Anaximenes of Miletus

Hello! My name is Anaximenes, and I lived a very, very long time ago in a bustling Greek city called Miletus. I was born around the year 585 BCE. My city was on the coast of Ionia, which today is part of the country of Turkey. Miletus was a wonderful place for a curious person like me. Ships from all over the world came to our port, bringing new goods and fascinating ideas. People in my city weren't afraid to ask big questions about the world, and I had one of the biggest questions of all: What is everything made of?

In Miletus, I was part of a group of thinkers now called the Milesian school. It started with a wise man named Thales, who was the teacher of my own teacher, Anaximander. We all wanted to know the answer to one giant puzzle: What is the one thing that makes up everything else in the entire world? Thales believed the answer was water. He thought that water could turn into ice, which is solid like earth, and steam, which is like air. Anaximander had a more complicated idea about a mysterious, endless substance that he said was the source of all things. I listened to their ideas, thought very hard, and decided I had a different answer, one that was all around us, all the time.

I believed that everything in the universe was made from one thing: air! Or as we called it in Greek, aer. Think about it! Air is everywhere. You can't see it, but you can feel it when the wind blows, and we all need it to breathe and live. I had an idea about how air could change into other things. I called these processes condensation and rarefaction. When air thinned out, a process I called rarefaction, I believed it became hot and turned into fire. When air was squeezed together and thickened, which I called condensation, it first became wind, then clouds, then rain. If it condensed even more, it became solid earth, and finally, even hard stones. This was a new way to explain how the world worked without involving gods—just natural processes that anyone could observe.

Using my idea about air, I imagined what the whole universe looked like. I thought the Earth was flat, like a big, round tabletop, and that it floated on a cushion of compressed air. The Sun, Moon, and stars were also flat, fiery objects that rode on currents of air. In my view, they didn't go under the Earth at night. Instead, they circled around the edge of our flat world, much like a cap spinning on a head. While we know now that the Earth is a round sphere that orbits the Sun, my ideas were an important first step. I was trying to explain the world using observation and reason, which is the beginning of science.

I lived a full life in Miletus and passed away around the year 528 BCE. My ideas were written in a book, but sadly, it has been lost to time. However, people remembered my thoughts and wrote about them, so my work was not forgotten. I am remembered as one of the first thinkers to suggest that the world works according to natural laws that we can understand. My theory that one substance could change into others through physical processes like condensation and rarefaction was a key step on the long road to modern science. The questions I asked are still the kind of questions scientists and thinkers ask today!