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The 'music of the spheres' was born from the effort to use numbers to explain the universe:
If you've ever heard the phrase "the music of the spheres," your first thought probably wasn't about mathematics.
But in its historical origin, the music of the spheres actually was all about math. In fact, that phrase represents a watershed in the history of math's relationship with science.
In its earliest forms, as practiced in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, math was mainly a practical tool for facilitating human interactions. Math was important for calculating the area of a farmer's field, for keeping track of workers' wages, for specifying the right amount of ingredients when making bread or beer. Nobody used math to investigate the nature of physical reality.
Not until ancient Greek philosophers began to seek scientific explanations for natural phenomena (without recourse to myths) did anybody bother to wonder how math would help. And the first of those Greeks to seriously put math to use for that purpose was the mysterious religious cult leader Pythagoras of Samos.
It was Pythagoras who turned math from a mere tool for practical purposes into the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. As the historian Geoffrey Lloyd noted, "The Pythagoreans were ... the first theorists to have attempted deliberately to give the knowledge of nature a quantitative, mathematical foundation."
[...] Pythagoras believed that, at its root, reality was made from numbers. That sounds crazy to modern minds taught that matter is made of atoms and molecules. But in ancient times, nobody really knew anything about what reality is. Every major philosopher had a favorite idea for what sort of substance served as reality's foundation.
[...] Specifically, Pythagoras identified the root of reality in what he called the tetractys, consisting of the first four integers: 1, 2, 3 and 4. Added together, those numbers equal 10. Ten, Pythagoras concluded, is the "perfect" number, the number that holds the key to understanding nature.
And why 1, 2, 3 and 4? Because those numbers were the key to creating harmonious sounds.
[...] The Pythagoreans surmised that the motions of the heavenly bodies generated pleasant music. As Aristotle later explained it, those bodies move rapidly and therefore they must make sound, because anything moving quickly on Earth makes sound (think arrows whizzing through the air). Proper ratios of the planets' speeds (which depended on their distances from the central fire) guaranteed that the sounds would be harmonious. Hence the moving planets created a "harmony of the heavens." Because later Greek writers supposed that each planet is carried on its orbit by a rotating sphere, eventually that harmony became known as "the music of the spheres."
[...] Using math for understanding nature was unknown before Pythagoras. It was his idea. Previously math had been a tool for scribes or surveyors or cooks. "Pythagoras freed mathematics from these practical applications," the Dutch mathematician B.L. van der Waerden wrote in his classic history of ancient math. "The Pythagoreans pursued mathematics as a kind of religious contemplation, as a way to approach the eternal Truth."
As for the music of the spheres, one issue remained. If the heavens made harmonious sounds, why didn't anybody hear them? Aristotle reported that the Pythagoreans "explain this by saying that the sound is in our ears from the very moment of birth and is thus indistinguishable from its contrary silence."
Aristotle rejected that explanation, just as he rejected the idea of a "counter-Earth" as well as the whole notion that everything was made from numbers. And yet, the importance of numbers in science, first expressed by Pythagoras, ultimately proved to be much more resilient than most of Aristotle's ideas. As experts on early Greek philosophy André Laks and Glenn Most have written, "Of all the early Greek philosophers," Pythagoras "without a doubt exerted the longest-lasting influence until the beginning of modern times."
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday May 12, @05:12AM (11 children)
One absolutely blatant distortion of reality introduced by western scholars is... "real numbers".
They are not real.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_number [wikipedia.org]
Ancient Greeks actually called them Πραγματικός αριθμός (pragmatikos arithmos), literally "practical numbers". They understood such numbers have nothing to do with reality, and serve only for computing and geometric deductions.
https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%A0%CF%81%CE%B1%CE%B3%CE%BC%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%B9%CE%BA%CF%8C%CF%82_%CE%B1%CF81%CE%B9%CE%B8%CE%BC%CF%8C%CF%82 [wikipedia.org]
And at schools, they still call them as such.
