>>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?