With this book, first published in Italian in 2009 and already published in English with a small US house in 2016, Rovelli is a long way from being the first to have noticed Anaximander’s importance. True! Perhaps most impressively, he intuited that, rather than having been divinely created, human beings must have evolved from earlier life forms and that the first life probably originated in the sea before crawling out on to land. Rain, he says, is water that has evaporated from the ocean and been blown over the land. Indeed, according to later authors, Anaximander is also the first to give an entirely naturalistic explanation of weather, doing away with thunderbolt-hurling Zeus and chums.

In Carlo Rovelli’s rather thrilling exegesis, this too becomes revolutionary, both in its positive claims - things happen out of “necessity,” so there is a causal order to the universe all things are made up of more fundamental entities - and in what it signally refrains from saying: that any of this is controlled by the gods. The sole example of his own verbatim writing we have, meanwhile, from a treatise On Nature, is brief enough to quote in full.Īll things originate from one another, and vanish into one another according to necessity they give to each other justice and recompense for injustice in conformity with the order of Time. (It would take millennia before it was understood that you could say the Earth is constantly falling around the sun.) So, in contrast to all other ancient civilizations, which pictured the heavens above and the Earth below, Anaximander insisted that the very ideas of “up” and “down” were relative. Why didn’t it fall? Because there was no preferred direction in which to fall: it was indifferent to directions. Luckily, as with many ancient authors, the works of the sixth-century BC philosopher Anaximander are described in subsequent treatises, and a resourceful writer can infer much from this evidence about what might have been “the first great scientific revolution in human history.”Īnaximander, a Greek citizen of the cosmopolitan port Miletus, on the coast of what is now Turkey, was as far as we know the first human to say that the Earth was an object floating in space with no means of support (elephants, turtles, or what have you).

It’s a daring thing to write a whole book about a man while confessing early on that “we know almost nothing of his readings, life, character, appearance or voyages,” and of whose writings only a three-line fragment survives.

Carlo rovelli the order of time review