welcome to the deep dive we are shifting gears
today we're not looking at modern tech or uh
current events we are going way way back to the
very beginning yeah or at least the beginning
of a certain way of thinking exactly we are traveling
back to the 6th century bc to the ionian coast
and specifically to the city of miletus miletus
yeah The birthplace of science, or at least,
you know, the birthplace of the attempt at science.
Right. And usually when we talk about this era,
this Milesian revolution, everyone talks about
Thales, you know, the guy who predicted the eclipse,
fell into a well and said everything is water.
Or they skip ahead to Pythagoras and his triangles
or Socrates. But we are here to talk about the
third man, the one who who usually just gets
a paragraph in the textbooks, but might actually
be the most important physicist of the bunch.
Anaximetes. Anaximetes of Miletus. The man who
looked. at the empty space in front of his face
and said, this is it. This is everything. This
is God. This is stone. This is the soul. It's
so easy to overlook him because his answer, everything
is air. It just sounds so simple, almost naive
to our modern ears. It really does. But Anaximus
is this forgotten genius. who basically invented
the concept of physical change. He didn't just
tell us what the universe was made of. He was
the first to really seriously try to explain
how it all worked. And that is our mission for
this deep dive. we are going to unpack the mind
of the man who, in a sense, weighed the air.
We're going to look at his arguments, his cosmology,
which, spoiler alert, involves a flat earth riding
on a cushion of wind. It gets wild. It does.
And we'll look at his legacy. But before we get
to the physics, we have to deal with the history.
Oh. Or, well, the lack of it. Because we don't
actually have his book, do we? We do not. And
this is the great tragedy of pre -Socratic philosophy.
I mean, Anaximenes is credited with writing a
book. It was likely titled On Nature or Periphyseos,
which became sort of the standard title for scientific
works for centuries after him. But the scroll
itself is gone, burned, lost, decayed. We just
don't have it. So what are we even working with
then? How do we know anything about him? We're
working with what scholars call the doxographic
tradition. Which is a fancy way of saying we're
reliant on the people who read his book before
it disappeared. So secondhand accounts. Very
secondhand. We have fragments and summaries from
Aristotle, who lived two centuries later. We
have Theophrastus, who was Aristotle's student
and was a bit more careful with the history,
which is helpful. A bit more a historian. A bit
more, yeah. And then we have later Roman and
Byzantine commentators like Simplicius or Hippolytus,
who were writing. you know, 800 or even a thousand
years after the fact. A thousand years. That
feels incredibly precarious. It's like trying
to reconstruct the plot of Hamlet by reading
a review written by someone who heard about the
play from their grandfather. That is a perfect
analogy. It requires a lot of detective work.
You have to constantly filter out the bias of
the reporter. Aristotle, for instance, he tends
to interpret everyone as if they were just trying
and failing to be Aristotle. Right. He projects
his own logic backward. Completely. So when we
analyze Anaximetes, we're constantly asking,
did he actually say this? Or is this Aristotle
summarizing him in a way that serves Aristotle's
own argument? But despite all that static, a
very clear, distinct voice does come through.
A voice that sounds different from his predecessors.
Oh, very different. And to understand that voice,
you have to understand where he was standing.
We have to talk about Miletus. Okay, let's set
the scene. This wasn't some backwater village.
Miletus in the 6th century BC was the jewel of
Ionia. It was the New York City of the ancient
Mediterranean, absolutely. It was located on
the coast of modern -day Turkey, right at the
mouth of the Meander River, a massive trade hub.
So you have ships coming in from everywhere.
Everywhere. You had ships from Egypt, from Phoenicia.
You had caravans coming over land from Babylon
and Persia. It was a true melting pot of cultures,
goods, and most importantly, ideas. And that
economic status is crucial, isn't it? Because
you don't really get philosophy when you're starving.
Exactly. The Greeks had a word for it. Skol.
It means leisure. But it's the root of our word,
skol. Yeah. Miletus was wealthy enough to support
a class of people who didn't have to toil in
the fields all day. Yeah. They had the time.
The time to just think. To look up at the stars
and ask questions that didn't have an immediate
practical application. Questions like... What
is all this stuff? But it wasn't just the money.
It was the information flow. You mentioned Egypt
and Babylon. These weren't just trading partners.
