An insightful survey of the scientific contributions of Greek philosopher Anaximander…Rovelli makes the most of the available evidence in building his case that the philosopher’s emphasis on natural causes marked a sea change in human thought. This is a masterful overview of a pivotal figure in scientific history.”— Publisher’s Weekly Mr Rovelli’s book, first published in French in 2009 and newly translated into English, is not a straight biography, as little is known of Anaximander’s life and hardly any of his original writing survives. Instead, it focuses on his revolutionary idea that the best way to uncover nature’s secrets is to question everything. Anaximander built his own cosmology on the work of past sages, interrogating their theories and making corrections where needed. He invented a process that allowed knowledge to grow from generation to generation, and enabled humanity to reap the benefits. Abold and persuasive case that this ancient Greek philosopher scientist was… the founder of critical thinking.”— Adam Rutherford, Start the Week I loved the whole atmosphere of the Oxford Literary Festival. From breakfast, alongside some of the attendees, who were talking books with each other a mile a minute, to the public event at The Sheldonian where everyone was lively and engaged – I felt I had arrived in a kind of literary heaven. The multiplicity of things that constitutes nature derives from a single origin or principle, called the apeiron (απειρον), the “indefinite” or “infinite.”

The second concept is the “apeiron” as the origin or principle (“arche”) of all things. “Apeiron” is sometimes translated as “the infinite” or “the indefinite” or “the undifferentiated.” I think it a stretch to give an unambiguously naturalistic interpretation of “apeiron”. In a naturalistic interpretation, you could read it as a truly empirical “thing” — an undifferentiated substance out of which all the multiplicity of things we are familiar with originates. Or you could see it as a logical concept, as the origin of multiplicity in undifferentiated unity. In fact, I think the distinction between a naturalistic interpretation and a logical one is something we lay over Anaxminder’s thought — it simply wasn’t a mature distinction at the time. 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. In 2021, he coordinated the Global Peace Dividend, an open letter signed by more that 50 Nobel Laureates, including the Dalai Lama, calling for all countries to negotiate a balanced cut on their military spending by 2% a year for the next five years, and put half the saved money in a UN fund to combat pandemics, the climate crisis, and extreme poverty. [27] On May first 2023, Rovelli gave a political speech at the large Italian Labour Day concert in Rome, inviting the youth to engage politically for the environment, economical equality and peace, and criticizing the Italian Defence Minister Guido Crosetto for his direct involvement with the industrial military complex. The speech raised a large controversy. [28] As a consequence, his invitation to represent Italy at the 2024 Frankfurt Book Fair was cancelled; the cancellation itself was widely criticized, leading to his re-invitation, [29] and the resignation of the Italian Commissary for the Buchmesse. [30] Rovelli repeated his call for reduced military spending and improved international cooperation following the outbreak of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war. [31]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: There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness, Penguin Random House, 2020

I’ll start with Anaximander. It’s a cliche that history is told by the winners. But if science is a “winner”, then Rovelli is telling the winner’s history of science. His claim, at the highest level, is that Anaximander produced the first “scientific revolution”, the beginnings of science itself. 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. Anassimandro è uno dei filosofi pre-socratici, che spesso scivola anonimo tra le prime lezioni di filosofia al liceo. Ma in questo libro (e ricordo un simile accenno nei documentari di Carl Sagan) lo si eleva a prima incarnazione storica dello spirito "scientifico", non essendosi accontentato nelle sue spiegazioni dei fenomeni naturali di tirare in ballo gli dei, ma avendo elaborato una proposta del tutto fisica.Carlo Rovelli (25 July 2017). "Carlo Rovelli: 'I felt the beautiful adventure of physics was a story that had to be told' ". The Guardian . Retrieved 5 April 2018. Since the dawn of civilization, humans had believed in the heavens above and the Earth below. Then, on the Ionian coast, a Greek philosopher named Anaximander set in motion a revolution. He not only conceived that the Earth floats in space, but also that animals evolve, that storms and earthquakes are natural, not supernatural, that the world can be mapped and, above all, that progress is made by the endless search for knowledge. For history, I found that Rovelli did a very good and thorough job of explaining things. I was astonished to learn that the Chinese thought the Earth was flat until Jesuit missionaries in the late 1500s came, and I think it an interesting example of a scientific idea being a world changer (in a literal sense). 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. 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 …

Carlo Rovelli (born May 3, 1956) is an Italian theoretical physicist and writer who has worked in Italy, the United States and, since 2000, in France. [1] He is also currently a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute, [2] and core member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy of Western University. [3]

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Every literary festival stays in an author’s mind for slightly individual reasons. I shall remember the Oxford festival for: Written by Rovelli, whose author himself is a visionary in the field of theoretical knowledge, specifically his research in quantum gravity. As there were limited resources on Anaximander, Rovelli put the pieces together with a plan to bring it to light. Suitable with Anaximander role in the history of natural science, taking into account social factors that led to the "big bang" moment for logical thought. All I really knew about Anaximander was that he had proposed an early cosmology, with a cylindrically shaped Earth and the light of the Sun and stars produced by fire contained in rings that had holes in to let the light out. This was interesting, but not necessarily hugely inspiring. By contrast, what Rovelli proposes is that Anaximander came up with a number of steps forward that were effectively foundational for the scientific method.

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… 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]

For the science and "religion" essays, I found them interesting and thought provoking. Rovelli explores what science is, and he talks about the philosophy of science well. He seems well-acquainted with the various theories that have been put forth, and does not favor any one side too strongly (I think a nice summary of the ideas, and his own thoughtful definition, if one could call it that). He explores what drives us to look for explanations, what that might mean, and ends reinforcing that accepting uncertainty is a crucial part of humanity's improvement of the past millenia.