You know, we spend a massive amount of time on
this show talking about let's call them the greatest
hits. of history the big names yeah the people
whose names are chiseled onto the marble facades
of libraries we talk about socrates we talk about
plato aristotle the rock stars they are the rock
stars the household names i mean you walk into
a bookstore if you can even find one anymore
their faces are on all the covers in the classic
section they're like the beatles of ancient philosophy
that's a very fair comparison they really do
take up all the oxygen in the room when we talk
about greek thought Exactly. But today we're
going to do something completely different. We're
going to veer off the beaten path. We're talking
about a guy who, frankly, doesn't get the press
he deserves. Not at all. He is not a household
name. If you mentioned him at a dinner party,
most people would probably think you were mispronouncing
Alexander. But, you know, based on the stack
of research we've gone through for this, he might
just be the most important thinker you've rarely,
if ever, heard of. It's a bold claim, I know.
But I'm inclined to agree with it. I mean...
If we're looking for the specific moment in human
history when we started to think differently,
and I mean really differently, like a fundamental
shift in our cognitive operating system, we have
to look at this man. This is the moment humanity
stopped looking up at the sky and seeing gods
and started seeing machinery. We're talking about
Anaximander of Miletus. Anaximander. It's a great
name. And the hook for me, the thing that really
grabbed me when I was prepping for this, is that...
Modern scientists are obsessed with him. They
are. We have Carlo Rivelli, a world -class theoretical
physicist, literally calling this guy the first
scientist, not one of the first, the first, period.
And Rivelli isn't using that title lightly. You
know, he's not just trying to sell books. He
is making a serious argument that Anaximander
represents the singularity of scientific thought.
Right. So if you remember, we're going back to
the 6th century BC. We're talking about 2 ,600
years ago. This is a world that is almost entirely
defined by mythology. Okay, let's set the stage
for that. Because it's hard for us to really
imagine now. We live in a world of cause and
effect. But back then... Back then, if there
was thunder, it wasn't a low -pressure system
colliding with a high -pressure system. It was
Zeus. It was Zeus. And he was angry. If the ground
shook, it wasn't tectonic plates shifting. It
was Poseidon striking the Earth with his trident.
If you got sick. Apollo's arrows. The world operated
entirely on the whims of powerful, invisible,
and often very capricious entities. It was a
world of personality, not physics. And that's
what makes Anaximander so wild. He looks at that
world, a world of magic and monsters, and like
you said, divine temper tantrums, and he just
decides that because Zeus said so, isn't a good
enough answer anymore. Exactly. He's the figure
who arguably invents the idea that nature follows
laws. Laws. Impersonal laws. necessary laws,
and most importantly, laws that are understandable
by the human mind. He takes the gods out of the
equation and replaces them with forces. That
is the mission for this deep dive. We are going
to explore how one man initiated this massive
shift. We're going to look at his map, which
is a huge deal. I mean, literally drawing the
world for the first time. A world he could see
as an object. We're going to look at his concept
of the infinite. which sounds kind of trippy
but is actually super logical. And we're going
to talk about his ideas on evolution and space,
which are surprisingly accurate and, let's be
honest, sometimes completely bizarre. Bizarre
is a generous word for some of it, but yes. It's
that perfect mix of genius and, well, what seems
to us like... Before we really jump in, though,
we should clarify what we're actually working
with here, because unlike Plato, where we have
these beautiful, intact volumes of dialogues,
Anaximander is a bit of a ghost, isn't he? He
is a puzzle with most of the pieces missing.
We don't have his complete works, but we have
our ancient testimonies. So other people talking
about him. Exactly. Later writers, Aristotle,
Theophrastus, Simplicius, Hippolytus, who were
describing what Anaximander said centuries earlier.
It's been like playing a game of telephone across
a thousand years. But we do have something special,
right? Something direct from the source. We do.
And it's so precious. We have fragments. Specifically,
one significant fragment from his book, On Nature.
