(DRUM BEATS)
You see, lonia was also the home
of another quite different
intellectual tradition.
Its founder was Pythagoras
who lived here on Samos
in the 6th century B.C.
According to local legend
this cave was once his abode.
Maybe that was once his living room.
Many centuries later
this small Greek Orthodox shrine
was erected on his front porch.
There's a continuity of tradition
from Pythagoras to Christianity.
Pythagoras seems to have been the first person in the history of the world
to decide that the Earth was a sphere.
Perhaps he argued by analogy
with the moon or the sun
maybe he noticed the curved shadow
of the Earth on the moon
during a lunar eclipse.
Or maybe he recognized
that when ships leave Samos
their masts disappear last.
Pythagoras believed that
a mathematical harmony
underlies all of nature.
The modern tradition
of mathematical argument
essential in all of science
owes much to him.
And the notion that the heavenly bodies
move to a kind of
music of the spheres
was also derived from Pythagoras.
It was he who first used
the word cosmos
to mean a well-ordered
and harmonious universe-
-a world amenable
to human understanding.
For this great idea,
we are indebted to Pythagoras.
But there were deep ironies
and contradictions in his thoughts.
Many of the lonians believed
that the underlying harmony and
unity of the universe was accessible
through observation
and experiment-
-the method which dominates
science today.
However, Pythagoras had
a very different method.
He believed that the laws of nature
can be deduced by pure thought.
He and his followers were not
basically experimentalists
they were mathematicians
and they were
thoroughgoing mystics.
They were fascinated by these
five regular solids
bodies whose faces
are all polygons:
Triangles or squares
or pentagons.
There can be an infinite number
of polygons
but only five regular solids.
Four of the solids were associated
with earth, fire, air and water.
The cube, for example,
represented earth.
These four elements, they thought,
make up terrestrial matter.
So the fifth solid
they mystically associated
with the cosmos.
Perhaps it was the substance
of the heavens.
This fifth solid was called
the dodecahedron.
Its faces are pentagons, 12 of them.
Knowledge of the dodecahedron
was considered too dangerous
for the public.
Ordinary people were to be
kept ignorant of the dodecahedron.
In love with whole numbers,
the Pythagoreans believed
that all things could be
derived from them
certainly all other numbers.
So a crisis in doctrine occurred
when they discovered
that the square root of two
was irrational.
The square root of two could
not be represented as the ratio
of two whole numbers
no matter how big they were.
Irrational originally meant
only that
that you can't express a number
as a ratio.
But for the Pythagoreans,
it came to mean something else
something threatening
a hint that their world-view
might not make sense-
-the other meaning of irrational.
Instead of wanting everyone to share
and know of their discoveries
the Pythagoreans suppressed
the square root of two
and the dodecahedron.
The outside world was not to know.
The Pythagoreans had discovered
in the mathematical underpinnings
of nature
one of the two most
powerful scientific tools.
The other, of course, is experiment.
But instead of using their insight
to advance
the collective voyage
of human discovery
they made of it little more
than the hocus-pocus of a mystery cult.
Science and mathematics were to be
removed from the hands
of merchants and artisans.
This tendency found its most
effective advocate
in a follower of Pythagoras
named Plato.
He preferred the perfection
of these mathematical abstractions
to the imperfections
of everyday life.
He believed that ideas were far more
real than the natural world.
He advised the astronomers
not to waste their time
observing the stars and planets.
It was better, he believed,
just to think about them.
Plato expressed hostility to
observation and experiment.
He taught contempt
for the real world
and disdain for the practical
application of scientific knowledge.
Plato's followers succeeded
in extinguishing the light...
of science and experiment
that had been kindled
by Democritus and the other lonians.
Plato's unease with the world
as revealed by our senses
was to dominate
and stifle Western philosophy.
Even as late as 1600
Johannes Kepler was still
struggling to interpret
the structure of
the cosmos in terms of
Pythagorean solids
and Platonic perfection.
Ironically, it was Kepler who helped
re-establish the old lonian method
of testing ideas
against observations.
But why had science lost its way
in the firstplace?
What appeal did Pythagoras'
and Plato's teachings
have for their contemporaries?
They provided, I believe
an intellectually
respectable justification
for a corrupt social order.
The mercantile tradition which had
led to lonian science
also led to a slave economy.
You could get richer
if you owned a lot of slaves.
Athens, in the time
of Plato and Aristotle
had a vast slave population.
All of that brave Athenian talk
about democracy
applied only to a privileged few.
Plato and Aristotle were comfortable
in a slave society.
They offered justifications
for oppression.
They served tyrants.
They taught the alienation
of the body from the mind
a natural enough idea, I suppose,
in a slave society.
They separated thought from matter.
They divorced the Earth
from the heavens.
Divisions which were to dominate
Western thinking
for more than 20 centuries.
The Pythagoreans had won.
In the recognition by
Pythagoras and Plato
that the cosmos is knowable
that there is a mathematical
underpinning to nature
they greatly advanced
the cause of science.
But in the suppression
of disquieting facts
the sense that science should be
kept for a small elite
the distaste for experiment,
the embrace of mysticism
the easy acceptance
of slave societies
their influence has
significantly set back
the human endeavor.
The books of the lonian scientists
are entirely lost.
Their views were suppressed,
ridiculed and forgotten
by the Platonists
and by the Christians
who adopted much of
the philosophy of Plato.
Finally, after a long,
mystical sleep
in which the tools of
scientific inquiry lay moldering
the lonian approach was
rediscovered.
The Western world reawakened.
