Pythagoras’ Epiphany

Pythagoras was a Greek philosopher who lived about a century before Athens’ golden age. Some time before 530 BC, he had an epiphany. He had been investigating vibrating strings, and found that when you cut the length of the string in half, the note it makes is an octave higher.

Sound is vibration. When one sound is vibrating twice as fast as another, it still sounds the same in some crucial way. The pitch is higher, or lower, but somehow we perceive it as having the same essential character. A C note, multiplied or divided by two as many times as you like, still sounds like a C.

Here are all eight C’s on the piano. They are different in pitch, but all have the same character. Eight Cs

Pythagoras also found that when you shorten the string to a third of its original length, it vibrates three times as fast. The note this creates is different in character from the C. Today it is called a perfect fifth. If you’re in the key of C (that is, if the full string sounds a C), this note will be a G.

This observation led him to what must have been a terrific epiphany — math, particularly number, is at the heart of all things. I sometimes envy those early Greek thinkers — what joy, to come across something basic for the first time!

But you know, everyone, everywhere, has lived in modern times. A thousand years after Pythagoras, Galileo was the first to find out that the Milky Way is made of stars. Can you imagine how he felt? And we are still on the cutting edge — civilization is in its infancy. Future generations will envy us our discoveries while smiling at their primitiveness. “A keyboard, how quaint!”

Pythagoras’ epiphany still has merit. Cosmologists have imagined many alternate universes, with different basic physical constants and laws, curved space, more dimensions — but it’s pretty tough to imagine a universe without number. I believe the integers — 1, 2, 3 and so on, are the most basic things we know about for sure.

Pythagoras actually founded a religion based on this insight. The inner circle were called the mathematikoi, and they lived a monastic life of study. The order had many rules, including a ban on eating beans. Perhaps they worked in close quarters. They also had a rule against picking something up when you dropped it. Cluttered, close quarters! But they found out a lot about math.

Next: Beauty is Truth