With the Big Bang theory, modern scientists gave us a story about our universe’s birth. With special relativity and quantum mechanics, they elucidated the fundamental characteristics of that universe. With the multiverse and string theories, they’ve begun to pose hypotheses too massive to hang on even those frameworks. Equipped with particle accelerators to study the small stuff and enormous telescopes to study the big stuff, researchers are going back to the complicated basics, asking why and how the universe and all of its constituent parts, including humans, exists.
One million days ago, pre-Socratic thinkers were asking the same questions. Before Socrates was born in 470 B.C.E., his intellectual predecessors were going on record with their own answers. They were the Western world’s first empiricists. Parmenides and Anaxagoras pulled cosmology earthward as Empedocles, Leucippus, and Democritus abandoned the sacred for the observable. At the time, their theories were considered absurd, fantastical, and speculative, but later Greeks vindicated many of their hypotheses — some of which hold to this day. Even so, many modern scientists and historians ignore the pre-Socratics’ contributions, in large part because they trafficked largely in conjecture. But — as any string theorist could explain — conjecture necessarily precedes proof.
The answers offered by today’s conjecturers, like those tossed out centuries before the Common Era, present engaged thinkers with a choice: Take counterintuitive hypotheses seriously, or dismiss them outright. Like the pre-Socratics, many modern scientists risk being ridiculed. And, if history is any indication, these modern scientists may be ignored or repudiated by future researchers even if they uncover new paths to knowledge. Nowadays, at least, scientists understand the cycle: The theorists come before the experimenters and the credit is rarely shared.