>>Thank you for joining me in the History
of Science Collections of the University of
Oklahoma Libraries. Let's look at a few treasures
from the vault that will introduce Pythagoras
and Plato.What is nature? How is nature known?
Is nature fundamentally mathematical, or musical?
In The Metaphysics, Aristotle expressed bewilderment
at the Pythagoreans' teaching that the whole
heavens are a musical scale and a fabric of
numbers. Aristotle confessed that he could
understand what is meant by "a number of things,"
but he was not sure what the Pythagoreans
meant by a "thing of numbers." For the Pythagoreans,
all of nature is a musical scale. And only
through mathematics can nature be known.Because
of the Pythagorean legacy, the field of mathematics
encompassed music. This two volume, 17th-century
treatise on music by Athanasius Kircher shows
a mechanical harpsichord. As the water falls
upon the small wheel, it turns the musical
cylinder, which depresses the keys of the
harpsichord. But at the same time the cylinder
animates the blacksmiths, who are shown pounding
their hammers onto the anvil. And this is
a reference to the ancient Pythagorean story,
that when Pythagoras was walking by the blacksmith
shop, he realized that the musical scale would
result from the harmonies of simple whole
number ratios.These are the five regular solids
of the Pythagoreans: the tetrahedron, 4 sides;
the cube, 6 sides; the octahedron, 8 sides;
the dodecahedron, 12 sides; and the icosahedron,
20 sides. In each regular solid, every face
and angle are identical: 6 squares in the
case of the cube; 4 triangles in the case
of a tetrahedron. The Pythagoreans proved
that there can be 5 and only 5 regular solids;
that it is impossible for there to be another
yet undiscovered. In a dialogue titled The
Timaios, Plato constructed the universe from
these regular solids, showing how nature could
be understood as built up from the properties
of numbers in a geometrical atomism. In this
way, the Pythagoreans and Plato were the first
particle physicists.This early edition of
Plato's works, published in 1491, was edited
by Marsilio Ficino, the leading Plato scholar
of the Italian Renaissance. It includes Ficino's
own essays on theology and Platonic love.
The Oklahoma copy is annotated with contemporary
marginal glosses. Annotations add to the research
interest of a book and throw light on how
a book has been understood by its early readers.Each
page of this monumental Estienne edition of
Plato, published in two large folio volumes,
displays Latin and Greek texts of Plato side
by side. Scholars who refer to Plato today
still use the page numbering of this edition,
the first complete edition of Plato's works.
Mundus Subterraneus (The Subterranean World)
by Athanasius Kircher, illustrates Plato's
theory of the Earth. In addition to describing
the submerging of the lost continent of Atlantis
due to collapse of the Earth's crust, Plato
suggested that the waters of the ocean find
openings at the poles to enter the interior
of the Earth, known as Tartarus. The idea
of sailing into the interior regions of the
Earth through these polar openings continued
to attract adherents up through the 19th century,
when it was endorsed by Jules Verne and Edgar
Allen Poe, among others.Wherever one finds
an emphasis upon mathematical demonstrations
in science, one may credit Plato and the Pythagoreans.
Alfred North Whitehead wrote that the history
of philosophy is a series of footnotes to
Plato. One might say the same about science.
Science is a story. What stories do you want
to hear and tell about Pythagoras and Plato?