They were ancient reservoirs of knowledge. Right.
And this is key. The Egyptians had been doing
practical geometry for land surveying for centuries,
you know, dealing with the Nile floods. Right.
And the Babylonians had thousands of years of
meticulous astronomical data. They knew the cycles
of the stars and planets better than anyone.
Miletus was the funnel where all this raw data
arrived. But the Milesians did something different
with it. That's the crucial twist. The Babylonians
watched the stars to read omens from the gods.
They were trying to predict the future. The Milesians
watched the stars to find the mechanism. They
wanted to know how the machine worked. They weren't
looking for the will of the gods. They were looking
for the laws of nature. Exactly. And this brings
us to the Milesian school, this little cluster
of thinkers. We have the big three, Thales, Anaximander,
and our guide Anaximenes. And they are all monists.
Now, we need to be careful with this word because
monism sounds like a religion. It does. But in
this context, it's material monism. It's the
belief that despite the incredible diversity
of the world, you know, trees, birds, oceans,
fire, there is only one underlying substance.
One arch. The arch. The beginning. The source.
And the sustaining principle. The stuff that
it's all made of. They believed if you could
zoom in close enough, everything is made of the
same fundamental Lego brick. They just disagreed
on what that brick was. Okay, so let's walk through
it. Thales goes first. He looks at the harbor
in Miletus. He looks at the blood in his veins.
He sees that everything needs moisture to live.
And he says... It's water. It's water. Which
is a pretty rational starting point. It's a great
start. Water is the only substance they saw naturally
in three states. Solid ice, liquid water, and
gaseous steam or mist. It's absolutely essential
for life. Seeds are moist. It makes a lot of
sense. But then comes Anaximander, who was the
teacher of our guy Anaximenes. Yeah. He rejects
water. He says it can't be water. He does. And
Anaximander was a heavy hitter. I mean, a truly
profound thinker. He argued that water couldn't
possibly be the arch because water has an opposite,
fire. His logic was, if the universe started
as infinite water, how could fire ever exist?
The water would just drown it out. The fundamental
substance can't be one of the things we see because
it has to be able to become all of the things,
including its opposite. So he goes abstract.
He invents the aperon. The aperon. The boundless.
The indefinite. He argued that the source of
all things can't be one of the things. It has
to be this case. This background energy. An infinite,
undefined reservoir from which hot and cold,
wet and dry separate out. It's a brilliant philosophical
move. It solves the logical problem. But I imagine
for a young student like Anaximenes, sitting
at Anaximander's feet, it might have felt a little
unsatisfying. That's the perfect word for it.
It was logically sound, but it's physically empty.
You can't see the epitome. You can't touch it.
It doesn't really explain how a rock forms. It
just sort of says the infinite did it. It's almost
like a placeholder for God. In a way, yeah. Anaximander
traded Zeus for the Aperon, but he still left
the actual mechanism vague. It was a principle,
not a process. So Anaximenes steps up. He respects
his teacher, but he sees the problem. He wants
to save the rigor of Anaximander, but ground
it back in the real, observable world of Thales.
He needs a Goldilocks solution. Exactly. Not
as specific as water, but not as vague as the
infinite. Enter air. Now, when he says air, he
doesn't just mean the oxygen and nitrogen mix
we talk about today. This is a richer concept.
Oh, much richer. For the Greeks, air was a dense
concept. It meant the dark, misty lower atmosphere.
It was distinct from the bright, clear aether
of the upper sky where the gods lived. But for
Anaximenes, it was the breath of the universe.
So why air? Why is that the perfect Goldilocks
substance? Well, think about its properties.
It's invisible. Yet it's everywhere. You feel
it on your skin. It occupies space. It has no
defined shape, so it can take any shape. Exactly.
It's boundless enough to satisfy an axamander's
requirement for infinity, right? The air seems
to go on forever. But it's also a physical, observable
substance, which is what Thales wanted. You can
feel the wind. And it's intimately connected
to life. That's the clincher. You can live without
water for days. You can live without food for
weeks. You can live without air for, what, a
few minutes? Right. And axamines saw that air,
or breath, was the driver of all living things.
It was dynamic. It was always moving. It was
the source of life and motion. Okay, so he picks
air. It's a brilliant synthesis of the two ideas
before him. But this is where the other shoe
drops. Because if I tell you everything is air,
you should look at me like I'm crazy and tap
on this granite table and say, this isn't air.
