Anaximander and the Nature of Science | Hacker News Reader

Anaximander and the Nature of Science

theguardian.com

52 pointsdiodorus17 comments

"Each time that we - as a nation, a group, a continent or a religion - look inward in celebration of our specific identity we do nothing but lionize our own limits and sing of our stupidity"

Good things tend to happen at the interface. Monocultures (large numbers of brains synchronized in identical thought patterns) stifle these orthogonal, non-conforming dimensions that help expand our perceptive abilities.

At the same time identity that looks outwards and engages with others in confidence is like a wellspring that doesn't stop giving. I like to think that Carlo Rovelli carries the torch of such open and inquisitive Italian minds, from Antiquity through Renaissance and Enlightenment.

Carlo Rovelli’s books are absolutely fantastic - he’s deeply passionate and writes with an artistry that very few other science writers do. “The Order of Time” is my favorite, but I’ve not been disappointed by anything of his I’ve read.

Shameless plug, but if you're interested in learning a bit more about Anaximander (along with the other philosophers of the Ionian School), I did a episode about him in my astronomy history podcast a little while back:

https://songofurania.com/episode/010

(And if you don't like listening to podcasts, there's a transcript, too.)

Helgoland by Rovelli is probably my all-time favourite book. I have recently finished 'The beginning of infinity' by David Deutsch (another bestseller), another quantum physicist and was deeply disappointed.

While Rovelli seems curious to me Deutsch seems certain about his conclusions. Did anyone have the same experience with those two authors that are seemingly talking about the same topics and are to some degree saying the same thing?

Deutsch is not certain that his conclusions are true. But he does know that he has reached them in the best way: by making explanations that are hard to vary, that solve problems and that have withstood severe criticism. If any of his conjectured explanations were refuted, he would change his conclusions. If he didn’t he would be authoritarian, which he would abhor.

His books are dense and benefit from multiple readings. I came back to them recently after reading Karl Popper’s works, which helped me understand his position better.

Both are amazing and challenging reads. Rovelli and Deutsch follow different interpretations of quantum mechanics (many worlds vs relational quantum mechanics), which sends them to different questions and assumptions behind their thinking.

"The Miletus of 2,600 years ago was a time and place in which the ability to read and write moved beyond a limited circle of elite scribes."

Interesting. Any time access to knowledge becomes cheaper a revolution occurs. Or anytime a monopoly on knowledge disappears. I guess the next revolution occurred with the printing press. And the last, with the internet. Did I miss any other?

Radio and television, I think. They were a medium for non-literates to also participate in learning and exploration, in a way they couldn’t if the only way to do so was through reading.

The students of early universities (Bologna, etcetera) were often troublemakers.

Could you please elaborate? What I gather is that Bologna started as a "club" of students, hence "university" (Bologna started the term) should be interpreted as "a collective"... The union suggests a creation of some power (not just an organization), but I do not know what «trouble[some]» objectives should such guild pursue.

Here's an instance at the University of Paris of students behaving as hooligans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1229_University_of_Paris_strik...

And these guys kinda sorta originated as students (student clergy mainly): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliards

And in general the students had a lot of power https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/8956... (this PDF has a lot of examples):

> Both students and faculty enjoyed a number of privileges from the state in the Middle Ages. Most of them were not new. From pre-Christian Greece, teachers and students had been free from taxation, free from military service, and in many places free from arrest and trial by civil authorities (Norton, 1909).

> But these privileges did not automatically come to students and faculty. It was because they did not enjoy the same protection as citizens of Bologna that the foreign students organized themselves into nations. When they gained power, the students were almost insatiable in their demands.

> The townspeople were cowed by the students and the professors, both of whom used the migration as a threat to force compliance with their wishes. Threats by students and faculty to move to another city were by no means hollow. Migrations were quite common during the Middle Ages. Most of the major universities of Europe were begun or developed by professors and students who had become unhappy at Bologna or Paris.

An earlier incident at Paris:

> In 1200 a battle in a tavern at Paris resulted in several students being slain by police. The king, fearing the students would migrate, condemned the police and ordered the burning of the homes of the citizens who had fought the students. He also decreed that in the future police must hand students over to the church for punishment, and required that Parisians take an oath not to harm students and to report anyone seen harming a student.

St. Scholastica Day Riots at Oxford, 10 February 1335:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Scholastica_Day_riot>

Town-gown frictions date to the earliest European universities:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_and_gown>

The telegraph was an enormous change, especially laying the trans-Atlantic line.

I'm amazed that the airplane is often forgotten on such lists.

How specifically do you see it contributing to dissemination of information and knowledge?

I see aircraft's role as significant, but more in transporting passengers and (limited) cargo. There is aircraft-based surveillance. And use in warfare as artillery-on-steroids.

Very much this.

I had the realisation some years ago,[1] almost immediately before stumbling across the work of Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. It turns out to be a major component of several general theories of history and/or systems development, see Peter Turchin and David Christian for example. Eisenstein's own work was strongly based on (and remarkably more robust than) Marshall McLuhan's. McLuhan himself built on the work of Canadian Economist Harold Adams Innis.[3]

It seems to me that you can point to, at the very least: emergence of speech, writing, mathematics and geometry (the latter more closely related to maps and earth measurements), various writing media (stone, wood, knotted rope, papayrus, parchment, paper), and the forms of printed works (scrolls, codices, moveable-type books, loose-leaf and other recloseable bindings, index cards, punch cards and other digital data, structured databases, revision control, online comms as email / Usenet / BBSes, Wikis, blogs), various transmission formats (smoke signals, light signalling, telegraph, radio, television, cable, satellite, microwave, fibre optics), lasers (ultimately far more significant in information transmission, storage, and retrieval than as energy systems), etc.

Many times an information transition was marked by a trendous disruption in the established order. The time of the Greeks saw the emergence of the Greek city-states from their predecessors (though there may have been some literate precursors, e.g., Linear A & B), the printing press lit off the Reformation and disruption across Europe for a century. The development of much cheaper and faster presses, as well as a tremendous expansion of literacy in Europe and the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries arguably led to the revolutions of 1776 -- 1914. Radio and audiotape played a significant role in the rise of fascism in Europe as well as WWII in the 1930s and 1940s. The television, talk-radio, and cable eras transformed politics from the 1960s--1990s, and expanding Internet, both landline and mobile, from the 2000s to the present.

Biologically it's likely that we can look at development of genetic systems (RNA, DNA), heritable memories or behaviours, learning, and pre-linguistic communications as well.

The ideas have been further developed in the case of business communications by James Beniger in The Control Revolution (1986).[4]

________________________________

Notes:

1. Here: <https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/gqzszjwf4unuqfupzqff8g>. Essentially stumbling across the notion that each advance in communications, storage, and/or processing likely led to a tremendous capabilities change and disruption (though not necessarily advantage) to the society in which it emerged.

2. Eisenstein developed the idea both in book length (<https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/printing-press-as-an-ag...>), and somewhat more concisely in a journal article: <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877720>). Both available via LibGen.

3. Noted variously, see <https://www.jstor.org/stable/4610816> or Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Innis>.

4. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Control_Revolution>

Also on the BBC at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001jc11

"Ancient knowledge Start the Week

Carlo Rovelli, Ann Yee and Kapka Kassabova discuss ancient knowledge, radical thinking and watery worlds with Adam Rutherford."

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