It is with him that “a search for knowledge based on the rejection of any obvious-seeming ‘certainty’” begins. 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. 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). Anaximander held that the Earth was a flattened cylinder, which is less true but does not undermine his achievement. It defies common sense but it happens to be true. 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. Discarding the obvious, Anaximander promoted the idea that the Earth was, in fact, suspended in the firmament. Or rather, one Greek: Anaximander of Miletus, born c610 BC. Except, after a certain point, the ancient Greeks. And almost all of them have found that conception, with the addition of a few explanatory deities, completely satisfactory. 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. This is obvious.įrom a modern standpoint – on the same Earth, beneath the same sky – this seems daft. 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.

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”. Further deductions are possible: things fall but the ground itself does not so there must be something that stops the ground from falling. It is common sense, for instance, that the stars are above us, just as the ground is below us.

Anaximander by carlo rovelli