To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science by Steven Weinberg – review

The ancient Greeks of Miletus looked for the underlying reality. Thales reportedly thought the world was made of water; Anaximander proposed a mysterious substance called the infinite; Anaximenes suggested air and Heraclitus fire. Empedocles of Sicily nominated a mix of water, earth, aether and sun as the fabric of all mortal things, and Democritus earned an enduring place in history with one fragment of observation: that all matter consisted of tiny particles called atoms. Sensations such as sweet and bitter existed only by convention. Reality consisted only of atoms, and the void.

Inasmuch as they believed in an underlying reality that united all things, the ancient Greeks were like modern scientists says Steven Weinberg in this provoking book. But there the similarity ends. None of them, from Thales to Plato, took it on themselves to explain how their theories about reality accounted for the appearances of things. This wasn’t just intellectual laziness: “There was a strain of intellectual snobbery among the early Greeks that led them to regard an understanding of appearances as not worth having.”