And the very existence of this book is a milestone
in itself. Why? It's considered the first philosophical
prose ever written by a Greek. And why does that
matter? Prose versus poetry. Oh, it matters a
huge amount. Before an axamander. Wisdom was
conveyed in poetry. You think of Homer's Iliad
or Hesiod's Theogony. Right. It's all epic verse.
And poetry is rhythmic. It's narrative. It's
designed to be memorized and sung. It's about
storytelling. And Aximander wrote intros. That
signals a total shift in intent. He wasn't telling
a story about heroes. He was explaining a system.
He's not trying to be Homer. He was writing a
treatise. He was trying to be precise, not just
evocative. It's the difference between, I don't
know. Song lyrics and a user manual. That is
a perfect analogy. He was writing the first user
manual for the universe. So let's get into the
context. We need to transport ourselves back
to the 6th century BC. We're in the city of Miletus.
Now, when I think of ancient Greece, I think
of Athens. The Parthenon, men in Togus debating
democracy. But Miletus isn't Athens. No, this
is way before the golden age of Athens. Miletus
was a city in Ionia. on the coast of modern -day
Turkey. And in the 6th century BC, Miletus was
arguably the most vibrant, wealthy, and intellectual
city in the entire Greek world. So it was the
place to be. It was the New York City of the
ancient Mediterranean. A trade hub. A massive
trade hub. You had a harbor just teeming with
ships. You had caravans coming in from the east.
You had goods and people coming in from Babylon,
from Egypt, from Phoenicia, from the Greek mainland.
And when you trade goods, you trade ideas. Precisely.
That is the key. Miletus was a melting pot. You've
got Babylonian astronomers who have been charting
the stars for centuries. You've got Egyptian
surveyors who basically invented geometry to
remeasure the Nile fields after the floods. All
these different knowledge systems. And you've
got Greek curiosity. All of it mixing together
in this one harbor town. It's interesting how
often innovation happens in places like that.
Places where different cultures crash into each
other. It forces you to question your assumptions.
Think about it. If you live in a secluded village,
Everyone believes the same creation myth. Sure,
it's the only story you've ever heard. But in
Miletus, the Babylonians are saying the god Marduk
created the world. The Egyptians say it was Adam.
The Greeks say it was Gaia. And eventually, a
smart person sitting in the marketplace starts
to wonder, they can't all be right. And maybe,
maybe none of them are right. Exactly. It breeds
skepticism. And from that skepticism, you get
the Milesian school. It starts with Thales. We
have to talk about Thales because he was the
teacher. He's often called the father of Western
philosophy, and an Axmander was his student.
The master and the apprentice. So let's talk
about Thales for just a second, just to establish
the baseline. Thales is famous for one big idea.
All is water. He thought everything was made
of water, which, you know, looking back from
our perspective, sounds a little ridiculous.
My desk is water. My dog is water. It sounds
silly to us, but you have to give Thales credit.
He was trying to do something truly radical.
He was saying that despite all the diversity
we see in the world, trees, rocks, birds, clouds,
it all comes from one underlying substance, a
single arch. The origin point. He's looking for
a grand unified theory. And why water? Was he
just... I don't know, thirsty? No, no, it was
observation. He saw that water is everywhere.
It falls from the sky. It springs from the ground.
Life needs it to survive. Seeds are moist. Okay.
And crucially, water changes. It can be ice,
which is solid. It can be liquid. And it can
be steam, which is a gas. If you don't have a
microscope or a periodic table, water is actually
the most logical candidate for the fundamental
stuff. Okay, so credit where credit is due. Thales
takes the first step. But here's where the Greek
miracle, or what we might call the invention
of science, really happens. Anaximander is Thales'
student. He respects him. He learns the system.
But then he disagrees. That dynamic is the most
important thing we will talk about today. This
is what Rovelli really harps on. In so many ancient
traditions, religious schools, or even other
philosophical schools like the Pythagoreans later
on, the whole goal is to preserve the master's
teaching. You memorize it. You protect it. Ipsidixit,
he himself said it. That was the proof. Unqualified
acceptance. You don't question the guru. Right.
