Mille: Why, I mean, this first great in light, I think you can call it an enlightenment. Why does it happen there and then? And my thought on it is that, of course, there have been these great empires that have existed before. That they have sufficient strength, sufficient reach, sufficient power to claim a universality. So the Egyptians can look at the Nile and assume that the Nile is the paradigm for the whole cosmos. Babylonians can look at Mesopotamia and think the same. But Mille wonders whether the Mylesians who are on the very edge of Asia and aware of these vast empires, the ancient civilizations, hugely more sophisticated and complex than they
Carlo Rovelli is one of the world’s best-known scientists. A theoretical physicist, his books have sold over two million copies around the world. He recently came to Intelligence Squared to talk about his favourite scientist, the little-known Greek philosopher Anaximander, whose ideas, articulated over two millennia ago, lay the foundations for cosmology, physics, geography, meteorology, and biology. It's the subject of Rovelli's book, Anaximander: And the Nature of Science, now being published in English for the first time. In conversation with the award-winning historian Tom Holland, Rovelli shows how Anaximander opened up a path that we are still on today: one that requires us to accept the provisional nature of our knowledge and allows us to challenge, rebel against and create new images of our world.
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