Cosmos Is Made Out of Chaos

Cosmos Is Made Out of Chaos

A revolution made Cosmos out of Chaos For thousands of years humans were oppressed – as some of us still are – by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable. Then, 2,500 years ago, there was a glorious awakening in Ionia : on Samos and the other nearby Greek colonies that grew up among the islands and inlets of the busy eastern Aegean Sea (as an aid to confusion, Ionia is not in the Ionian Sea; it was named by colonists from the coast of Ionian Sea).

We know that the early Greeks had believed that the first being was Chaos, corresponding to the phrase in Genesis in the same context, “without form”. Chaos created and then mated with a goddess called Night, and their offspring eventually produced all the gods and men. A universe created from Chaos was in perfect keeping with the Greek belief in an unpredictable Nature run by capricious gods.

An endless cycle of deaths and rebirths, of souls and universes, in which nothing fundamentally new can happen. Source : © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

But in the sixth century B.C., in Ionia, a new concept developed, one of the great ideas of the human species. The universe is knowable, the ancient Ionians argued, because it exhibits an internal order: there are regularities in Nature that permit its secrets to be uncovered. Nature is not entirely unpredictable, there are rules even she must obey. This ordered and admirable character of the universe was called Cosmos.

But why Ionia, why in these unassuming and pastoral landscapes, these remote islands and inlets of the Eastern Mediterranean? Why not in the great cities of India or Egypt, Babylonia, China or Mesoamerica? China had an astronomical tradition millennia old; it invented paper and printing, rockets, clocks, silk, porcelain, ocean-going navies. Some historians argue it was nevertheless too traditionalist a society, too unwilling to adopt innovations.

Why not India, an extremely rich, mathematically gifted culture? Because, some historians maintain, of a rigid fascination with the idea of an infinitely old universe condemned to an endless cycle of deaths and rebirths, of souls and universes, in which nothing fundamentally new could happen.

Why not Mayan and Aztec societies, which were accomplished in astronomy and captivated, as the Indians were, by large numbers? Because, some historians declare, they lacked the aptitude or impetus for mechanical invention. The Mayans and the Aztecs did not even – except for children’s toys – invent the wheel.