Or you have the opposite. Rival schools that
just want to tear each other down. Unqualified
criticism. You're wrong because you're not us.
And Axamander introduced a third way. He deeply
understood Thales' ideas. He appreciated the
brilliance of seeking a single source. But then
he said, I think you're wrong about the details
and I can prove it. It's the birth of constructive
criticism. It's the scientific method. I stand
on the shoulders of giants so I can see further
than they did. Exactly. It's not heresy. It's
progress. It's iteration. So let's get into the
argument. Why did Anaximander have a beef with
the water theory? He didn't just say, I don't
like it. He had a logical proof, didn't he? He
did. And it's a brilliant piece of logic. It's
all based on the concept of opposites. In the
ancient world, they understood matter through
qualities. Hot versus cold. Wet versus dry. The
elemental cage match. Right. And these qualities
are mutually exclusive. Water is, by definition,
wet and cold. Okay. Fire is, by definition, hot
and dry. Makes sense. Axmander argued that if
the primary substance of the universe, the arch,
was water, then fire could never exist. Walk
me through that. Why not? Well, if everything
starts as water, then the universe is infinitely
wet and cold at its core. So where does the dry
and hot come from? Right. How do you get fire
out of water? You can't. If the source is infinite
water, the wetness would be total. It would overwhelm
any spark of fire before it could ever exist.
Water destroys fire. There are opposites. That
is actually really solid logic. If the universe
was just made of infinite water, we'd never have
the sun. We'd never have heat. Exactly. So he
argued that the source of all things cannot be
one of the things we see. It can't be water.
It can't be fire. It can't be air. Why not? Because
any one of those defined elements would destroy
its opposite. So the source has to be something
else, something neutral, something that lies
underneath all the elements. And this leads us
to his big concept, the apuron. The apuron. It
sounds like a Marvel villain. The apuron is coming.
But what does it actually mean? It's usually
translated as the infinite, the boundless, or
the indefinite. The Greek word paras means limit
or boundary. Apuron means without limit. So try
to visualize this for me. Is it a fog? Is it
energy? What is it? He posited that there's this
primordial mass, ageless and deathless, that
surrounds the entire cosmos. It isn't water.
It isn't fire. It's the raw potentiality from
which all things arise. Think of it like... Clay
or gold. You can make a ring out of gold or a
necklace or a coin. But the gold itself isn't
a ring. It's the stuff that becomes the ring.
The eperon is the stuff that becomes the elements.
So it's this cosmic soup of undefined potential
that just generates the universe. That's a helpful
way to visualize it. It encompasses everything.
And because it's infinite boundless, it can keep
generating worlds and life without ever running
out. It solves the problem of where did fire
come from? Right. It came from the eperon. just
like water did. They are siblings born from the
same mother. That's surprisingly abstract for
a guy living 2 ,600 years ago. He isn't pointing
at a river or a mountain. He is inventing a metaphysical
concept to solve a logical error in his teacher's
theory. And he backs it up with what is essentially
a law of conservation. We actually have that
surviving fragment of his writing, the only direct
quote we have that explains how this works. It
is one of the most famous sentences in all of
ancient philosophy. I have it right here in the
notes. I want to read it slowly because it sounds
like poetry, but you're telling me it's physics.
He says, It just gives you chills. It's beautiful.
It is beautiful, but let's be real. It's also
pretty cryptic. justice and recompense for their
injustice, what on earth is he talking about?
Is nature committing crimes? Is a rock committing
a felony? No, not quite. You have to remember,
he doesn't have the vocabulary of modern science
yet. He doesn't have words like thermodynamics
or equilibrium or conservation of energy. So
he uses the language he has, the language of
law and society, words like dike justice. So
translate the metaphor for me. What is the injustice?
Think of the elements as being at war for territory.
Let's take the seasons. Summer is hot and dry.
