Anaxagoras’ account of the origin of the world is strikingly similar to a model which is popular today.
Quote:
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At the beginning, he said, ‘all things were together’, in a unit infinitely complex and infinitely small which lacked all perceptible qualities. This primeval pebble began to rotate, expanding as it did so, and throwing off air and ether, and eventually the stars and the sun and the moon. In the course of the rotation, what is dense separated off from what is rarefied, and so did the hot from the cold, the bright from the dark, and the dry from the wet. Thus the articulated substances of our world were formed, with the dense and the wet and the cold and the dark congregating where our earth now is, and the rare and the hot and the dry and the bright moving to the outermost parts of the ether.
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anaxagoras ~ 500 BC
Excerpt from
An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy ....