Never Split the Difference takes you inside his world of high-stakes negotiations, revealing the nine key principles that helped Voss and his colleagues succeed when it mattered the most - when people's lives were at stake. This literal groundbreaking idea – inventing at a stroke the idea of the cosmos – was, as the historian of science Karl Popper suggested, “one of the boldest, most revolutionary and most portentous ideas in the whole history of human thinking”. Half of the book is a collection of thoughts of Rovelli about the role of science and its main characteristics: simple but important concepts. The first, Thales, one of the seven sages of ancient Greece, is often credited as the pioneer in applying deductive reasoning to geometry and astronomy; he used his mathematics, for example, to predict solar eclipses.

Would Carlo Rovelli’s faith in Anaximander hold up if archeological evidence established that Anaximander was not an atheist, or at least not a naturalist? Continued scientific inquiry will reveal those aspects of the theories provided by Einstein and Heisenberg that are absolute truth. He describes how the Greeks established that the Earth was not flat using a nearly identical scientific inquiry used by the Chinese to establish that the Earth was flat. Maybe Carlo Rovelli need not answer these questions or maybe he thinks these are questions not worth asking.He attributes Anaximander’s analysis of the physical world as wholly devoid of a metaphysical or religious system as though Anaximander did not or could not attribute some aspect of his existence or existence in general to factors not fully attainable through observation of physical phenomena. I know it would not discredit his scientific inquiry or process and I trust Carlo Rovelli would agree. As a stand-alone proposition, it is the least bit enlightening, but after reading this book I can appreciate that Anaximander’s contribution to scientific inquiry and analysis was monumental, as Carlo Rovelli teaches. An engraving of Anaximander: ‘the first human to argue that rain was caused by the observable movements of air and the heat of the sun rather than the intervention of gods’.

He exercises that faith in an understanding that Anaximander was a naturalist; a man that expressed his knowledge of this world wholly independent, if not in contrast to, a metaphysical or religious understanding of the world. Something very startling happened in Miletus, the ancient Greek city on the modern Turkish coast, in about 600BC. Rovelli thus works in this book a little like an archaeologist sifting a burial site for clues, finding reference points in later historical accounts by Pliny and Aristotle and Herodotus among others. And it was no coincidence that Anaximander’s revolutionary thinking also coincided with the birth of the polis – the nascent democratic structures built on debate as to how best to govern society.If I understand Carlo Rovelli’s position, there are absolute truths in each of these findings that cannot be undone even by following the type of scientific inquiry unleashed by Anaximander. It was implicit in Miletus’s geography as a trading city in which Greek and Egyptian and Babylonian cultures met. For instance, the sun is and will be the center of the solar system because all known planetary bodies revolve around it. If Newton characterised himself as “standing on the shoulders of giants”, then the two men near the very base of that human pyramid were Anaximander and Thales of Miletus. Essentially he claims that Anaximander was the first person who looked for explanations of natural events, rather than crediting spirits of one sort or another with such effects .

The rest of the book (about half of it) concentrates on what science is, the dangers of cultural relativism and understanding the world without gods. Alongside the desacralisation and secularisation of public life,” Rovelli argues, “which passed from the hands of divine kings to those of citizens, came the desacralisation and secularisation of knowledge… law was not handed down once and for all but was instead questioned again and again. Do recent observations of near death experiences offer valid answers to whether human beings have a soul? Now widely available in English for the first time, this is Carlo Rovelli's first book: the thrilling story of a little-known man who created one of the greatest intellectual revolutions Over two thousand years ago, one man changed the way we see the world.Rovelli has improved hugely since his early super-waffly titles - if you have an interest in where science came from, this is arguably his best so far. Given that these are different ISBN numbers, what has changed in this new version; the original was already 5 star.