Michael Benson Shares The Awesome Beauty We Create When Art and Science Meet

 

Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time – Michael Benson (2014)

            Rarely do I come across a book such as this, one that brings together two of my greatest loves and creates something fabulous.  Author Michael Benson shows us how the worlds of Art and Astronomy are, and have always been, connected and complimentary, and the way he does so is so beautiful, informative, and clever that I am left in awe.  I love this book!

            The objects in our sky, the gorgeous night with its twinkling stars, shiny planets, comets, and meteors, and the beaming sky of day with the Sun and sometimes the Moon visible, have been our companions throughout the whole existence of life on our planet.  Ancient man not only saw, but understood, that the view afforded from Earth allows us to see the passage of time, and the cycles described by the motions of the heavens.  Using just plain, careful, repeated observation, and before the invention of written language, humanity catalogued stars and constellations, predicted eclipses, and calculated the Moon’s cycles.  We also created art to help us describe what we saw, from cave paintings to petroglyphs to carved or molded sculptures.  This is how we know that ancient man understood the cosmos in a deep and meaningful way, something which has been sadly lost to much of our modern human population.

            Cosmigraphics collects some of the most amazing images and artwork created by us to describe the heavens above and our Earth below.  This book captures the artistic legacy of the visual explorations of our cosmos, and provides wonderfully descriptive and informative text with each image.  This book is divided into sections exploring the idea of Creation, our Earth, the Moon, the Sun, the structure of the Universe, etc.  Each chapter is so gorgeous and so indicative of the immense genius required to not only grasp infinitely complex ideas but to also portray them in a visual manner, that they allow for the dissemination of information and the spread of wisdom.  These images tell a million stories.  They are beautiful in their own right, and worthy of the appreciation we rightfully lay upon masterpieces by the likes of Michelangelo or Picasso.

            We marvel at the heavens, and have always done so.  As our scientific knowledge grew, our ideas of the universe grew.  Whereas ancient man had deduced that the Earth is spherical, it was accepted doctrine that the Earth was the center of all creation (Bible bias, always), and that, according to early Greek philosophers, what we see in the sky corresponds to sequential “shells” with each carrying different denizens of the sky.  It was accepted belief that the Moon rotated around the Earth in its own sphere, then the Sun, then each known planet.  At the time, this was Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  Beyond the planetary “spheres” was a celestial sphere containing the stars in heaven, all fixed and immovable.  It took centuries of human observation, and the perfection of lenses and the telescope, for us to understand that there are no “shells”, that the heavens do move, that our Sun is the center of our solar system, that the planets all rotate around the Sun and not Earth, and that the stars themselves are ridiculously far away from our personal solar system.  Even so, it was assumed that the whole of existence fit within our galaxy, a self-contained universe we refer to as the Milky Way.

            Astronomers and other scientists improved on the initial telescopes, and with the new-found clarity of vision, were able to discern that many of the objects in our night sky were not nebulas internal to the Milky Way, but actually their own island universes, located an inconceivable distance from our own galaxy.  Each new discovery shrunk the old world dictated by religious dogma and human make-em-up, and increased the scope of vision allowed to a human being.  As our knowledge of the universe, its galaxies, and the overall structure of it grew, the idea that humanity was the single reason for everything to exist also dissipated, much to the chagrin of every deluded, brain-dead, dogmatically religious idiot whose entire world-view is based in blind belief and obedience to thousand-year old make-believe. 

            With every new discovery, with every new tool we create to explore our universe, we find more wonder and weirdness than we could ever have imagined. There used to be just one Sun.  Now we know that our galaxy, the cloudy band of light in our night sky called the Milky Way, is composed of billions of individual stars.  We know that outside of our galaxy lie countless trillions of other galaxies, each with their infinity of suns and planets. Hell we even know that everything we can see in the sky above is just a small part of the entire universe.  Estimates now posit our Universe is on the order of 13-15 billion years old, and nearly unimaginably vast, but we can only observe about 36 billion light years distance in any direction.  In its early stages, spacetime itself expanded faster than light, causing much of the Universe to remain occulted from our vantage point.  Any observer on a planet over 36 billion light years away from us would not be able to see Earth either.  It is these type of realities that, while factually and verifiably true, crash against our ideas of “common sense.”  Common sense stated that, if the Earth were actually rotating, all plants, animals, and water would be flung off the planet! (They did not know about gravitation, just as humans in the 1800’s did not know about radiation.  Who knows what all-encompassing truths of the Universe we remain ignorant of today in 2026!)