In the Greek view, when summer is dominant, it
is committing an injustice against winter, which
is cold and wet. Okay, so summer is taking up
too much space. It's encroaching. It's aggressive.
And necessity and time are the judges. Time forces
summer to pay recompense by yielding to winter.
The pendulum has to swing back. Nothing can dominate
forever. So it's a cosmic balancing act. He's
describing a state of dynamic equilibria. If
one element takes too much, it has to pay it
back by being destroyed or receding. That sounds
a lot like Newton's third law. Every action has
an equal and opposite reaction. Or just the general
idea of equilibrium in physics. Energy in. Energy
out. It is the ancestor of those ideas. It's
the concept that the universe is a closed system
where checks and balances are enforced. But they
aren't enforced by Zeus throwing a lightning
bolt because he's in a bad mood. No, it's automatic.
They are enforced by the ordinance of time. It's
an impersonal mechanical process. The sun must
retreat in winter, not because it wants to. but
because it is necessary. That distinction, personal
versus necessary, that's the whole game, isn't
it? It is. It's the shift from God willed it
to that's how the machine works. Now, I saw in
the notes that some people take a much darker
view of this fragment. Friedrich Nietzsche, the
German philosopher, apparently had a field day
with this one. Oh, yes. Nietzsche loved the pre
-Socratics. Ah. But he interpreted this fragment
through a very pessimistic, very Nietzschean
lens. He thought an axamander was saying that
existence itself is the crime. Wait, what? Just
being alive? Life is the injustice. According
to Nietzsche's reading, yes. By separating from
the eternal unified apron and becoming an individual
thing, a person, a rock, a season, you are breaking
the unity. You've been committing an injustice
against the whole just by being an individual.
So your death. Your destruction. Your death is
the penance you pay for the sin of having been
born. Wow. That is incredibly bleak. Sorry for
existing. I'll make up for it by dying. It's
very dramatic. It turns the universe into a Greek
tragedy. But I should say, most modern scholars
like Rovelli and others, they lean more toward
the equilibrium interpretation. That makes more
sense. It's about the balance of physical forces,
not a moral judgment on the tragedy of existence.
It's physics, not original sin. That seems to
fit better with the rest of his work. He doesn't
seem like an emo philosopher weeping about existence.
He seems like a guy trying to figure out how
the machine runs. Exactly. And speaking of the
machine. We have to talk about the earth. Because
this is where an axamander completely blows my
mind. This is the moment where the bottom drops
out of the ancient world. This is the floating
earth theory. Okay, let's look at the before
picture. Thales, the water guy, he thought the
earth floated on water. Like a log or a raft.
Which was a very common view in the Near East
and Egypt. It makes intuitive sense, right? It
explains why the ground feels solid. But we have
earthquakes. Maybe the water underneath is rocking
like a ship in a storm. But there's a problem
with that, a big logical trap. The infinite regress
problem. If the Earth rests on water, what does
the water rest on? A bowl, a rock. And what does
the rock rest on? A turtle. Just turtles all
the way down. Exactly. You eventually run out
of support, so you just keep pushing the problem
down one level. And Axmander saw this logical
trap, and he just stepped right out of it. He
did something completely unprecedented. He proposed
that the Earth floats in the center of the infinite.
It rests on nothing. I want the listener to really
pause on that image. We are in the 6th century
BC. There are no telescopes, no satellites, no
pictures of the blue marble from space. And this
guy stands up and says, hey everyone, the Earth
is just hanging there in empty space. It's not
sitting on anything. I mean, why did he think
it didn't fall? He used what we call the principle
of sufficient reason. Or sometimes it's called
the logic of indifference. He argued that if
the Earth is truly in the center of the universe
and the universe is uniform all around it. Then
there is no reason for it to go left or right
or up or down. Exactly. It is equidistant from
everything. Why would it fall down? In the cosmos,
there is no down. Down is just the direction
toward the Earth, but the Earth itself has no
preferred direction to travel in the void. It
stays where it is because of equilibrium. That
is a staggering leap of abstraction. He realized
that down is relative. He realized that space
doesn't have a bias. Karl Popper, the famous
philosopher of science, called this one of the
boldest, most revolutionary, and most pretentious
ideas in the whole history of human thinking.