This is hard. It's heavy. It hurts if I drop
it on my foot. Right. How do you get a rock out
of thin air? How does he bridge that gap? This
is the moment. This is where Anaximenes earns
his place in history and why I think he's the
most important of the three. Thales and Anaximander
identified the substance. Anaximenes identified
the mechanism. He introduced the concepts of
rarefaction and condensation. So he turns it
into a sliding scale of density. Precisely. This
is the birth of quantitative science. He was
the first person to realize that the same substance
can have wildly different properties based on
how tightly packed it is. Let's break that down
because that's a huge idea. Quantitative science.
Before Anaximetes, qualities were seen as absolute
things in themselves. Hot was a fundamental quality.
Cold was a different quality. Hard was its own
thing. And Anaximenes came along and said, no,
those are just symptoms. They're illusions. The
only real variable is density. The quantity of
stuff in a given space. So more or less of the
same thing in the same amount of space changes
its properties completely. Yes. If you have a
little bit of air in a large space, that's one
state. If you have a lot of air crammed into
a small space, that's a totally different state
with different qualities. So walk us through
that spectrum. We start with our neutral, everyday
air. What happens when we loosen it up? Rarefaction.
If you rarefy air, make it thinner, spread it
out, he said it becomes fire. Fire is just thin
air. In his model, yes. It becomes hot and luminous
because the particles, as we would say, have
more room to move. It's less dense. Okay. Now
let's go the other way. We start compressing
it. What's the first step down from air? It becomes
wind. Okay. Which makes sense, right? Wind is
just moving compressed air. Okay. Squeeze it
tighter. It becomes cloud. Even tighter. And
the cloud condenses into water. And you can see
that process in the sky. We can literally watch
it happen. Yeah. But he doesn't stop there. Keep
compressing the water. What do you get? Earth.
Dirt. Earth? Solid ground. And then the ultimate
compression. The densest possible state of air.
Stones. Rocks. So a diamond, in his view, is
just air that has been squeezed within an inch
of its life. Correct. And he used this brilliant
everyday analogy from the local industry in Miletus
to explain this process. Felting. Felting, like
making felt from wool. Exactly. Miletus was famous
for its wool and its textiles, so everyone would
have known the process of felting. You take loose,
fluffy wool, which is mostly air, right? Right.
And you press it, you beat it, you add moisture,
and you compress it until all those individual
fibers lock together and it becomes a hard, dense,
water -resistant fabric. Wow. And Axiomini said
the universe is doing the same thing. Nature
is a felting machine. The wind is just felting
the air into clouds, and the pressure in the
clouds is felting them into water. That is so
tactile. It takes this grand mystery of creation
and turns it into a manufacturing process that
anyone on the docks in Miletus could understand.
It's science for the people. But he didn't just
link density to hardness and state of matter.
He linked it to temperature, which was the second
part of his brilliant theory. Right, so rarefaction,
making things thinner. He argued that creates
heat, expansion is hot. And condensation, compressing
things. Creates cold. Compression is cold. Expanded
is hot. Compressed is cold. Yes. And I'm sure
any listeners with a background in thermodynamics
are probably screaming at their speakers right
now. Because in modern physics, it's usually
the opposite, right? The ideal gas law. If you
compress a gas in a piston, it gets hot. It gets
very hot. Right. But Anaximenes wasn't working
with pistons and closed systems. He was working
with everyday observation. And he provided what
might be the first recorded scientific experiment
to prove his point. I love this. The famous breath
experiment. It's so simple and so elegant. It
really is. And you can do this right now as you're
listening. Let's try it. Okay. It's very simple.
First, open your mouth wide. Just relax your
jaw. And blow gently onto the palm of your hand
like you're fogging a mirror. Okay. Exhale gently.
It's warm. It feels like a standard warm breath.
Right. And axamine says, see, you opened your
mouth. You let the air expand as it came out.
Yeah. That is rarefaction. Therefore, it is warm.