            Many of my intellectual heroes utilized both Art and Science in their work.  Leonardo da Vinci fused art, science, and engineering in ways we are still coming to grips with today.  Even Richard Feynman, physicist extraordinaire, created a visual and artistic way of describing particle interactions with diagrams named after him still used today to explain quantum processes.  Galileo’s observations of Jupiter and his discovery of its visible moons would not have had the impact they had without his daily drawings of the gas giant and it’s satellites.  These beautiful drawings are included in Cosmigraphics.  An image is truly worth a thousand words and Galileo’s drawings helped to simplify the results from exceedingly complex visual observations, allowing the rest of us to grasp his discoveries. 

            Science, the scientific method specifically, is how we understand the basic truths of our existence.  Art is how we communicate those found truths, whether personal or universal.  In Cosmigraphics, Michael Benson catalogues and examines the confluence of Science and Art, and expands our collective minds in doing so successfully.  This is a masterpiece of artistic and scientific exposition, and I hope someday to find a copy for my own collection.  Almost nothing that we humans do is isolated.  Every field of human endeavor touches every other field, and we are better off for it.  The specialization of humanity’s explorations have led to amazing discoveries, but it is the space between the specialists, the diffuse and vague areas between concrete ideas, where the true synergy of life occurs.  We would all be better off if we recognized this fact and lived our lives accordingly.  If you know of anyone interested in science, art, or the history of humanity’s exploration of our universe, this is the book for them.  It is highly recommended.

(This amazing book can be purchased here: https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/cosmigraphics/author/michael-benson/ )

Charles-François Dupuis shared the truth with us over 200 years ago

 

The Origin of All Religious Worship - Charles-François Dupuis (1795)

 

            One of the very best things about books is that they can transport a reader anywhere and to any time.  Most people love old fiction works specifically for this reason.  I adore older non-fiction books, especially ones that deal with deep exploration of a given subject.  I especially enjoy finding and reading the old books used as references for the more modern works I read.  I have read widely in comparative religion and mythology over the past decade.  There are few seminal works, and Dupuis’ “The Origin of All Religious Worship” is one such masterwork.  It has taken me months to digest it all.

            People remember the French Revolution alongside the American one as a battle to usurp monarchy and instill democracy.  While this is technically correct, what they were fighting against was the power that the European monarchies and the Roman Catholic Church had consolidated in the 1500-1700’s.  For centuries, the super-rich aristocracy and the super-rich Papacy joined teams to control nations and to plunder their wealth for themselves. The scientific method along with obsessive rationality led French leaders to denounce the church, the evils they commit under the guise of “religion,” and everything they teach.  In order to have evidence against the church, to fight the centuries of lies and obfuscation, geniuses like Dupuis sought to study just why the church acts as it does, and where they got their theological ideas.  Before the modern study of comparative religion and mythology, Dupuis set out to explore the historical past of religious worship.  What follows in this book is a detailed excoriation detailing why everything taught by all priests from all religions is sadistic and willful untruth seeking to blind the eyes of the people.  It is awesome.

            Since truly ancient times, the only real concern of humanity has been to study the heavens.  Once the ancient humans understood that the seasons were cyclical, that around the same time each year the days would get longer, signaling the return of spring and summer, they began to understand the world around them and their place in it.  There was a large, overarching pattern to the world and humans lived in harmony with it.  One hundred thousand years ago, there was no thought of “rational” versus “spiritual,” or of “natural” versus “supernatural.”  These are all recent inventions.  The world of ancient humans was equal parts what they saw and experienced, what they dreamed, and what they imagined. 

Dupuis goes back as far as recorded history lets him, considering he lived in the late 1700’s.  While there existed civilizations before the ancient Egyptians, their culture amalgamated and absorbed the wisdom of all the previous millennia.  Ancient man would describe what they saw in the heavens through allusion, metaphor, and anthropomorphism.  They saw patterns in the stars, which, to their eye, never changed.  These became the constellations.  Initially meant purely as a visual code to describe the locations of the stars, the constellations helped mark the passage of the year.  The Sun would rise in the sky in front of a different constellation every month for a year, and then repeat itself.  During parts of the year, the daylight hours grew compared to the nighttime hours, and at the opposite end of the year, the nighttime hours grew while the daylight shrank.  At two specific points each year, the ancient sages noted that the hours of day and night were equal.  These are now referred to as the Spring and Autumnal Equinoxes.

The Spring equinox seemed a perfect time for ancient humanity to designate as the beginning of the yearly cycle.  It marks the day that the warmth and life-giving properties of the Sun start to increase in influence over the Earth (at least for the people in the Northern Hemisphere.  Throughout much of human history, most of our species has lived above the equator.  This includes the ancient cultures of Egypt, India, China, and Mesopotamia.  It is because of this that astrology and such things are north-biased.  The stars that are visible from the southern hemisphere are different from those that make up what most humans call the Zodiac and were one of the reasons ancient sea-faring humans understood the Earth is a sphere.)  Fall and Winter were times where the Sun’s living force diminished.  In Spring and Summer the Sun’s energies were in full power. 

Our recent ancestors did not know of the procession of the stars, something that occurs because our Earth is not only rotating, but also wobbling in space.  Our ancient forebears knew better.  Before around 14,000 years ago, the Spring equinox Sun would rise in the constellation of Taurus, or the Bull, and the Egyptians would sacrifice the apis Bull on that date, signaling the new year.   For the past few thousands of years, the Spring Sun rises in Aries, or the Ram.  On the Spring Equinox, Christians celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ, a stand-in for the Sun in its yearly journey.  Ancient Hebrews would sacrifice lambs, and the Christ is symbolized by the ‘Lamb” for this very reason.  In a few thousand years, the Spring Sun will rise in Aquarius and humanity’s gods will be altered to match.  Each human culture shared this information through their myths and legends.  Ancient stories of Heracles/Hercules were poetic representations of the Sun’s path through the constellations each year.   Each of his Labors correspond to a different constellation.  Dupuis describes this in depth, even explaining how the ancient poets included stars adjacent to the constellation in the epics, disguised but understandable to those with astronomical knowledge. 

Other of our collective human myths are analyzed by Dupuis, each one shown to be a poetic and allusion-filled description of the path of our Sun as it rises in front of a different constellation each month.  From the ancient Vedas of East Asia, to the Osiris myths of Egypt, to the Dionysian myths of the Mediterranean, to the Zoroastrian founding myths, all are shown to be, at their core, astronomical in nature.  He shows how every religion’s main stories come from an attempt to explain the workings of the Heavens, with each god, all the way up to Jesus, being a stand-in for our beneficent and all-powerful Sun, the true life-giver of our world.

It is this idea that is the basis for the main thrust of this work.  Charles-François Dupuis had grand goals when he set out to write this book.  He wanted to provide clear and irrefutable evidence that the many man-made religions and cults that exist in our history took as their basis either a willful or an ignorant misunderstanding of what the ancient poets wrote in the legends.  The genius of our ancient sages lay in the ability to describe the world around them in a way that could be transmitted and repeated by oral means.  These stories eventually became codified by scribes writing in clay or papyrus. 

Dupuis points out one thing that corrupts ancient wisdom.  As long as there have been humans, there have been some among us who seek to increase their wealth and/or power by using our collective knowledge to control and train the rest of us.  These are the sacerdotal classes; whether shamans, rabbis, magi, or priests, and their sole reason for existence is to create the illusion that they are the only ones capable to providing a lowly human with the divine truths.  Before priests, all humans were equally informed and aware of these universal truths.  The Sun provides warmth and life.  The Earth completes a full cycle every year.  Winter is followed by spring is followed by summer, etc.  We are all part of the whole.  The sun is divine.  We, like all life, contain a piece of the divine within us, and when we die, that energy will dissolve back into the universe.  This used to be basic wisdom, sacred wisdom, showing the interconnectedness of everything in creation.  The ancients did not differentiate between good things and bad things.  Anything and everything could be either, at any time, depending on how and who was utilizing it.  Our living spark comes from the Sun and returns to the Sun after death.

Before priests and the sacerdotal classes could use the old wisdom to control the people something else had to happen.  This is something that is hard to pin down, but Dupuis has done a masterful job of it.  The ancient oral wisdom, allegories meant to provide information about the heavens and the yearly cycles began then to be interpreted in non-allegorical ways.  Instead of understanding that the heroes of myth, Osiris, Heracles, were stand-ins for the mighty and all-powerful Sun, “wise men” began to postulate that they were real, actual people, humans who had lived and been so inspired as to become like gods themselves.  A second and critical jump was the dogmatic assertion that, since the Sun/God was all good, there are things in the universe that are all-bad.  They created polar enemies, Ormuzd and Ahriman, Jehovah and Satan, to foster the lie that the universe is a constant battle between that which is good, and that which is evil.  Of course, the priests/rabbis/cult leaders/shamans/gurus were the only ones among us all to know the “true path” to divinity, and to avoid eternal damnation.  It is the oldest grift in the world, to demand that someone behave as you ask in life, while promising riches and peace in death, promises they know they cannot deliver.  In this manner, all form of religion manages to leech the wealth and riches of the populace, continuing to this very day.  Most religions seem to think the living Earth is a pit of despair, abounding in horrors, and that the only true life is the “eternal” life that they promise after death.  This is a sick and twisted view, directly opposite of the wisdom our ancient ancestors tried to impart.

One of the beautiful things about this book is how Dupuis shows respect and admiration for the ancient sage poets that initially composed the solar myths we have all worshipped and fed off of for millennia. Their ability to describe, in poetic form, the passage of our Sun around the zodiac, is just one of the many bits of knowledge the ancients wished to pass down.  Many secret societies teach how to read these old myths, how to understand the scientific and natural wisdom the ancients hoped to pass on.  This was something of the reason why the Templars, Freemasons, and other such societies are viewed as a threat by the church. Who knows how much more the ancients knew?  Modern humans, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, have been around for somewhat over 100,000 years.  The genus Homo Sapiens itself, has been around for over 1,000,000 years.  The ancients seemed to understand this, many of them describing the great circumnavigations, whether labeled ages or Vedas that the world lives through, each covering tens of thousands of our years.  This was not idle fiction.  They wrote about it to share it with us, thousands of years later, the cyclical nature of existence.  It is Dupuis contention that these legends and myths have everything to offer us today, if only they could be divorced from the religions formed to use the ancient wisdom to take advantage of us, keeping them rich, fat, and comfortable, while they preach abstinence, austerity, and forgiveness.

This work was completed around the time when modern humans started to ignore myth and legend to instead focus on industrial and material matters.  The American Revolution had helped overthrow the ancient and false idea of the Divine Right of kings, and the French revolution tried to free the nation from the king and the powers of the Roman Catholic Church.  The Church has engaged in mass murder and genocide in France many times, seeking to exterminate any enclaves of what they termed “heretics.”  These were the initial freethinkers, dangerous to the status quo of a massive church, wealthier and more powerful than any single nation on Earth.  Dupuis stood for all of us when he wrote this work.  The Church has killed writers and philosophers for far less.

I am so glad I found this book.  It came at the right time, which is one of the magical things about books.  Sometimes, the exact book you need to read will come into your life.  Twenty years ago I would not have managed to complete this book, much less grok the immensity of its scope.  Dupuis truly is one of the greats, a hero to freethinkers and a bright guidepost to anyone seeking understanding of our deep mythical past.

(This book can be downloaded as a PDF here: http://iapsop.com/ssoc/1872__dupuis___origin_of_all_religious_worship.pdf )

Tycho Brahe & Johannes Kepler. Two shining lights in a sea of ignorance.

Tycho & Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership That Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens – Kitty Ferguson (2002)

The knowledge that humanity has built up over our existence is always dependent on the sharing of information and the ability to spread the information as far as possible.  One never knows just who will be the person to grasp that bit of data and head off on a new intellectual adventure.  This is especially true in the sciences, where solitary scientists spent years of their life making very careful observations of the natural world and the heavens around us.  This hard data is the basis of all science.  Only when such rigorous data is obtained are the theories that seek to explain the data able to be verified, or rejected as not conforming to the verified data.  For decades, Tycho Brahe labored as the pre-eminent astronomer of his time, using his knowledge and position to build ever more elaborate and precise astronomical observation instruments.  His data, gathered after countless thousands of man-hours spent between him and his many assistants making nocturnal observations, spoke no truths in and of itself.  It was up to a younger astronomer and mathematician, Johannes Kepler, to utilize this storehouse of astronomical data in his quest for the truth about why and how the planets move through the sky, and bring about a revolution in the human understanding of the Universe.

