He was also the first to explain that rain resulted from water vapour evaporating from seas and lakes and he also suggested that species of animals and plants could change (evolve?) into other forms. He said there was no need for the Earth to rest on anything as there was no “cause” or natural reason for it to move in space. He thought the Sun, Moon, planets and stars must travel around the Earth.
Anaximander followed, and may have been mentored by, Thales the first Greek philosopher known to us.Īnaximander is the first person we know of to say that the Earth is a body floating freely in space and not resting on the backs of elephants, a turtle, the shoulders of Atlas or floating on an infinite ocean as Thales imagined.
Nevertheless from those writings it is evident that he was very significant.Īnaximander lived two centuries before Athens became prominent and the lives of the well-known Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Archimedes etc. Almost nothing that he wrote has survived and all we know of his life and work is what is described by later writers. He lived in the C6th BCE in Miletus, a Greek trading port on the west coast of what is now Turkey. It is not really a biography of Anaximander as almost nothing is known about his life.
Anaximander was his first but it has only just been translated into English. Rovelli is an eminent physicist who has written a number of well-regarded, popular science books. I have been reading Anaximander and the Nature of Science by Carlo Rovelli.
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