Simple enough. Okay, now the second part. Purse
your lips. Tighten them like you're about to
whistle or like you're trying to cool down a
spoonful of hot soup and blow a sharp, fast stream
of air onto your hand. Okay. Sharp exhale. Whoa,
that's cold. It's distinctly cold. It is. And
an ax meanie says, see, you compress the air
with your lips. You forced it through a small
opening. That is condensation. Therefore, it
is cold. It is such a convincing demonstration.
I mean, we know why it feels cold now. It has
to do with the Venturi effect and rapid evaporation.
The fast moving air pulls heat away from your
skin. But for him, the correlation was perfect
and undeniable. It was empirical. He wasn't quoting
a holy text. He wasn't citing an ancient myth.
He was using his own body as a scientific instrument
to demonstrate a cosmic law. He's saying the
laws that govern the stars are the same laws
that govern your mouth. That is a massive conceptual
leap. It implies that the universe is uniform
and knowable. It's not gods do magic up there
and we do physics down here. It's all physics.
Yeah. All the way down. So once he established
this powerful mechanism that density determines
reality, he had a tool. And now he had to use
that tool to build a universe. He had to explain
the Earth, the stars, everything. Exactly. He
had to build a cosmology. And this brings us
to his cosmology, which, I have to be honest,
is a bit of a mixed bag from our perspective.
He starts with the Earth, and he believes the
Earth is flat. He does. He believed the Earth
was a broad, flat disk. Like a tabletop. Which
feels like a step backward, doesn't it? I mean,
Thales thought it was a log floating in water.
Anaximander thought it was a cylinder hanging
freely in space, which is surprisingly advanced.
Why did Anaximenes go back to a simple flat disk?
Because of his air theory. It had to be consistent
with his mechanism. If the Earth is made of condensed
air, it's heavy. It needs something to support
it. Water in Thales' model. Right. But for Anaximenes,
the support system had to be air. He argued that
the earth rides on the air underneath it like
a lid on a pot of boiling steam. And this is
his famous analogy. The leaf analogy. Like a
leaf on the wind. He argued that if the earth
were a ball or a cylinder, the air would just
slip around it and it would fall. But because
it's a broad, flat plate, it traps the air underneath
it. It creates a cushion of pressure that holds
it up. So he's using the principle of air resistance
to explain why the earth doesn't fall through
the infinite air. It's actually a very clever
aerodynamic argument. Even if the premise is
wrong, it's internally consistent. Okay, so we
are on a giant leaf floating in an infinite column
of air. What about the stuff above us? The sun,
the moon, the stars, how are they formed? This
is where he applies the rarefaction part of his
theory. And we get into some really interesting
textual debates. He says the Earth... Being moist
lets out exhalations. Like Earth. Essentially,
yeah. Moisture rises from the Earth. As this
moist air rises up into the sky, the pressure
lessens and it expands. It rarefies. And what
happens when air rarefies? It gets hot and becomes
fire. Exactly. So the stars, the sun, and the
moon, they were all ignited exhalations from
the Earth. They are bodies of fire created by
the thinning of the atmosphere as you go higher.
So the cosmos is being fueled by the Earth. It's
a cycle of condensation down here and rarefaction
up there. It's a complete system. But here's
where the controversy starts. We have conflicting
reports from our ancient sources on how these
stars are arranged and how they move. Some sources,
like Hippolytus, say he thought the stars were
like fiery leaves floating on the upper air,
just like the Earth floats on the lower air.
So they're just drifting around up there. Right.
But other, sometimes more reliable, sources describe
the stars as Nails. Nails. Nails or studs driven
into a crystalline surface. Like bronze nails
hammered into a great transparent shield that
rotates around us. That implies a solid sky.
A dome. It does. A dome made of perhaps extremely
condensed and frozen air. Like ice. And this
is a huge deal. Because if he believed the fixed
stars were like nails stuck in a rotating sphere.
Then what about the planets? The wanderers. Exactly.
What about them? Because they don't move with
the background stars. This suggests a possibility
that he distinguished between the fixed stars,
the nails, and the freely floating bodies like
the sun, moon, and planets, the leaves. And if
that's true? If that's true, he might have been
the first Greek thinker to formally separate
the planets from the stars and propose a two
-tiered system. The foundation of the celestial
spheres model that would dominate astronomy for
the next 2 ,000 years, right up to Copernicus.
Wow. That is a pivotal moment. But I have to
ask about the sun. Because in any flat Earth
model, the biggest problem is always sunset.