The two men could not have been more dissimilar.  Tycho Brahe was, while not a royal, a member of a family that had been deeply ingrained in Denmark’s aristocracy, with members serving royal courts, acting as bishops in the church, and running fiefdoms in accordance with the King’s will.  Tycho Brahe grew up and was educated with the intent to have him become one of these servants to the crown, which included not only formal education, but the skills and tact necessary to commiserate with the royal courts of Europe and the egos found within.  He ingratiated himself with the king and was given many opportunities to pursue his intellectual and scientific curiosity, mostly abandoning the family demands that his class demanded.  Johannes Kepler was a more modest man.  He was not raised in the aristocracy, but his family members were well respected members of academia, business, and local religion.  Kepler did not have the connections available to Brahe.  He had to seek out his place in life.  He wanted to study the cosmos, but his family would not support it, hoping he would become one of the new class of professional men, and urging him to become a physician, a job more respectable than University professor at the time.

It is the life stories of these two men, and how they eventually became intertwined for posterity, that is the main thrust of this book.  It details both men’s childhoods, their educations, their attempts at scientific discovery, and their nearly endless troubles with the crown, the churches, and the profound level of ignorance that they found themselves surrounded with.  Tycho Brahe worked for decades, cataloguing a star chart the likes of which had never even been attempted by a human being.  In the later years of his life, and through countless setbacks, he accepted Johannes Kepler as his assistant.  In fact, he had chosen a man whose intellectual abilities rivaled the master’s, and who would guarantee the immortality of Tycho Brahe and his work.  Johannes Kepler used these precise measurements to understand what we now know as the Solar System.  He was the first human to do so, working out his three Laws of Motion, which are the basis for nearly all of modern astronomy. 

Johannes Kepler’s insights allowed him to describe our heavens in a way that had never been understood before.  Tycho Brahe had refuted the Ptolemaic system, which stated that the sun, planets, and stars all rotated around the Earth, which was the center of existence.  Tycho did not, however, postulate a solar system where the planets all rotate around the Sun.  Instead, he created a very complex system to explain the motions of the heavenly bodies.  It was not perfect.  Johannes Kepler, much to Brahe’s consternation. Supported the Copernican model of the solar system, in which the Sun stood in the center and the planets and stars all rotated around the Sun.  Kepler also suspected that the stars were much further away than the planets.  These and other observations were extremely revolutionary, not just for science, but for humanity at large.  Humans had been living under the Ptolemaic system for centuries because it aligned with the teachings of the catholic church.  The Earth was the center of all things, as it should be, since god created earth for humans and humans are his most perfect creation. Everything else is secondary. These types of circular arguments are all that any organized religion has to justify their own bullshit existence.  The church silenced any scientists that sought to understand the true reality of existence, even setting a few of them on fire. 

            Both Brahe and Kepler had to contend with a Europe in the midst of a Counter-Reformation.  The Calvinists and Lutherans that had started the Reformation, were now being attacked on all sides by the Holy Roman Empire and the ridiculous catholic church.  In catholic towns, protestants were banished or killed if they chose not to convert, with their heads hung on pikes for the world to see their “sin.”   In Protestant towns, Catholics were equally persecuted, all for supporting the Pope.  These two men of science, men of reason and enlightenment, and devout Christians both, were plagued on all sides by the stupid, petty, and evil wars that religions create among us to keep us in their debt and our money in their coffers. (It is still the same damn thing).  Not only did Kepler have to contend with religions and their stupidities, but he had such a tragic life.  He lost his first wife and around 9 children to disease over the span of twenty years.  His mother was accused and tried at age 72 for being a witch, by the ignorant Christians in her town.  Thank rationality and human ingenuity that Kepler was able to overcome all this and work on astronomy.

The bravest among us are the ones willing to stand up for their individuality and the ability to think for oneself.  Humanity is filled with countless people and organizations who seek to dampen human intelligence, to keep us stupid and slobbering at their crooked teats.  People like Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe who are strong enough and fortunate enough to hold their own against the tide of shit around them do so for the betterment of all humankind.  Without these two men our world would be a lot different.  The story of their lives and research is invaluable and anyone interested in the history of astronomy, or human thought, should read this book.

