The First Scientist Quotes

“What opens our minds and shows the limits of our ideas is an encounter with other people, other cultures, other ideas.”
― Carlo Rovelli, The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy

“Human beings often cling to their certainties for fear that their opinions will be proven false. But a certainty that cannot be called into question is not a certainty. Solid certainties are those that survive questioning. In order to accept questioning as the foundation for our voyage toward knowledge, we must be humble enough to accept that today’s truth may become tomorrow’s falsehood.”
― Carlo Rovelli, The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy

“Being aware that we may be wrong is different from claiming that it is senseless to speak of right and wrong. Recognizing diversity and taking seriously ideas that diverge from our own is different from claiming that all ideas are equally worthy. Knowing that a given judgment is born within a complex cultural context and is related to many others does not necessarily imply that we are unable to recognize it is wrong.”
― Carlo Rovelli, The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy

“Scientific answers are not definitive: they are, almost by definition, the best ones that we have at any given time. Consider”
― Carlo Rovelli, The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy

“But this does not imply that we cannot or must not trust our own thinking. To the contrary: our own thinking is the best tool we have for finding our way in this world. Recognizing its limitations does not imply that it is not something to rely upon. If instead we trust in “tradition” more than in our own thinking, for instance, we are only relying on something even more primitive and uncertain than our own thinking. “Tradition” is nothing else than the codified thinking of human beings who lived at times when ignorance was even greater than ours.”
― Carlo Rovelli, The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy

“Science is the human adventure of accepting uncertainty, exploring ways of thinking about the world, and being ready to overturn any and all certainties we have possessed to this point. This is among the most beautiful of human adventures.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Anaximander: And the Birth of Science

“What counts is not the pen used for writing but the poetry that is written. The reason we take interest in an automobile engine is not because it makes wheels turn; it is because it takes us places that we could not reach by foot. The turning wheels are just the mechanism of an instrument that allows us to journey.”
― Carlo Rovelli, The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy

“There is no secure, unquestionable basis upon which we can find knowledge. Each time we have deluded ourselves into believing we have discovered the definitive theory of the world, we have played fools. Similarly, each time we have thought we have found the final secret to certainty, the secure point of departure for knowledge, we have later been forced to realize we were wrong.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Anaximander: And the Birth of Science

“Si el planeta se calienta a causa de la Revolución industrial, el riesgo para la humanidad puede ser considerable. Pero los caminos tradicionales no nos protegen de estos riesgos; al contrario, los hacen más incontrolables. Grandes civilizaciones antiguas, como los mayas, la Grecia clásica y tal vez el propio Imperio romano, probablemente se vieron debilitadas, si no destruidas, por graves desequilibrios ecológicos que ellas mismas habían engendrado. Con la circunstancia atenuante de que no tuvieron, a diferencia de nosotros, la oportunidad de entender lo que estaba pasando e intentar defenderse. La inteligencia no nos ahorra desastres, pero es nuestra principal arma frente a ellos.”
― Carlo Rovelli, El nacimiento del pensamiento científico: Anaximandro de Mileto

“Nuestro saber es demasiado débil para no aceptar vivir en el misterio. Y precisamente porque el misterio existe, y porque es tan profundo, no podemos confiar en quien declara poseer la llave de este misterio. Aceptar la incertidumbre y la novedad de un pensamiento que busca nuevos caminos conlleva nuevos riesgos.”
― Carlo Rovelli, El nacimiento del pensamiento científico: Anaximandro de Mileto

“Los Estados modernos han reemplazado esencialmente su papel en la estructuración del espacio político, y de la religión no quedan más que retazos: apenas poco más que experiencias individuales y sistemas de convicciones. Una de las tesis más interesantes de Gauchet es la idea de que el monoteísmo no representa un estado evolucionado, «superior», del pensamiento religioso; al contrario, no es más que una fase de la lenta disolución de la centralidad y la coherencia de la organización religiosa antigua del pensamiento.”
― Carlo Rovelli, El nacimiento del pensamiento científico: Anaximandro de Mileto

“Los dioses se alejan cada día un poco más en sus cielos. El hombre se queda solo, a merced de un mundo en revolución. Las líneas que Jaynes escribe sobre este período son muy bellas. En ellas percibimos el eco del célebre lamento [Tablilla «Ludlul bel nemeqi», figura 19]: Mi dios me abandonó y desapareció. Mi diosa me visita con menos frecuencia y se mantiene distante. El ángel bueno que caminaba a mi lado se fue…”
― Carlo Rovelli, El nacimiento del pensamiento científico: Anaximandro de Mileto

“I believe that looking for a key to unravel all problems - a methodological and philosophical fixed point to which this intellectual adventure could be anchored - is to betray science's very nature, which is intrinsically evolutionary and critical. (pp Xvi)”
― Carlo Rovelli, Anaximander

