Thales of Miletus

Thales of Miletus

Thales of Miletus, the first Ionian scientist, attempted to understand the world without invoking the intervention of the Gods. He held a similar view that the opinion of the Babylonians, but, as Benjamin Farrington said, “he left Marduk out”. Yes, everything was once water, but the Earth out of the oceans by a natural process – similar, he thought, to the silting he had observed at the delta of the Nile.

Indeed, he thought that water was a common principle underlying all of matter, just as today we might say the same of electrons, protons and neutrons, or of quarks. Whether Thales’ conclusion was correct is not as important as his approach: The world was not made by the gods, but instead was the work of material forces interacting in Nature. Thales brought back from Babylon and Egypt the seeds of the new sciences of astronomy and geometry, sciences that would sprout and grow in the fertile soil of Ionia.

The Past is Bigger than the Future. Photo : Elena

Very little is known about the personal life of Thales, but one revealing anecdote is told by Aristotle in his Politics:

Thales was reproached for his poverty which was supposed to show that philosophy is of no use. According to the story, he knew by his skill, in interpreting the heavens while it was yet winter that there would be a great harvest of olives in the coming year; so, having a little money, he gave deposits for the use of all the olive-presses in Chios and Miletus, which he hired at a low price because no bid against him. When the harvest time came, and many were wanted all at once, he let them out at any rate which he pleased and made a quantity of money. Thus he showed the world philosophers can easily be rich if the like, but their ambition is of another sort.

He was also famous as a political sage, successfully urging the Milesians to resist assimilation by Croesus, King of Lydia, and unsuccessfully urging a federation of all the island states of Ionia to oppose the Lydians. 20

Anaximander of Miletus was a friend and colleague of Thales, one of the first people we know of to do an experiment. By examining the moving shadow cast by a vertical stick he determined accurately the length of the year and the seasons. For ages men had used sticks to club and spear one another. Anaximander used one to measure time. He was the first person in Greece to make a sundial, a map of the known world and a celestial globe that showed the patterns of the constellations. He believed the Sun, the Moon and the stars to be made of fire seen through moving holes in the dome of the sky, probably a much older idea. He held the remarkable view that the Earth is not suspended or supported from the heavens, but that it remains by itself at the center of the universe; since it was equidistant from all places on the “celestial sphere”, there was no force that could move it.

For me, the Earth is not suspended or supported from the heaven, but it remains at the center of the universe. Image: © The Breathtaking Fictional Door is Open, by Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Evolutionary Causality

Evolutionary Causality

Past information might be revered, but in successive retellings it would become progressively more muddled and eventually lost. Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with, the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. We thing the health of our civilisation, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.

Were the Earth to be started over again with all its physical features identical, it is extremely unlikely that anything closely resembling a human being would ever again emerge. There is a powerful random to the evolutionary process. A cosmic ray striking a different gene, producing a different mutation, can have small consequences early but profound consequences late. Happenstance may play a powerful role in biology, as it does in history. The father back the critical events occur, the more powerfully can they influence the present.

The pattern of evolutionary causality is a web of astonishing complexity; the incompleteness of our understanding humbles us. Image: © Elena

For example, consider our hands. We have five fingers, including one opposable thumb. They serve us quite well. But I think we would be served equally well with six fingers including a thumb, or four fingers including a thumb, or maybe five fingers and two thumbs. There is nothing intrinsically best about our particular configuration of fingers, which we ordinarily thing of as so natural and inevitable. We have five fingers because we have descended from a Devonian fish that had five phalanges or bones in its fins. Had we descended from a fish with four or six phalanges, we would have four or six fingers on each hand and would think them perfectly natural.

We use base ten arithmetic only because we have ten fingers on our hands (the arithmetic based on the number 5 or 10 seems to be so obvious that the ancient Greek equivalent of “to count” literally means “to five”.

Had the arrangement been otherwise, we would use base eight or base twelve arithmetic and relegate base ten to the New Math. The same point applies, I believe, to many more essential aspects of our being – our hereditary material, our internal biochemistry, our form, stature, organ systems, loves and hates, passions and despairs, tenderness and aggression, even our analytical processes – all of these are, at least in part, the result of apparently minor accidents in our immensely long evolutionary history.

Perhaps if one less dragonfly had drowned in the Carboniferous swamps, the intelligent organisms on our planet today would have feathers and teach their young in rookeries.

Ancient Findings

Ancient Findings

Some of the earliest authors wrote on clay. Cuneiform writing, the remote ancestor of the Western alphabet, was invented in the Near East about 5,000 years ago. Its purpose was to keep records: the purchase of grain, the sale of land, the triumphs of the king, the status of the priests, the positions of the stars, the prayers to the gods.

For thousands of years, writing was chiseled into clay and stone, scratched onto wax or bark or leather; painted on bamboo or papyrus or silk. But always one copy at a time, and, except for the inscriptions on monuments, always for tiny readership.

Then in China between the second and sixth centuries, paper, ink and printing with carved wooden blocks were all invented, permitting many copies of a work to be made and distributed. It took a thousand years for the idea to catch on in remote and backward Europe. Then, suddenly, books were being printed all over the world. Just before the invention of movable type, around 1450, there were no more than a few tens of thousands of books in all of Europe, all handwritten; about as many as in China in 100 B.C., and a tenth as many as in the Great Library of Alexandria. Fifty years later, around 1500, there were ten million printed books. Learning had become available to anyone who could read. Magic was everywhere.

 Everything would depend on what ancient findings we had accidentally been told about, and how accurate the account was. Image: © Elena

More recently, books, especially paperbacks, have been printed in massive and inexpensive editions. For the price of a modest meal you can ponder the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the origin of species, the interpretation of dreams, the nature of things. Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.

