The Man Who Thought Everything Was Made of Water
From falling into wells to predicting eclipses, how one distracted Greek invented the idea of reason.
Next we move from one who found truth in stillness to one who found it in motion: Thales of Miletus, the man who thought everything was made of water.
Now there’s an idea.
“Everything comes from water,” he said, and for once he wasn’t being poetic.
The Big Idea
The world used to make no sense. Storms, plagues and bad luck were blamed on the gods having a tantrum.
Thales had a better idea. Maybe the universe isn’t ruled by moods but by forces — things that can be studied, understood and even predicted.
He thought everything came from water, which sounds daft now, but it was a bold start: the first time anyone tried to explain the world without invoking Olympus.
That’s how reason was born, from one man daring to say, “Let’s think about it.”
The Man and the Moment
Thales was born around 624 BCE in Miletus, a bustling seaport on the coast of Ionia, now western Turkey. Miletus was a place of trade, noise and ideas: Phoenician sailors swapping stories, Egyptian merchants selling geometry, priests muttering predictions about eclipses.
The Greeks called these early thinkers physiologoi, students of nature, and Thales was the first of them.
He had the look of a man permanently distracted. One story has him falling into a well while stargazing, which feels about right. His neighbours probably shook their heads and said, “That Thales chap, bright but hopeless in the real world.”
Still, he was an extraordinary product of his time. The Ionian coast sat at a crossroads of civilisations: Egyptian mathematics, Babylonian astronomy, Greek myth. Thales absorbed them all and began asking questions no one had thought to ask. What is everything made of? Is there a pattern? A principle? Could the world run on rules rather than whims?
For the first time, someone suggested that behind the chaos of nature there might be order, a structure that could be studied, mapped and predicted. He looked at a thunderstorm and thought, not “Which god is angry?” but “What’s happening in the clouds?”
That single shift of attention was enough to start the long, strange story we now call science.
Why It Mattered
Thales’s claim that “all is water” wasn’t a chemistry lecture. It was an attempt to find unity in variety, a single principle beneath the clutter of existence.
Water could be liquid, solid or vapour. It moved, nourished, destroyed. It felt alive, changeable and essential. For Thales, that was enough to make it the candidate for the world’s raw material.
More importantly, he didn’t declare it as divine truth; he proposed it as a theory. That small grammatical shift, from revelation to reasoning, marks the birth of philosophy and science alike.
He studied eclipses, geometry and the stars. Aristotle later credited him with predicting one — possibly with the help of Babylonian data — and with measuring the height of pyramids using shadows.
He even cornered the olive-oil market one year by predicting a bumper harvest and renting every press in town. The first philosopher, it seems, was also the first futures trader.
People thought him eccentric, of course. You would too if your neighbour were lying on his back measuring triangles in the dust. But eccentricity is often the price of looking at the world before anyone else notices it’s interesting.
Thales never explained how he knew what he knew. He simply trusted that the universe was intelligible — that it could be grasped by reason. That act of trust, more than his watery theory, was his true discovery. He believed that thought itself could touch reality.
The Legacy
Thales set something loose that no god has managed to put back: curiosity. Once you allow that the world can be understood through observation and argument, you can’t stop people asking questions.
His students Anaximander and Anaximenes refined his ideas, proposing air, fire and infinity as the fundamental stuff. The questions multiplied; the myths retreated.
The line from Thales runs straight through Aristotle’s logic, Galileo’s telescope and Newton’s apple. The details changed, but the faith remained: that the universe behaves according to patterns the human mind can trace.
He was also the first recorded sceptic. When asked if everything was full of gods, he reportedly said, “Perhaps.” It’s hard to know whether he was hedging his bets or teasing his interviewer, but it shows a new tone of thought — playful, speculative, unafraid. The divine, if it existed, would have to fit inside the laws of nature, not outside them.
Even his mistakes were fruitful. He was wrong about water, but gloriously wrong. To suggest that one material principle underlies everything was to light the torch that burned all the way to quantum theory. He was the first to say: there is a pattern, and we can find it.
In Our Time
If Thales were alive today, he’d probably be the one standing in a park staring at his phone’s astronomy app while everyone else is filming themselves. The man who once fell into a well would now trip over a charging cable.
He’d recognise our craving for a single explanation. We still hunt for the theory of everything, the one elegant equation that ties together gravity, time and the mysterious bit of toast that always lands butter-side down.
Every century rediscovers Thales’s dream of unity: physics, genetics, algorithms, consciousness — all trying to find the One Thing Beneath It All.
The difference is that we’ve replaced water with data. The world, we now say, is made not of substance but of information: streams, flows, waves — the same metaphors in modern dress. Somewhere, Thales is smiling into his toga and saying, “Told you so.”
If he looked at artificial intelligence, he’d probably see it not as something alien but as another ripple in that same current — thought distilled into pattern. AI isn’t sorcery; it’s Thales’s old hunch made digital: that reason itself can be encoded, and that the universe, including us, might just be computable.
He’d be fascinated, and maybe a little horrified, to see how far we’ve taken his faith in logic — machines now imitating minds, asking the same questions he once asked while gazing at the stars.
Yet for all our cleverness, we often forget his humility. He didn’t claim to have found the truth, only that the truth might be findable. The real revolution was his confidence in curiosity itself.
Thales lived in a culture of certainty. The priests knew, the poets knew, the myths knew. Only Thales admitted he didn’t — and from that admission everything followed.
In a way, he’s the patron saint of not knowing. Every scientist peering down a microscope, every child asking “why?”, owes him a small debt.
Modern life has its own wells. We fall into them while looking at stars on screens, chasing data instead of wisdom. But the impulse is the same: to look up, to wonder, to connect dots that might never have been meant to join.
Maybe that’s what progress really is — a long chain of distracted geniuses falling into their own wells and shouting back, “I think I see something!”
Key Ideas and Writings
Fragment on Water (6th century BCE) — The line that started it all: “Everything is full of gods.” Thales believed water was the essence of all things, which may explain why the Greeks invented bathing.
Astronomical Observations (c. 585 BCE) — Credited by Aristotle with predicting an eclipse. Whether he did or not, it showed he believed the heavens followed rules, not whims.
Geometry in Practice — Thales supposedly measured the height of pyramids by comparing their shadows, thus inventing trigonometry and showing off in equal measure.
The Essence
“Everything flows, everything connects.”
(Thales, or possibly every physicist since.)
Look deeply enough into water and you’ll see reflection as well as depth. Thales glimpsed both.
The first philosopher was also the first mirror: he made the world look back at itself.