Maybe Carlo Rovelli need not answer these questions or maybe he thinks these are questions not worth asking. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. For instance, the sun is and will be the center of the solar system because all known planetary bodies revolve around it.

Anaximander assimilated Thales’s ideas, treated them with due respect, but then rejected and improved on them and came up with more exact theories of his own. Anaximander's legacy includes the revolutionary idea that the earth floats in a void, that the world can be understood in natural rather than supernatural terms, that animals evolved, and that universal laws govern all phenomena. Essentially he claims that Anaximander was the first person who looked for explanations of natural events, rather than crediting spirits of one sort or another with such effects .

Photograph: Lanmas/Alamy View image in fullscreen An engraving of Anaximander: ‘the first human to argue that rain was caused by the observable movements of air and the heat of the sun rather than the intervention of gods’.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Now widely available in English for the first time, this is Carlo Rovelli's first book: the thrilling story of a little-known man who created one of the greatest intellectual revolutions. And it was no coincidence that Anaximander’s revolutionary thinking also coincided with the birth of the polis – the nascent democratic structures built on debate as to how best to govern society. The beginnings of scientific thought in the centuries before Christ and its subsequent repression by the Holy Roman Empire is interesting, but the book does not address the vital question of how organised religions can co-exist with freedom of expression and good science education. The next step Rovelli takes is to try to understand why 6th century BC Greece was pretty well the only such starting point.Something very startling happened in Miletus, the ancient Greek city on the modern Turkish coast, in about 600BC. He emphasises, for instance, that despite their impressive mathematics, astronomical observation and technological developments, Chinese philosophers and scientists never came up with the insight of a non-flat Earth floating in space, only switching to this viewpoint when they received information from missionaries in the seventeenth century. Admittedly, Carlo Rovelli relies on one sentence left by Anaximander and some additional findings and analysis attributed to him. I know it would not discredit his scientific inquiry or process and I trust Carlo Rovelli would agree.