The great libraries of the world contain millions of volumes, the equivalent of about 10 (14) bits of information in words, and perhaps 10(15) bits in pictures. This is ten thousand times more information than in our genes, and about ten times more than in our brains. If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read. The information in books is not preprogrammed at birth but constantly changed, amended by events, adapted to the world.

It is now twenty-three centuries since the founding of the Alexandrian Library. If there were no books, no written records, think how prodigious a time twenty-three centuries occupies almost a hundred generations of human beings. If information could be passed on merely by word of mouth, how little we should know of our past, how slow would be our progress.

Warehouse of Our Memory

Warehouse of Our Memory

When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented them.

But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to know more than could conveniently be contained in brains. The world of thought is divided roughly into two hemispheres. The right hemisphere of the cerebral cortex is mainly responsible for pattern recognition, intuition, sensitivity, creative insights.

So we learned to stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to know more than could conveniently be contained in brains. So we learned to stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library.

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts, still called “leaves, imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person – perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greates of human inventions, binding, together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.

 A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts, still called “leaves, imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. Image: © Elena

Some data preserved in the libraries:

It is easy to see that only a very restricted range of laws of nature are consistent with galaxies and stars, planets, life and intelligence. If the laws of nature are unpredictably reasserted at the cusps, then it is only by the most extraordinary coincidence that the cosmic slot machine has this time come up with a universe consistent with us.

Nuclear accelerators are designed to allow for the increase of mass with increasing speed; if they were not designed in this way, accelerated particles would all smash into the walls of the apparatus, and there would be little to do in experimental nuclear physics.

The spacecraft might have tipped over and crashed, or at the least its mechanical arm, intended to acquire Martian soil samples, might have become wedges or been left waving helplessly a meter too high above the surface, if the spacecraft landed in too rough a place.

Information of Our Genes

The information in our genes is very old – most of it more than millions of years old, some of it billions of years old. In contrast, the information in our books is at most thousands of years old, and that in our brains is only decades old. The long-lived information is not the characteristically human information. Because of erosion on the Earth, our monuments and artifacts will not, in the natural course of things, survive to the distant future. But the Voyager record is on its way out of the Solar system. The erosion in interstellar space – chiefly cosmic rays and impacting dust grains – is so slow that the information on the record will last a billion years.

Genes and brains and books encode information differently and persist through time at different rates. But the persistence of the memory of the human species will be far longer in the impressed metal grooves on the Voyager interstellar record.

Intelligence has provided us with awesome powers. Whatever the scientists they talking about, the life in infinite (Quotations from Megan Jorgensen). Image: © Megan Jorgensen

The Voyager message is traveling with agonizing slowness. The fastest object ever launched by the human species, it will still take tens of thousands of years to go the distance to the nearest star. Any television program will traverse in hours the distance that Voyager has covered in years. A television transmission that has just finished being aired will, in only a few hours, overtake the Voyager spacecraft in the region of Saturn and beyond and speed outward to the stars. If it is headed that way, the signal will reach Alpha Centauri in a little more than four years. If, some decades or centuries hence, anyone out there in space hears our television broadcasts, I hope they will think well of us, a product of fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution, the local transmogrification of matter into consciousness.

Our intelligence has recently provided us with awesome powers. It is not yet clear that we have the wisdom to avoid our own self-destruction. But many of us are trying very hard. We hope that very soon in the perspective of our cosmic time we will have unified our planet peacefully into an organisation cherishing the life of every living creature on it and will be ready to take that next great step, to become part of a galactic society of communicating civilizations.

Interstellar Methods of Communication

Interstellar Methods of Communication

There may be many effective methods of communication that have substantial merit: interstellar spacecraft optical or infrared lasers; pulsed neutrinos; modulated gravity waves; or some other kind of transmission that we will not discover for a thousand years. Advanced civilizations may have graduated far beyond radio for their own communications. But radio is powerful, cheap, fast and simple. They will know that a backward civilization, like ours, wishing to receive messages from the skies, is likely to turn first to radio technology.

Perhaps they will have to wheel the radio telescopes out of the Museum of Ancient Technology. If we were to receive a radio message we would know that there would be at the very least one thing we could talk about: radio astronomy.

But is there anyone out there to talk to? With a third of half a trillion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy alone, could ours be the only one accompanied by an inhabited planet? How much more likely it is that technical civilizations are a cosmic commonplace, that the Galaxy is pulsing and humming with advanced societies, and, therefore, that the nearest such culture is not so very far away – perhaps transmitting from antennas established on a planet of naked-eye star just next door. Perhaps when we look up at the sky at night, near one of those faint pinpoints of light is a world on which someone quite different from us is then glancing idly at a star we call the Sun and entertaining, for just a moment, an outrageous speculation.

I’m quite sure someone quite different from me is glancing idly at a star we call the Sun and entertaining, for just a moment, an outrageous speculation: Is it possible that an intelligent species exist near that yellow star? Image: Magical World © Elena

In fact, it is very hard to be sure. There may be severe impediments to the evolution of a technical civilization. Planets may be rarer than we think. Perhaps, the origin of life is not so easy as our laboratory experiment suggest. Perhaps the evolution of advanced life forms is improbable. Or it may be that complex life forms evolve readily, but intelligence and technical societies require an unlikely set of coincidences, just as the evolution of the human species depended on the demise of the dinosaurs and the ice-age recession of the forest in whose trees our ancestors screeched and dimly wondered. Or perhaps the civilisations arise repeatedly, inexorably on innumerable planets in the Milky Way, but are generally unstable; so all but a tiny fraction are unable to survive their technology and succumb to greed and ignorance, pollution and nuclear war.

It is possible to explore the great issue further and make a crude estimate of N, the number of advanced technological civilizations in our galaxy, but let’s talk about this issue later.