Cosmos
Author: Carl Sagan
While there are a thousands of interesting points in the dense yet provacative "Cosmos", one of the more interesting notes occurs as a footnote.
The sixth century B.C. was a time of remarkable
intellectual and spiritual ferment across the planet. Not only was it the time
of Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras and others in Ionia, but also the time of
the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho who caused Africa to be circumnavigated, of
Zoroaster in Persia, Confucius and Lao-tse in China, the Jewish prophets in
Israel, Egypt and Babylon, and Gautama Buddha in India. It is hard to think
these activities altogether unrelated.
That's certainly a lot of great thinkers and apparently this guy has created a website dedicated to this very passage and it saves me a lot of breath. This footnote was borne out of a story Sagan tells about the development of the Pythagorean theorem and the importance it played in the development of modern science. He notes this kind of fraternity of 6th century BC thinkers...kind of like a collective conscious enlightenment period .
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