Let me tell you a story to explain what I mean. The story is an old story about my latest, greatest passion outside theoretical physics: an ancient scientist, or so I would say, even if often he is called a philosopher: Anaximander. I am fascinated by this character, Anaximander. I went into understanding what he did, and to me heâs a scientist. He did something that is very typical of science, and which shows some aspect of what science is. So what is the story with Anaximander? Itâs the following, in brief: Until him, all the civilizations of the planet, everybody around the world, thought that the structure of the world was: the sky over our heads and the earth under our feet. Thereâs an up and a down, heavy things fall from the up to the down, and thatâs reality. Reality is oriented up and down, heavenâs up and earth is down. Then comes Anaximander and says: no, is something else. âThe earth is a finite body that floats in space, without falling, and the sky is not just over our head; it is all around.â How he gets it? Well obviously he looks at the sky, you see things going around, the stars, the heavens, the moon, the planets, everything moves around and keeps turning around us. Itâs sort of reasonable to think that below us is nothing, so it seems simple to get to this conclusion. Except that nobody else got to this conclusion. In centuries and centuries of ancient civilizations, nobody got there. The Chinese didnât get there until the 17th century, when Matteo Ricci and the Jesuits went to China and told them. In spite of centuries of Imperial Astronomical Institute which was studying the sky. The Indians only learned this when the Greeks arrived to tell them. The Africans, in America, in Australia⊠nobody else got to this simple realization that the sky is not just over our head, itâs also under our feet. Why? Because obviously itâs easy to suggest that the earth sort of floats in nothing, but then you have to answer the question: why doesnât it fall? The genius of Anaximander was to answer this question. We know his answer, from Aristotle, from other people. He doesnât answer this question, in fact. He questions this question. He says why should it fall? Things fall toward the earth. Why the earth itself should fall? In other words, he realizes that the obvious generalization from every small heavy object falling, to the earth itself falling, might be wrong. He proposes an alternative, which is that objects fall towards the earth, which means that the direction of falling changes around the earth. This means that up and down become notions relative to the earth. Which is rather simple to figure out for us now: weâve learned this idea. But if you think of the difficulty when we were children, to understand how people in Sydney could live upside-down, clearly requires some changing in something structural in our basic language in terms of which we understand the world. In other words, up and down means something different before and after Anaximanderâs revolution. He understands something about reality, essentially by changing something in the conceptual structure that we have in grasping reality. In doing so, he is not doing a theory; he understands something which in some precise sense is forever. Itâs some uncovered truth, which to a large extent is a negative truth. He frees ourselves from prejudice, a prejudice that was ingrained in the conceptual structure we had for thinking about space.
Science is about finding the most reliable way of thinking, at the present level of knowledge. Science is extremely reliable; itâs not certain. In fact, not only itâs not certain, but itâs the lack of certainty that grounds it. Scientific ideas are credible not because they are sure, but because they are the ones that have survived all the possible past critiques, and they are the most credible because they were put on the table for everybodyâs criticism.
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