“Science, I believe , is a passionate search for always newer ways to conceive the world. Its strength lies not in the certainties it reaches but in a radical awareness of the vastness of our ignorance. ( pp xii)”
― Carlo Rovelli, Anaximander

“a step forward is the realization that the problem must be posed differently in order to be resolved. Students writing their doctoral dissertations under my supervision are often surprised that after three years of work, the content of their thesis is not the solution to the problem posed at the outset. If the problem had been well posed, it wouldn’t have taken three years to solve it.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Anaximander: And the Birth of Science

“They fail to see that what changes in scientific revolutions is not what could reasonably be expected to change, but instead what no one expected.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Anaximander: And the Birth of Science

“... ogni volta che come nazione, come gruppo, come continente, o come religione, ripieghiamo in noi stessi nella celebrazione della nostra specifica identità, non stiamo facendo altro che celebrare i nostri limiti e cantare la nostra stupidità. Ogni volta che si apriamo alla diversità e ascoltiamo ciò che è diverso da noi, stiamo contribuendo all'arricchimento e all'intelligenza della razza umana. ...”
― Carlo Rovelli, Anaximander: And the Nature of Science

“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 own stupidity. Each time that we open ourselves to diversity and ponder that which is different from us, we enlarge the richness and intelligence of the human race. A Ministry of National Identity, like those established of late in some Western countries, is nothing more than a ministry of national obtuseness.”
― Carlo Rovelli, The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy

“Hecataeus the historian was once at Thebes, in Egypt, where he boasted that he descended directly from a god, in sixteen generations. But the priests reacted with him precisely as they also did with me (though I myself did not boast my own lineage): they brought me into the great inner court of the temple and showed me colossal wooden figures. They counted these statues, showing me that they were precisely the number they had previously told me. Custom was that every high priest set up a statue of himself there during his lifetime. Pointing to these and counting, the priests showed me that each high priest succeeded his father. They went through the whole line of figures, from the statue of the man who had most recently died, back to the earliest. Hecataeus had traced his descent and claimed that his sixteenth forefather was a god, but the priests traced a line of descent by counting the statues, and these were three hundred and forty-five. The priests refused to believe that a man could be descended from a god in only sixteen generations; they refused to believe that a man could be born before a god. And all those men whose statues stood there had been good men, but not gods.”
― Carlo Rovelli, The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy

“If you want to truly advance the path of knowledge, you must not just revere your master, study, and build on his teachings. You must seek out his mistakes.”
― Carlo Rovelli, The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy

“The essence of scientific knowledge is the capacity to avoid clinging to certainties and received worldviews, and instead be prepared to change these, repeatedly if need be, in light of our knowledge, observations, discussions, different ideas, and criticisms. The nature of scientific thought is critical and rebellious. It does not suffer a priori conclusions, reverence, or untouchable truths.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Anaximander: And the Birth of Science

“Science, I believe, is a passionate search for always newer ways to conceive the world. Its strength lies not in the certainties it reaches but in a radical awareness of the vastness of our ignorance.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Anaximander: And the Birth of Science

“Therefore the scientific quest for knowledge is not nourished by certainty, it is nourished by a radical lack of certainty. Its way is fluid, capable of continuous evolution, has immense strength and a subtle magic. It is able to overthrow the order of things and reconceive the world time and again.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Anaximander: And the Birth of Science

“Uno de los textos más antiguos y fascinantes que nos transmitió la antigua India, el Rigveda, escrito hacia el año 1500 a.C., dice: ¿De dónde ha nacido esta creación y de dónde vino?
Hasta los Devas nacieron después de la creación de este mundo,
y entonces, ¿quién sabe de dónde vino la existencia?
Nadie puede saber de dónde vino la creación,
y si Él la creó o si Él no la creó.
Él, que la vigila desde lo más alto de los cielos,
solo Él lo sabe,
o quizá no lo sabe. [Rigveda, 10. 129]”
― Carlo Rovelli, El nacimiento del pensamiento científico: Anaximandro de Mileto

“Por un lado se tiene la certeza de conocer la verdad. Por otro está el reconocimiento de nuestra ignorancia y la duda perpetua de toda certeza. La religión, especialmente el monoteísmo, encuentra una profunda dificultad de aceptar el pensamiento del cambio, el pensamiento crítico. Eva recogió la manzana para llegar a saber. Pero ante el dios que quiere ser el Dios Único e indiscutible fue el primero de los pecados.”
― Carlo Rovelli, El nacimiento del pensamiento científico: Anaximandro de Mileto

“When we seek a sure foundation on which to base decisions about our actions and thoughts, we find that a sure foundation does not exist. We do not even know whether we actually need such a foundation. We continue to make use of vague, uncertain ideas, precisely in those areas that most deeply concern us. What we call “irrational” is the code name for what we don’t understand well about ourselves given the limits of our own intelligence.”
― Carlo Rovelli, The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy