Opening paragraphs...............................

As the senior, if least deserving, of the authors, I shall open the narrative.
     Over many years I have searched for the point where myth and science join.  It was clear to me for a long time that the origins of science had their deep roods in a particular myth, that of invariance.  The Greeks, as early as the 7th century B.C., spoke of the quest of their first sages as the Problem of the One and the Many, sometimes describing the wild fecundity of nature as the way in which the Many could be deduced from the One, sometimes seeing the Many as unsubstantial variations being played on the One.  The oracular sayings of Heraclitus the Obscure do nothing but illustrate with shimmering paradoxes the illusory quality of "things" in flux as they were wrung from the central intuition of unity.  Before him Anaximander had announced, also oracularly, that the cause of things being born and perishing is their mutual injustice to each other in the order of time, "as is meet," he said, for they are bound to atone forever for their mutual injustice.  This was enough to make of Anaximander the acknowledged father of physical science, for the accent is on the real "Many."  But it was true science after a fashion.
-Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, from the Preface to  Hamlet's Mill:  An Essay On Myth & The Frame Of Time