Anaximander: And the Birth of Science

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Adnkronos (23 November 2022). "I Belladonna mettono all'asta come Nft un brano con Carlo Rovelli". Adnkronos . Retrieved 27 November 2022. Anaximander is traditionally credited with introducing the use of the gnomon to the Greek world, perhaps from Babylonia. A gnomon is a rod set vertically in the ground. By measuring the length of the shadow it casts, one can determine the Sun’s altitude. A complex astronomy of the Sun’s movements can be developed using a gnomon.

Rovelli's first book is on the Italian student political movements in the 1970s. [26] He later refused to compulsory military draft and was briefly detained. In doing so, he steps into the territory of modern philosophy of science. In his chapter on “What is Science?” he attempts to find his footing within that debate, with Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, and others. The discussion is very short, and his criticisms of those thinkers abrupt and controversial. But in a way, that doesn’t matter — it’s not the point of this part of the book. The point, I think, is to, with the help of Anaximander’s thought, turn our understanding of science in a more conceptual direction — into an explicit focus not only on facts and observation per se, but on the terms in which we think about and organize the facts and observations of science. Rovelli thinks that, in fact, this is what great scientists do. 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 a new model of the shape and position of earth (not flat, resting on a foundation of some sort, but a cylinder freely floating in the universe)

Science] means building and developing an image of the world, which is to say a conceptual structure for thinking about the world, effective and consistent with what we know and learn about the world itself. Premio letterario Galileo per la divulgazione scientifica [ it] for the book Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity With Francesca Vidotto, Covariant Loop Quantum Gravity: An Elementary Introduction to Quantum Gravity and Spinfoam Theory, Cambridge University Press, 2014, ISBN 978-1107069626

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. 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] Anaximander drew up the first map of the known world. In the generation following him, another Milesian, Hecataeus, expanded this map. Hecataeus’s map served then as the basis for all other ancient (and hence modern) maps. 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.Certainly, in the terms of Anaximander’s thinking, and in the absence of any explicitly mythological elements, there is a strain that we could call “naturalistic.” The Earth is a body of finite dimensions floating in space. It doesn’t fall because there is no particular direction toward which it might fall. It is “dominated by no other body.” The night in Oxford was the most beautiful event I have ever done. Not just the spectacular setting (of the Sheldonian), but an unforgettable evening. Consegnato a Carlo Rovelli il premio "Alassio per l'Informazione Culturale" ". Ecodisavona (in Italian) . Retrieved 6 April 2018. their intelligence – this makes a huge difference for a speaker. In the Oxford audience I encountered many experts in the field my book covered and even one of the ambassadors I’d quoted

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. The Sun, the Moon, and the stars rotate around the Earth, forming complete circles. Immense wheels, similar to wagon wheels, carry them along. They are hollow inside (like a bicycle tire), filled with fire, and pierced along their inward-facing surface. The Sun, the Moon, and the stars that we see in the sky are the fire visible through these holes. The wheels are probably meant to explain why the planets don’t fall. The stars are on the wheels closest to us, the Moon on the middle wheel, and the Sun on the wheel farthest from us. Their distances from Earth are in the proportion 9:18:27. In my experience, working scientists often get history of science wrong - in this case, as it's arguably more history of philosophy, I can't say whether or not Carlo Rovelli is straying far from what's known to make his point, but what he has to say about the Greek philosopher Anaximander from the 6th century BC is fascinating. 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] Adnkronos (18 October 2023). "√ Musica, i Belladonna e Carlo Rovelli nel ballott dei Grammy Awards". Adnkronos (in Italian) . Retrieved 18 October 2023.The bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics illuminates the nature of science throughtherevolutionaryideas ofthe Greek philosopher Anaximander Alan Lightman (14 May 2018). "Benedict Cumberbatch Meets Albert Einstein in Carlo Rovelli's New Audiobook". The New York Times . Retrieved 1 October 2019. ItalianPostNews (23 November 2022). "Belladonna are auctioning off a song with Carlo Rovelli as Nft". Italian Post . Retrieved 27 November 2022. A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting. Our knowledge, like the Earth, floats in nothingness,” Mr Rovelli says. “Its provisional nature and the underlying void do not make life meaningless; they make it more precious.” This book offers a timely rebuttal to those who would sacrifice the vital legacy of Western science—and the progress that comes with it—on the altar of cultural sensitivity or by retreating to the safety of metaphysical revelation. ■

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator. But I think he’s actually more interesting and puzzling than that. In what we have of Anaximander’s actual writings, there are two concepts that seem difficult, in our own time and terms, to reconcile. 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.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 is known as the ancient master of the universe & author of the first surviving lines of Greek philosophy. He speculated & argued about "the boundless" as the origin of all that is. Apart from being one of the earliest pioneers in the fields of what we now call geography, biology, & astronomy. 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. This position led him to face the following problem: if time is not part of the fundamental theory of the world, then how does time emerge? In 1993, in collaboration with Alain Connes, Rovelli proposed a solution to this problem called the thermal time hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, time emerges only in a thermodynamic or statistical context. If this is correct, the flow of time is not fundamental, deriving from the incompleteness of knowledge. Similar conclusions had been reached earlier in the context of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, in particular in the work of Robert Zwanzig, and in Caldeira-Leggett models used in quantum dissipation. [14] [15] Relational quantum mechanics [ edit ] Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations , because at first reading I could not make much sense of it, but I expected it to be a mine of ideas. I am slowly advancing into it, and this time it is not disappointing.