Why Anaximander deserves to be called ‘the first scientist’

It’s a daring thing to write a whole book about a man while confessing early on that ‘we know almost nothing of his readings, life, character, appearance or voyages’, and of whose writings only a three-line fragment survives. Luckily, as with many ancient authors, the works of the 6th-century BC philosopher Anaximander are described in subsequent treatises, and a resourceful writer can infer much from this evidence about what might have been ‘the first great scientific revolution in human history’.

Anaximander, a Greek citizen of the cosmopolitan port Miletus, on the coast of what is now Turkey, was as far as we know the first human to say that the Earth was an object floating in space with no means of support (elephants, turtles, or what have you). Why didn’t it fall? Because there was no preferred direction in which to fall: it was indifferent to directions.