It really is. It frees the Earth. And once you
free the Earth from resting on roots or pillars
or water, you open the door for astronomy, for
real astronomy. Yes. That's the key consequence.
Yeah. Before this, you had a huge problem. Where
does the sun go at night? Right. It sets in the
west, and then it rises in the east. Yeah. How
did it get back? Did it sneak back around the
side? Did it float on a river? Did a god carry
it in a boat? Because it couldn't go under the
earth. The earth was sitting on something. Exactly.
But now, Anaximander can say, it goes under us.
Because the earth is floating, the stars and
the sun can pass underneath the earth. It allows
for a full... 360 -degree model of the cosmos.
The Earth becomes an object suspended in space.
It's the moment the universe became 3D. It really
is. Now, before we give him a Nobel Prize, we
have to talk about the shape of the Earth. Because
while he got the floating part right, he didn't
quite get the shape right. No. He didn't think
it was a sphere. No. He thought it was a cylinder.
A cylinder. Like a soup can. Like a column of
stone. A drum. He believed its height was one
-third of its diameter. And we live on the flat
top surface. Okay, so it's a flat disk, but with
thickness. Why a cylinder? I mean, why not a
box? Why not a sphere? Well, he probably looked
around and saw the horizon look flat. So the
flat earth part comes from direct observation.
But he needed it to have depth to be a stable
object. The column is a sturdy shape. It feels
significant. And you have to remember, Miletus
is full of stone columns. It's a familiar architectural
shape. So we are living on the top of a giant
cosmic column floating in the void. Precisely.
It's still a huge step up from floating log.
So we have this drummer thinking in the void,
what's going on above it. Because his map of
the heavens is... Well, it's mechanical, which
is cool, but it's also wildly different from
what we know. It is the first mechanical model
of the universe. He moves away from God's driving
chariots to wheels of fire. Wheels of fire. Let's
unpack that. That sounds like some heavy metal
imagery. It is quite metal. He imagined that
at the beginning of the world, a ball of flame
surrounded the earth like bark on a tree. Ooh,
that's a great image. A cosmic skin. And then...
This ball of flame broke apart and formed into
rotating rings, or wheels, surrounding the earth.
Okay. These wheels are hollow, they're opaque,
made of a dark, misty air. But they're filled
with fire. So giant, hollow donuts filled with
fire. Correct. And we can't see the fire directly
because of the mist, but there are holes in the
wheels, vents, or as he described them, like
the hole in a flute or a nozzle. And the fire
shines through these holes, and that's the sun.
That is the sun. The sun isn't an object. It
isn't a god. It isn't a rock. It is a hole in
a giant fire wheel that lets us see the fire
inside. That is fantastic. It explains why the
sun is so bright. It's pure fire. What about
the moon? Same thing. A different wheel with
a hole and the phases of the moon. Let me guess.
The hole is opening and closing. That's it. Like
a shutter on a camera. Then an eclipse. The hole
gets completely blocked. It's so... Mechanical.
It's cosmic plumbing. It's not a god getting
angry and hiding the sun. It's a nozzle getting
clogged or a shutter closing. That's the genius
of it. Yeah. He is looking for a mechanism. He
even tried to calculate the sizes. He said the
sun wheel was 27 or 28 times the size of the
Earth and the moon wheel was 19 times the size.
He's using numbers. He's using ratios. He's trying
to quantify the cosmos. Why those numbers, though?
27, 19. They seem a little random. They aren't
random to a Greek. They are multiples of 3 and
9. They're sacred or mathematical ratios. Even
if the numbers were wrong, and they were very
wrong, the fact that he felt the need to use
numbers is the breakthrough. He is claiming that
the universe has a mathematical structure. He's
trying to decode the blueprint. And he also realized
that these things are far away. He's the first
to conceive of depth in space. The stars aren't
painted on a dome just above our heads. They
are wheels at massive distances. But he got the
order wrong, right? He did. This is one of the
bizarre parts. He thought the stars were the
closest wheels to Earth, then the moon, and the
sun was the farthest away. So stars, then moon,
then sun. Why would he think the stars are closer?
We aren't entirely sure, but perhaps because
the fire of the sun is so intense, he assumed
it must be on the largest, most massive wheel
way out there. Or maybe he thought the sheer
number of stars meant they had to be on the smaller
inner rings. But again, the details matter less
than the structure. The big idea. The big idea.
Celestial bodies at different distances operating
by understandable laws. This theme of laws just
keeps coming up. It extends to the weather, too.
I mean, if you live in ancient Greece, thunder
and lightning are the domain of Zeus. That's
his brand. That's his logo. It's his whole deal.
And Anaximander says, actually, no. Right. He
demystifies the weather completely. He says thunder
and lightning are caused by wind. Wind? How does
wind make lightning? Well, he believed that wind
gets trapped inside thick clouds. It builds up
pressure, and eventually it bursts out violently.
Okay. The ripping of the cloud is the noise.
That's the thunder. And the rift in the cloud
reveals the fire or the glow inside. That's the
lightning. So it's like a balloon popping. Exactly.
It's a physical interaction of elements. Air
and cloud. No God required. It's a pneumatic
explanation for a divine phenomenon. He really
was stripping the magic out of everything, wasn't
he? He was stripping the caprice out of it. He
wasn't removing the wonder. He was removing the
idea that it happened because someone was angry.
He also had this theory about the sea drying
up, which feels weirdly prescient given our current
conversations about climate change, although
his reasoning was totally different. He believed
the Earth was originally much wetter than it's
once covered in moisture. the sun is slowly drying
it up. So the oceans are shrinking. Right. The
sea is just the remnant of this primordial moisture.
And rain is just moisture that the sun has pumped
up, which then falls back down. The water cycle.
Essentially, yes. He described evaporation, and
he predicted that eventually the sun would dry
up the sea completely. So a slow, inevitable
desiccation of the planet. Cheerful guy. A realist,
perhaps. He likely saw that the coastline of
Miletus was changing. The river meander was silting
up the harbor. He just extrapolated that local
drying to a global scale. But speaking of beginnings,
we have to talk about where we came from. Because
Anaximander's thoughts on the origin of life
are, frankly, shocking. He basically invents
evolution 2 ,400 years before Darwin. Proto -evolution
is a fair term. And what's brilliant is how he
gets there. He doesn't have fossils in the way
we do. He starts with a simple observation about
human babies. They're useless. They're helpless.
Extended infancy. Think about a horse or a cow.
A foal can walk within minutes of being born.
It can run. It can feed itself pretty quickly.
Yeah. A human baby. It can't lift its head. It
can't eat solid food. It needs intense care for
years. It's true. We were born half -baked. And
Axmander looked at that and said, wait a minute.
In the primeval harsh world, if the first humans
had appeared as helpless infants, they would
have been eaten or died of exposure immediately.
So Adam and Eve couldn't have just popped into
existence as babies. They wouldn't have survived
the first night. Right. So he concluded that
humans must have originated from something else,
something that grows up faster, something that
could protect them while they were vulnerable.
And his answer was fish. Fish or fish -like creatures.
He believed life began in the moisture in the
sea, triggered by the heat of the sun. The first
creatures were covered in a spiny bark, maybe
scales or a shell. Okay, so life starts in the
ocean? Check. That aligns with modern science.
Then he argues that humans grew inside these
fish -like creatures. We were held prisoners
inside them, protected until puberty. Wait, until
puberty? So we were just hanging out inside a
giant fish for like 12 years? That was his theory.