If the Earth is a flat table, where does the
sun go at night? Does it go under the table?
Most people who thought about it assumed so.
That was the underworld theory. And Xenium, he
said, absolutely not. He was adamant that the
sun and moon never, ever go under the Earth.
So where do they go? Around. He used the hat
analogy. He said to imagine a felt cap on your
head. You can spin the cap around your head.
The brim stays parallel to the ground. It never
goes under your chin. So the sun circles the
earth laterally, like a game of tetherball played
on a giant disc. Perfect analogy. It circles
around to the north at night. Okay, but then
why does it get dark? If it's just circling to
the other side of the yard, shouldn't we still
see its glow? This is his explanation for that.
He argued that the northern parts of the earth
were elevated. that there were massive towering
mountains in the far north. So when the sun circles
around to the north, it is hidden from our view
because it goes behind these higher lands. That
feels like a bit of a stretch. I can't explain
the sunset, so there must be invisible giant
mountains in, what, Russia? It is a stretch.
It's an ad hoc solution. But notice what he's
not doing. He's not saying the sun god Apollo
takes his chariot into a cave for the night.
He's not saying the sun dies and is reborn each
morning. He's inventing a physical geography
to explain an optical phenomenon. Exactly. He's
wrong. But he's wrong for the right reasons.
He's desperately trying to keep the model physical
and consistent without resorting to gods or magic.
And that commitment to naturalism is really the
core of his project. And it brings us to the
weather, to meteorology. In the ancient world,
this was the scariest stuff. Thunder, lightning,
earthquakes. That was the gods screaming at you.
It was. If the ground shook, Poseidon the Earthshaker
was angry. You needed to sacrifice a bull immediately.
And Aximenes looked at an earthquake and said,
no, that's just structural fatigue. How did he
explain earthquakes with air? He actually used
a geology analogy here, a non -air one. He said
the earth is like an old wooden ship or mud brick
wall. When it gets too dry during a drought,
it cracks and fissures appear. And when it gets
too wet after heavy rains, parts of it get saturated
and swell and then collapse. So earthquakes are
caused by the material of the earth expanding
and contracting. So earthquakes happen in cycles
of drought and heavy rain? Yes. It's just the
expansion and contraction of the material itself.
No angry gods, just moisture cycles and physics.
That must have been terrifying to people. I mean,
it's liberating, but also, if Poseidon isn't
causing the earthquake, then sacrificing a bull
won't stop the next one. You're just stuck on
a cracking rock. That is the double -edged sword
of science, isn't it? It gives you understanding,
but it takes away the illusion of control. You
can't bribe the laws of physics. What about lightning?
That's Zeus's personal trademark. For Anaximenes,
lightning is just wind. Specifically, he says
it's wind that gets trapped inside a thick, dark,
moist cloud. The pressure builds up, it's condensation
again, and eventually the pressure is too great.
The cloud rips open violently. It's a bursting
balloon. It's a bursting balloon. And the flash
is the escaping air igniting for a moment, and
the thunder is the roar of it tearing through
the cloud. Again, not terribly far off from the
modern idea of pressure differentials and charge
separation, even if he missed the electricity
part. Exactly. But his most beautiful explanation,
I think, has to be the rainbow. The rainbow,
usually associated with the goddess Iris, the
messenger. Right. A direct message from the gods.
And Axiomines is the first recorded thinker to
try to explain the rainbow as a purely optical,
natural event. He said it's not a physical object
in the sky at all. He said it was a reflection.
A reflection of what? Of the sun's rays. Specifically,
sunlight bouncing off a dense, dark cloud that
is so compressed it can't be penetrated by the
light. The light hits the air as a wall and reflects
back to our eyes. And the colors, where did the
colors come from? This is amazing. He theorized
that the colors were created by the interaction
of the bright sunlight with the dark medium of
the cloud. He's trying to derive the spectrum
from a mixture of light and darkness. The first
scientific theory of color. The very first. He's
wrong, of course, about darkness being an ingredient.
But he's right that it's an interaction between
light and the atmosphere. He's on the right track.
