I intend to harp on one of my pet themes/issues, all the guise of reviewing a book. Carlo Rovelli has in the last several years become one of my favorite writers on science. He not only has a keen sense of how to explain, he is gifted with excellent translators, as his first language is Italian. He is a theoretical physicist, specializing in quantum gravity, which he explicated marvelously well in his book Reality Is Not What It Seems. He came on the popular science scene with a short book remarkable in its concision and depth, Seven Brief Lessons On Physics, and has since cast his gaze widely and effectively. 

His most recent work is Anaximander and the Birth of Science. It is ostensibly a history, tracing the growth of this tool we have that has simultaneously given us so much and yet shaken our confidence in ourselves. Anaximander of Miletus, along with Thales, is credited with positing the first observational shift in human conceptions about the universe, the one that detached us from the supernatural and the fickle realms of gods. It has been a jagged, broken road from then to now, and the path is still not clear of obstacles.

Anaximander was born in 610 B.C.E. in the Hellenic colony of Miletus, although in reality the Ionian “colonies” had handily established their independence and become something more by then. Sea powers, trading giants, and the seats of a burgeoning philosophical movement that was to inform and somewhat shape all that followed.

Part of the difficulty in discerning direct contributions of such people is the tragic loss of source material. Over the centuries, with the waxing and waning of political, religious, and economic struggles, much has disappeared, too much quite intentionally. The destruction of the Library of Alexander is only the most famous (infamous?) example of this process, so what we are left with are quotes and paraphrases in other works, tantalizing hints here and there. But entire schools grew around many of these ideas and their impact remains. What exactly may have been written becomes less important than the preservation of the key ideas. And what Anaximander did was to sever the connection between the supernatural and the natural world. 

To be sure, this was controversial at the time, but it seeded movements that later became what we now call science—the direct examination of the material world and the construction of workable explanations—theories—of how nature works. The byways, dead-ends, and mazes into which brilliant minds quested is the history of human intellectual development, the corpus of knowledge upon which all our understandings of the world—and ourselves—rests. 

Rovelli’s prose let us fall into the essence of the history, the tracks of exploration, and the subsequent unfoldings of nature’s substance. He is bringing necessary history to light in a well-paced and considered volume. But he is also showing all the barriers it has been necessary to tear down in order to free ourselves from the chains of nonsense.

It must have been a shock to be shown that all these events—storms, earthquakes, droughts, plagues—had nothing to do with gods or demons, but were simply (simply!) the processes of the environment in which we live. There is a sense of control inherent in the idea that some intelligence must be placated to prevent pain and tragedy, or conversely to achieve success and plenty. Getting the incantation “wrong” is perhaps easier to accept than that there is no way to predict or control events in the world. That things simply happen.

But then on top of that basic rupture, there are all the social power structures built around these ideas of placating gods, and so there are vested interests to confront determined to suffocate materialist science in its crib.

During the Civil War, Darwin’s book came to America and was immediately seized upon by abolitionists as scientific proof that the assumptions of racial superiority driving the slave powers were utterly unsupportable. Science gave us the resources to finally drive a stake through the vampiric heart of baseless assumptions that had kept millions of human being in thrall. The factions vested in maintaining those baseless assumptions have, in one way or another, kept the “controversy” of evolution alive in an attempt to discredit it, presumably to once more erect the substanceless (yet powerful) lie of racial superiority. Science stubbornly says no. Therefore, science itself must go.

It is this that Rovelli throws into sharp relief in his story of the struggle of science since Anaximander’s startling observations, the persistence of those who for many reasons do not want science to be correct.

He does so by lovingly explaining what science is and where it came from and how it applies. It is a tool that necessarily doubts its conclusions, for the plain fact that there is always more to discover. (Of course, it is unlikely in the extreme that something already and thoroughly shown to be wrong could be “discovered” to be somehow correct.) It is, in short, our best resource for growth and maturity and the apprehension of, first, fact and then, as a consequence, truth.

It is today unlikely that the body of knowledge we have could be so utterly demolished as it has been in the past, but there are other ways for the forces of ignorance to achieve similar ends. One need never burn a book if one can convince people to never read it.

The primary dictum of science is the one that has been present in its practice since the beginning: never be afraid to ask questions. If the answer is not known or incomplete or unsatisfying, go look. Examine. Question.

The patient, kind, and loving approach Carlo Rovelli brings to the necessary work of teaching science is possibly the best way to keep the forces of darkness (if I may indulge a bit of drama) at bay. In the end, opening one’s eyes is always better than forcefully keeping them shut.