Note both links above is one Wikipedia entry only in different languages.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 12, @05:21AM (8 children)
Does this "absolutely blatant distortion of reality" actually cause any sort of distortion of reality at all? It doesn't mak any sense to complain of such things, if you have no actually distortion to point to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12, @06:14AM
Indeed, it makes you wonder which numbers shouldn't count.
OTOH, nice to see some love for "ancient Greek philosophers" here.
--
-Thomas Dolby, She Blinded Me With Science
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12, @07:09AM (4 children)
So far I have yet to see the numbers or mathematical operations that would generate the qualia of chocolate (or other qualia for that matter).
Thus while I do agree that current numbers and known math are useful for describing and predicting certain things in reality, there's more to reality than numbers and math.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Friday May 12, @10:36AM (3 children)
Indeed. Time is a great example, where the objective (clock) time is presented as being more "real" than the subjective time that we experience in our lives. One might very reasonably argue that subjective time is more fundamental, as we directly observe subjective time; and clock time is a derived quantity that is correlated with, but different to, subjective time.
Say I get interested in a book, look up a few minutes later and find the wall clock registers a couple of hours have passed. Which is correct? Which is more "real"? What does "real" mean in this case?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 12, @03:41PM (1 child)
Time is just what we use to help measure the rate of change of things.
When you see it that way there is no time travel paradox. There just is no past. It's just like time in a pacman game running in an emulator. If you pause the game "time stops" from your external perspective, if you start it, it continues. But from within the you wouldn't know that the game was paused at all. Also there's no past to travel to. You could store a snapshot of the pacman game state but even so there is no past to travel to from the perspective of the pacman game world. It only exists from your external perspective.
That said there's plenty of evidence that our universe is weird[1]. So I could be wrong about the time thing.
[1] There's the quantum stuff. And also the consciousness thing I experience - based on current theory consciousness does not need to exist at all - everything could work without anything experiencing consciousness - some stuff just could just behave as if they were conscious... But perhaps consciousness is a fundamental of this universe.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Friday May 12, @05:53PM
The reason there's no "past" in a Pacman game is because it's discarded. Many applications have unlimited un-do functions, subject only to memory constraints. What if the Universe actually has that and we just haven't found the right keystrokes yet? That would also be like the "many worlds" theory in which every tick of time forks the Universe, creating unlimited parallel universes and if you could somehow get to them you'd know what would have happened if you asked that girl out, or taken the bus last Tuesday, or turned right in the maze instead of left.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 15, @11:49AM
And you just stated why it really is more real in our lives. Subjective is subjective.
One might just as very reasonably argue that the Moon is made of green cheese.
The fact that you're asking answers the question.
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday May 12, @10:43AM (1 child)
So called "real numbers" are actually so unreal, far from reality, that the real computers cannot even represent them exactly, and there are provably plenty of them which are not computable at all.
Besides their limited practical purpose for crude approximate computations, calling such numbers "real" is a blatant scam about reality.
Many of them (like Pi number) actually contain infinite information, which is not possible in reality at all. https://github.com/philipl/pifs [github.com]
Therefore, I insist the western scholars enforced a deliberate lie about "real-ness" on many generations of western population.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 12, @12:57PM
So what? How does that "blatant scam" affect us?
Why we should care in the least about this deliberate lie of generations? What is the actual problem here?
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday May 12, @10:39AM
Real numbers are not real, but they are more real than imaginary numbers.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday May 12, @10:46AM
Liddell-Scott-Jones lists multiple ancient Greek (Pindar and Hesiod) usages of πρᾶγμα as denoting a concrete fact or a taken/done action as in "real": https://lsj.gr/wiki/πρᾶγμα [lsj.gr]
compiling...
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday May 12, @03:39PM (2 children)
A lot more mathematics is known now than in Pythagoreas' time. We use some of it to describe the universe. Why is mathematics so successful at this? The Mathematical universe hypothesis [wikipedia.org] says it's because the universe is actually made out of mathematics.
Or read the more informal What's the Universe Made Of? Math, Says Scientist [livescience.com]
Or look for the references at the end of the wikipedia article. It's a controversial, but not a priori absurd, philosophical theory.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 13, @12:28AM
Don't forget Wigner's famous essay [ed.ac.uk].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 15, @11:52AM