He's asking the right questions. So we have a
universe that is self -regulating. It runs on
density, heat, and wind. Earthquakes, lightning,
rainbows, all explained. But Anaximenes didn't
stop at the rocks and the clouds. He turned the
camera around. He looked at the observer. The
soul. The psyche. This is the part that, for
me, is the most profound. Because up until now,
he's been a physicist, a meteorologist. Now he
becomes a metaphysician. The distinction wouldn't
have existed for him. To him, the soul was just
another physical thing that needed explaining
with his system. And what is the soul? Well,
what's the most obvious difference between a
living person and a dead one? One is breathing.
The other isn't. Exactly. When someone dies,
they stop breathing. The breath leaves the body.
The corpse is heavy. Cold and inert. The living
person is warm, moving, and breathing. So an
axomenes makes the connection. The soul is air.
Pneuma. Yes. The Greek word pneuma, which gives
us pneumatic drills and pneumonia, originally
meant wind or breath. But it also carried the
meaning of spirit or life force. An axomenes
took that linguistic connection and made it a
literal physical fact. Our internal life force
is a pocket of the divine air. And there's a
specific fragment, fragment B2, that sums this
up perfectly. It's one of the only direct quotes
we're pretty sure is authentic. It's a beautiful
line. It reads, Just as our soul, being air,
holds us together, so do breath and air encompass
the whole world. Just as our soul holds us together,
so does air encompass the whole world. Let's
unpack that. Because there is so much in that
one sentence. It is the first explicit statement
we have in Western philosophy of the microcosm
and the macrocosm. The little world and the big
world. Exactly. The idea that the little world,
the human being, is a perfect analogy for and
functions exactly like the big world, the entire
universe, or cosmos. He's saying that the force
that keeps my body coherent and prevents it from
falling apart into a pile of dust, my soul, my
breath, is the exact same substance and force
that holds the entire universe together. It's
a grand unifying theory of everything. It means
you can study the universe by studying yourself.
Yeah. And you can understand yourself by studying
the storms and stars. It completely bridges the
gap between what we would call biology and cosmology.
It also implies that the universe is alive. Yes.
This is a concept called hylozoism. The belief
that matter is alive. If our soul is air and
the universe is just an infinite amount of air,
then the universe itself is essentially a giant
living soul. It's a living, breathing organism.
That is a staggering thought, that we are just
little eddies of breath swirling inside a massive
cosmic inhalation. And did he take this to a
religious place? If air is the divine principle?
He did, but in a revolutionary way. He didn't
deny the existence of the traditional gods like
Zeus and Apollo, but he demoted them. He said
the gods themselves arose from the air. They
weren't the creators. They were just another
product of the fundamental substance like we
are. So air is the true divinity, the ultimate
source. The ultimate source. This idea had a
huge influence. The Stoics picked this up centuries
later, the idea of the universal pneuma. that
binds the cosmos together. The concept of the
Holy Spirit is the breath of life in Christian
theology. It all tracks back to Anaximenes connecting
the wind outside to the breath inside. So we
have this incredible, coherent intellectual architecture,
the density theory, the empirical experiments,
the flat earth cosmology, the microcosm, macrocosm.
Why then did he fall off the map? Why is he the
forgotten Milesian today? It's a classic case
of history being written by the victors or in
this case by the critics. And the biggest critic
was Aristotle. Right. Aristotle really set the
canon for philosophy for the next 2000 years.
And he was looking for a specific kind of logic,
his own system of causes. He labeled Anaximenes
a simple monist and kind of filed him away as
just a stepping stone to, well, to more sophisticated
thinkers like himself. He put him in a box. He
put him in a box labeled early and naive. And
that reputation stuck. It's ironic because in
late antiquity, Anaximenes was actually considered
the most important of the three Milesians by
many writers. And there was a modern critique
too, right? From a very surprising source, Werner
Heisenberg, the quantum mechanics guy. Yes. Heisenberg,
one of the fathers of quantum physics, was fascinated
by the pre -Socratics and wrote about them. And
he was fascinatingly harsh on Anaximenes. Heisenberg
loved Anaximander. He saw the abstract apirin
as a brilliant ancient precursor to the modern
concept of energy. or the quantum field, this
pure, undifferentiated potential from which all
reality emerges. So when Anaximenes went back
to a concrete substance like air, Heisenberg
saw that as a step backward. Exactly. He called
it a retrogression. He thought Anaximenes dragged
philosophy back down into the mode of simple
materialism and away from the profound abstraction
of his teacher. But that feels so unfair, doesn't
it? Because he's ignoring the key contribution.