We stayed inside until we were strong enough
to feed ourselves. Then the fish burst and humans
emerged onto dry land ready to survive. That
is wild imagery. It sounds like a Cronenberg
movie or alien. It does. But the logic behind
it is impeccable. He identified a biological
constraint, infant vulnerability, and he hypothesized
a biological solution for it. Gestation in a
different host. It connects humans to the animal
kingdom. We aren't separate creations of a god.
We are part of a lineage that came from the sea.
That is a massive conceptual leap. He just missed
the mechanism of natural selection and replaced
it with bursting fish. Which, given the tools
he had, is forgivable. He figured out adaptation.
He figured out origins. He just missed the how.
Exactly. He deduced the history of life from
the frailty of a child. So we've got the infinite
void, the floating drummer, the fire wheels,
and the fish people. This guy is batting a thousand
on creativity. But Anaximander wasn't just a
theorist sitting in an ivory tower. He was a
practical guy. A leader in Miletus, yeah. And
he is credited with making the first map. The
first map of the entire inhabited world. Now
Babylonians had maps, but they were often local
property lines, cities, or strictly symbolic.
An axamander attempted to draw the whole known
world, Europe, Asia, and Libya, which was their
word for Africa. Why is that such a big deal?
I mean, we take maps for granted. We have Google
Maps in our pocket. Because to draw a map of
the world, you have to adopt a God's eye view.
You have to mentally lift yourself out of your
physical location and imagine looking down on
the earth from above. It's a feat of abstract
thinking. It really is. You're converting the
world into an object that can be seen and measured.
It's not just turn left at the big rock. It's...
This is the shape of the landmass. Exactly. It
visualizes the world as a graspable object. It
was likely a circular map with the ocean flowing
around the outside of the river Oceanus. Miletus
or maybe Delphi would have been right in the
center. And this wasn't just for fun, for philosophy.
Miletus was a trade hub. This was useful. Incredibly
useful for navigation, for trade, for politics.
If you want to found colonies on the Black Sea,
which Miletus did. Extensively. You need to know
where it is relative to you. Knowledge is power.
And a map is a tool of control and expansion.
He also introduced the gnomon to Greece. The
gnomon. It sounds fancy, but it's a simple vertical
rod, a stick in the ground. Yeah. The Babylonians
probably invented it, but an axamander refined
its use in Greece. It's basically a sundial stick.
Yes. But it's not just about telling time. By
measuring the shadow, you can track the seasons.
The shadow is longest on the winter solstice
when the sun is low and shortest on the summer
solstice when the sun is high. And I read that
he used this to determine the equinoxes with
real accuracy. Which requires geometry. It implies
he wasn't just sticking a stick in the ground.
He was understanding the geometry of the sun's
path across the sky. He was modeling the heavens.
There's also this story about an earthquake.
Cicero mentions it. Apparently, Anaximander warned
the Spartans to sleep outside because an earthquake
was coming. And lo and behold, the city collapsed
and part of Mount Tejistis split off. How? Did
he have a magical sense? Was he a mystic? Or
was he just incredibly lucky? Well, Cicero and
others debate this. Some called it admirable
inspiration. But if we look at Anaximander's
character, the naturalist, the observer, it's
far more likely he was observing natural signs.
Maybe the strange behavior of animals, maybe
the release of gases from the ground, maybe the
water levels and wells changing. He believed
nature followed laws. If an earthquake is a physical
event, it might have physical precursors. So
even his magic trick was probably just really
good observation. Exactly. He was paying attention
to the world, not the omens. I want to zoom out
a bit to his legacy. We've covered a lot of specific
theories, but what is the big picture here? There's
a note in our source material about the plurality
of worlds. This connects right back to the apron.
Since the source of all things is infinite, Anaximander,
and later the atomists, believed that our world
isn't the only world. The multiverse. In a sense,
yeah. He believed that worlds are constantly
appearing and disappearing within the apron.
Infinite worlds in an infinite time frame, like
bubbles in a cosmic foam. That is mind -bending.
It makes you feel very small. And that's a very
modern feeling. Science often does that. It displaces
us from the center. Copernicus moved the Earth
from the center, and Aximander moved our entire
world into a sea of infinite other worlds. But
let's go back to that idea of the scientific
method. We touched on it with Faley's, but I
want to dig a little deeper here. Carlo Rovelli
makes a really strong case that an axamander
invented the process of science. Rovelli argues
that an axamander initiated a tradition that
is unique. It's the ability to say, I value your
knowledge, but I think you are wrong about this
specific detail, and here's why. It is the institutionalization
of criticism. It's not heresy. It's progress.
Precisely. In many ancient cultures, Egypt, Babylon,
China, questioning the cosmological order was
dangerous. It was an affront to the gods or the
king. Stability was the goal. An axamander and
the Milesians in general created a safe space
for intellectual rebellion. How? They stripped
the gods out of the equation and replaced them
with forces. Once you remove the god, you can
criticize the theory without being a blasphemer.
That is a crucial distinction. If the sun is
a god, analyzing it is rude. If the sun is a
hole in a wheel of fire, analyzing it is just
mechanic. Exactly. He made the world safe for
analysis. And he used familiar terms to explain
unfamiliar concepts. He translated mythology
into physics. He didn't just tear down the old
house. He built a new one using some of the old
bricks, words like justice and time, but with
a completely different architectural plan. And
we see echoes of him even in modern quantum mechanics,
apparently. We do. The physicist Max Born actually
suggested that the primordial substance of quantum
mechanics, the underlying field from which particles
pop in and out of existence, should be called
the aperon. No way! Really? Yes. Because, like
in Aximander's aperon, the quantum field is indefinite.
You can't observe it directly, but it's the source
of all observable reality. It defies standard
definitions of matter. just like the appearance
did. That is a direct line from 600 BC to the
20th century. It shows that the fundamental questions
haven't changed. What is everything made of?
How did it start? How does it stay balanced?
And Axe Manor was the first to frame these questions
in a way that science could eventually try to
answer. It's incredible. He floats the earth
in a void. He evolves humans from fish. He replaces
Zeus with natural law. He essentially lights
the match that becomes the torch of science.
And he does it all while living in a time when
most people were... you know afraid of the dark
so what does this all mean for us why does an
axamander matter today other than as a really
cool history lesson i think he matters because
he teaches us courage intellectual courage it
takes bravery to look at the world see everyone
believing one thing that the earth sits on water
that zeus throws bolts and to say i think it
works differently it takes braver to accept that
the earth isn't resting on a sturdy foundation
but is floating in nothingness He was comfortable
with uncertainty. He was comfortable with the
infinite. He wasn't afraid of the vastness. He
didn't need the comfort of a turtle to rest the
world on. No. He embraced the void. And that
is the spirit of exploration, isn't it? You have
to leave the safe harbor to find the new world.
That is a great takeaway. There is one final
thought I'd like to leave you with. A provocative
thought based on his surviving fragment. Let's
hear it. We talked about his fragment. About
existence paying penance to the infinite. If
an axamander is right, and everything that exists,
you, me, the stars, the earth, is just a temporary
theft from the infinite of Peron, a momentary
disruption of the eternal silence, then we're
a fleeting injustice, a beautiful temporary imbalance,
and eventually we have to pay the debt. We have
to return to the source. It suggests that our
existence isn't the point of the universe. The
point is the balance. We are just... the noise
in the system. That is both terrifying and oddly
comforting. We're just borrowed stardust waiting
to be returned. We're part of the cycle. Exactly.
Well, on that existential note, this has been
a fascinating journey into the mind of the first
scientist, an axamander of Miletus, the man who
saw the infinite. Thanks for diving in with us.
It was a pleasure. And thank you for listening.
Keep looking up, keep questioning, and don't
be afraid of the void. We'll catch you on the
next deep dive.