But he wants to construct a different understanding of what science is, one he refers to at one point as “science as a cognitive activity” (p. 111). He gives at least one explicit definition: 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. Often as an author, I only occasionally get to meet the public who buy and read my books. The Oxford Literary Festival was a special opportunity for me and certainly one of the highlights of my career – it was an honour I will never forget.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. For example, Parmenides, certainly not a “scientist”, explicitly separated the world as it appears to us (the world of “seeming”) from the world as it really is (the world of “truth”). Aristotle refined a method of presenting the thoughts of earlier philosophers as a basis for his own arguments and positions, providing an explicit structure for progress in thought, but not a method of science per se.

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. A stimulating and rewarding on-stage conversation; a lively informed and tolerant audience; privileged access to the great treasures of the Bodleian, and finally, wonderfully interesting dinner companions to help me conclude the best day I have enjoyed at any festival – anywhere. All animals originally came from the sea or from the primal humidity that once covered the Earth. The first animals were thus either fish or fishlike creatures. They moved on to land when the Earth became dry, and they adapted to living there. Human beings, in particular, cannot have been born in their current form, because babies are not self-sufficient, so someone else had to have fed them. They grew out of fishlike creatures. Some authors report that Anaximander was the first to measure the obliquity of the ecliptic (the path that the Sun appears to trace in the sky during the year). This is possible if, as seems likely, he made systematic use of the gnomon, since the obliquity of the ecliptic is the primary natural measurement shown by the gnomon.Something very startling happened in Miletus, the ancient Greek city on the modern Turkish coast, in about 600BC. 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. Wondrous as this was, it was the reaction of the second man, Thales’s fellow citizen, Anaximander, 11 years his junior that, Rovelli argues, changed the world. 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 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] This very clear theoretical aim, which he clearly explains at the beginning of the book, also implies that even if we've got some relatively small number of facts about Anaximander wrong, that doesn't nullify the claim that, based on the written traces at our disposal, several defining characteristics of science and the scientific mindset (such as constitute Rovelli's focus in this book) were first conceived in the Greece of the VI century BCE. Even more importantly, Anaximander's ideas provide Rovelli with a compact historical and philosophical signpost, so that Rovelli can take the cue from this to talk, as a scientist, about science itself. 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.Personally, an eye-opening read & I’m definitely indulged in the scientific thinking & methodology part of this book which I hoped I’ve read during my postgrad studies. I fancy reading on/discovering thinkers & undoubtedly, it's one of the best read on scientific thought, process, & pioneering scientific frameworks. Anaximander wrote a treatise in prose, On Nature (Περι ́ φυ ́σεως), now lost. Only one fragment remains, quoted by Simplicius of Cilicia in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics… Much has been written about this handful of obscure words, which can easily inspire fanciful interpretations. It is always difficult to interpret a passage out of its context with any degree of certainty. It is not this fragment of direct evidence that tells us what is interesting in Anaximander’s ideas. Instead, many Greek sources relay the content of Anaximander’s book… Solid insights into the foundations of science…as usual, Rovelli communicates his ideas with clarity and verve.”— Kirkus Carlo Rovelli's first book, now widely available in English, tells the origin story of scientific thinking: our rebellious ability to reimagine the world, again and again.