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )

Neil deGrasse Tyson brings the Astrophysics to us

Astrophysics for People In a Hurry – Neil deGrasse Tyson (2017)

            The science of Physics, and specifically Astrophysics, has always fascinated me.  I have found that the best way to step outside my own reality tunnel, and to gain what Mr. Tyson labels the “Cosmic Perspective,” is to read and study about the amazing achievements and discoveries that humans from ancient times have made regarding the cosmos we live in.  Our current world-society, with its incessant data-feeds and distractions, impedes people from reflecting on the Universe at large, and the amazingly complex and utterly massive nature of it.  We are all obsessed with our day-to-day grind, our jobs, our families, the news, politics, financial worries, etc.  It is because of this glut of activities and concerns that take up much of the modern human’s life that Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote this great little book.

            One of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s greatest traits is his ability to be a science explainer.  Very few scientists have this ability, and because of this, many non-scientists feel that either science is too complex to be understood by them or that scientists are purposefully being obtuse and intricate so as to not share their knowledge with “normal” people.  That is a real shame, because the basics of all the sciences affect us every single day, and without this knowledge it is too easy to be fooled by charlatans and con-artists seeking to impress you with pseudo-science and psychobabble, which all sound very plausible as long as you do not think critically about them.  Some hard-line nerds may put down Mr. Tyson because his focus is on education and dissemination, just as they used to insult Carl Sagan, that last great astronomer-teacher.  Screw them.  The world needs people who can clearly, and patiently, explain the vast knowledge we have accumulated to those who are interested, but do not have the rigorous and expensive education needed to grasp the mathematical underpinnings of science.  I would rather our best and brightest minds become celebrities than the vapid illiterates that society worships

.

            In the first chapters Neil deGrasse Tyson explores the development of astrophysics and humanity’s evolving understanding of the heavens above, deliberately highlighting how new discoveries and technologies forced us to change our perspective, from being self-absorbed and obsessed with our human primacy among the cosmos, to finding out that our planet Earth is not the center of the Universe, to discovering out that our Solar System is just one of countless billions in our Milky Way galaxy, to learning that our immense galaxy is just one among billions that populate the Universe, to understanding that we cannot even see much of the Universe due to its expansion.  It is a breathtaking journey that is all the more amazing because it happened in a blink of cosmic time, the teeny tiny sliver of time that Homo Sapiens Sapiens has been studying the heavens.  Compared to the age of our Earth (around 4.5 billion years) humans have not been around very long at all. Compared to the age of our Universe (around 14.5 billion years) we have barely begun to exist!  It blows my mind to think that we humans have only been able to study the heavens as they are for the past several hundred years.

            Each chapter is divided into the different ways that astrophysics are able to study the cosmos.  Some deal with the visible light available.  Others talk about the discovery of the remnants of the big bang, mapped through microwaves.  One chapter details the development of radio frequency telescopes, capable of exploring parts of the Universe that are invisible in any other manner.  From gamma detectors to cosmic rays, to the particle/antiparticle pairs that are popping in and out of existence throughout all of “empty” space, every major movement and field of study in astrophysics is presented, and the latest data and ideas about these findings are shared with the reader.  This is all in the service of what Mr. Tyson discusses in the last chapter, which is the beauty and joy of the Cosmic Perspective.  Understanding that we truly are one with the cosmos, that we are made of the same material that the Universe is made of, that our world is one of billions, that all life on Earth, and maybe all life in the Universe, is united by the common threads of our existence, and that it is our ability to understand the Universe itself that sets us apart, all are vital for each and every human being to understand.  The divisions that humans create to aggrandize one group and demean and subjugate another are illusions.  They are outright lies.  We are all humans, all conscious, all alive, all looking for our place in the Universe and our place among our human society.  I hope many people read this book and take the Cosmic Perspective to heart.

(This book is available for purchase here:  AMAZON  )

Anaximander is my Newest Hero

The First Scientist: Anaximander and his Legacy – Carlo Rovelli (2011)

In my never-ending search for new reading material I came across the name Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist who wrote a book intriguingly titled “Reality is Not What It Seems.”  That book is about the development of quantum gravity theories.  I wanted to read it badly, but could not find a copy at my Library of choice (I am still on the hunt!  Soon!).  What I did find available was a book by Rovelli about the Greek philosopher Anaximander, a man whose ideas about us and the natural world around us were so advanced for their time that they were quickly discarded in favor of the same old status-quo.  People like to throw out the old statement that there is nothing new under the sun, usually to bemoan the lack of originality evident in some artwork or research or idea.  This is a falsehood.  There truly ARE new ideas, never before thought or spoken.  Anaximander was the earliest human that we have record of who helped create the logical and rational framework that set the stage for the scientific revolution all humans have experienced over the past 250 years.