Anaximenes added the mechanism. That's the entire
defense. Without Anaximenes' mechanism, Anaximenes'
apron is just poetry. Anaximenes is the one who
gave us the tools to actually measure and describe
change. And that's why the people who came after
him, like the atomists, Lucimpus and Democritus,
they owe him everything. Connect that for us.
How do we get from felting air to atoms? The
atomists said the world is made of tiny, uncuttable
particles moving in a void. Okay, great. But
how do those identical particles create a soft
feather and a hard rock? Density. Packing. Arrangement.
The atomists took Anaximenes' core theory of
rarefaction and condensation and simply applied
it to atoms instead of air. A rock is just atoms
packed tightly together. A feather is atoms with
a lot of void between them. So the fundamental
logic of modern physics, that quantitative arrangement
determines qualitative properties, it starts
right there. It starts with the wool -felting
man in Miletus. His influence is everywhere.
Plato references his theory of matter, the seven
states from stone to fire in the Timaeus. Diogenes
of Apollonia basically revived his entire air
-based system a century later. And we shouldn't
forget his writing style. You mentioned he wrote
a book. Yes, and this is another innovation.
Before the Milesians, wisdom was transmitted
through poetry. Homer. Hesiod. If you wanted
to say something profound and true, you wrote
it in hexameter verse. It was often cryptic,
flowery, mythological. Anaximes is credited with
writing in prose. Plain, simple, descriptive
prose. What was called the simple and economical
Ionic style. He wasn't trying to dazzle you with
rhymes or divine inspiration. He was trying to
communicate facts as clearly as possible. He
essentially invented the format of the scientific
paper. You could absolutely make that argument.
Here's the observation. Here's the theory. Here's
the proof. It's a democratization of knowledge.
You don't need to be a divinely inspired bard
to understand the universe. You just need to
read the sentence and think about it. So let's
zoom out. We've spent the hour with a man who
believed the stars were fire nails and the earth
was a floating leaf. It's easy for us to chuckle
at the specific conclusions, but when you look
at the structure of his thought, it feels surprisingly,
almost unnervingly modern. It really does. He
was wrong about the way it's not air, but he
was so profoundly right about the how. The how?
What do you mean? He was right that the universe
is likely a single system governed by uniform
laws. He was right that quantitative changes
in structure create qualitative changes in properties.
He was right that physical processes can explain
complex phenomena without invoking gods. And
he was right that there is a deep structural
connection between the observer and the cosmos.
I keep going back to that star stuff idea that
we all love today. The idea that Carl Sagan made
so famous. We are made of stardust. It's the
modern version of Fragment B2, isn't it? It really
is. We know now that the carbon in our cells,
the oxygen we breathe, the iron in our blood,
it was all forged in the nuclear furnaces of
stars. Stars that lived and died and exploded,
scattering that debris across the galaxy to eventually
form the Earth. And us. And us. Anaximenes thought
it was air thickening into Earth and thinning
back into the fire of the stars. We know it's
atomic fusion and gravity and supernova. But
the fundamental sentiment, the core insight,
is identical. The boundary between me and the
universe is an illusion. It's all the same stuff,
just arranged differently for a little while.
And that realization that we are not separate
from nature, but a direct manifestation of it,
is perhaps the most important insight a human
being can have. And Axmedes was the first person
we know of to articulate it clearly as a physical
fact without hiding behind a myth. He stripped
away the gods to show us the gears of the machine.
And even if he didn't quite understand how the
gears turned, he knew they were there. And that
changed everything. It was the beginning of the
long, difficult road to understanding where we
actually are and what we actually are. And I
think that's a perfect place to land. So we're
going to leave you with a final thought to mull
over. Anaximenes believed our souls were made
of air, the same air that supports the Earth
and becomes the stars. If he were alive today,
looking at our modern understanding that we are
literally made of star stuff, atoms created inside
distant suns, would he feel vindicated? Would
he see our science not as a reputation of his
idea, but as its ultimate confirmation? The confirmation
that the boundary between the stuff out there
and the stuff inside us really is just a matter
of density and organization. Something to think
about. Thanks for taking this deep dive with
us. We'll see you next time.