Anaximander: And the Nature of Science

The birth of science and the birth of democracy, therefore, have a common foundation: the discovery of the usefulness of criticism and dialogue among equals.

Darwin resolved a problem that was not a problem at all in nineteenth-century biology, because his contemporaries were convinced that they already knew the answer.

The explicit goal of scientific research is not to make correct quantitative predictions; it is to understand how the world works.

Anaximander thus posits that all substances in our experience can be understood in terms of something that is natural but, at the same time, is not one of the substances in our everyday life.

Science’s leaps forward are most often not solutions to well-established problems. They come from discovering that the problem was ill posed.

Around 750 BCE, little more than a century before Anaximander’s birth, the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet. But in so doing they stumbled upon a crucial detail—Indo-European phonetics is simpler than Semitic phonetics: Greek has fewer consonants than Phoenician. Similarly, English, an Indo-European language, has fewer consonants than Arabic,

Science is looking further, with the awareness that our ideas often prove inadequate the moment we step outside our own little corner of the world. Above all, it is unmasking prejudices, and building and developing novel conceptual tools with which to think more effectively about the world.

Scientific thinking, then, is not so different from everyday thinking. It is the same activity, carried out with more-refined instruments: learning to move about the world by constantly updating our mental schemes. When I arrive in a new city, my idea of the city is approximate at first. I make for myself a simple mental scheme that allows me to ge

The reason we take interest in an automobile engine is not because it makes wheels turn; it is because it takes us places that we could not reach by foot. The turning wheels are just the mechanism of an instrument that allows us to journey.