Anaximander: And the Nature of Science

In the economically and culturally reborn Greece of the seventh century BCE, there was no centralized power, no organized religious authority, no church or powerful priestly caste, no scribes with secret knowledge, no sacred text.

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

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

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.

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 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.

Plato hews closely to Pythagoras and sees the structured world as written with the language of mathematics, which for the Greeks meant geometry.

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,

The laws of Galileo and Newton, which form the basis of all modern technology, show how physical variables change “according to necessity” and “in conformity with the order of Time.”