Rovelli does a fabulous job of explaining the radical difference between the worldviews that all humans lived under before Anaximander (The Earth is below, the Heavens above. All is put into motion by the will of gods.  Everything has been the way it is now since the beginning of time, etc.), and the general worldview that most of us modern humans live in, (The Earth is not the center of the Universe. The Universe is exceedingly old. Rain clouds form after water evaporates and climbs into the atmosphere. Land animals evolved from sea animals, etc.)  He explains how big a conceptual leap it was to go from the standard beliefs of the time, beliefs which persisted through all human cultures ever studied, to the core idea that pushes scientific thinking and study.

This core idea is a very critical thing, and it is something that many people do not grasp.  In essence, it is this: Nothing can be learned from certainty, especially certainty blindly accepted without analysis.  Certainty only leads to ignorance.  Before Anaximander, most people who wished to study under a master had to wholly accept that master’s wisdom and teachings without question.  They were assumed to be infallible, due to their prestige, age, or perceived wisdom.  This does not allow for knowledge to expand.  Blind allegiance to “certainty” negates critical thinking.  The ancient sage Thales was Anaximander’s “master.”  What Anaximander did that changed the course of human history is to absorb and understand everything his master had written, and then to LOOK FOR THE MISTAKES.  Anaximander assumed, rightly, that humans are not infallible, and that new knowledge and wisdom is to be found by asking questions of those that came before.  Each new answer creates new questions.  Nothing is absolutely certain in science.  It is only as good as the current data and experiences we use to create our scientific theories.  This idea is the germ of all scientific and rational thinking about the world around us.

Critics of science and scientific thinking despise this uncertainty.  They value the certainty their religion gives them.  Unchanging, unthinking certainty is an evil.  They claim that because Isaac Newton overturned the Ptolemaic idea of the Universe then Ptolemy must have been completely wrong.  Also, since Albert Einstein and his General Relativity overturned the Newtonian idea of the Universe, therefore Newton’s ideas must be completely wrong, according to these people.  Science does not work that way.  The genius of Newton is that his theories on gravity and the Universe and matter and energy were and are correct for 99.99% of the natural world we see around us.  Einstein absorbed this, understood this, and sought out the tiny areas where he felt the great genius Newton was incorrect or lacking information, and proceeded to flesh out those areas.   Newton assumed certain things about our Universe.  Einstein showed these things to be false, and because of his work, was able to understand the relativity of location, the curvature of space time, the “speed limit” set by light, etc.  These were concepts that Newton had no way to understand, but which Einstein, by building on Newton’s work, managed to ingeniously create. 

Einstein was not 100% correct either.  NO ONE IS.  Anyone that tells you is either a liar out to steal from you or use you in some way, or they are deluded morons, trying to make you live in their blindly ignorant and simple worldview.  Either way, they are enemies of rational thought, of rational and human exploration of the world around us.  We, as a human race, owe Anaximander for this conceptual leap.  We owe him big time. 

           Anaximander lived around 600 BC.  That is a little under 3,000 years ago.  He was able to deduce through observation and rigorous thought, that Zeus does not cause the rain but that it is caused by water evaporating from the Earth, heated by the Sun, with no need for any supernatural intervention.  He understood that the Earth was a solid mass, floating in the nothingness of space, with the “heavens” in all directions.  He understood that the first land animals must have come from the oceans, and that humans are descended, along with all creatures, from the sea.  He posited that the Universe was born out of chaos, that all that happened afterwards was dictated not by the capricious will of some gods, but by natural laws.  Before Anaximander humanity was like a child, full of blind faith and certainty.  After Anaximander we have a world where a human can, by virtue of study and hard work, truly understand the causes and effects of the natural world around them, constantly building upon the knowledge of previous humans, and correcting any errors along the way.  This is the true genius of humans.  It is so sad to see that nearly three thousand years later, so much of the world is still obsessed with their religious and philosophical certainties, and willfully ignorant of the uncertain truths that science and logical thinking can provide us.

(This great book can be purchased here:  https://www.amazon.com/Anaximander-Carlo-Rovelli/dp/159416262X )