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- 1 year agoCosmos: A Personal Voyage Episode 7: The Backbone of Night 0 min 40 sec " The sky calls to us; if we do not destroy ourselves we will one day venture to the stars. " 37 min 45 sec " So a crisis in doctrine occurred when they discovered that the square root of two was irrational. That is: 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". " 38 min 10 sec " 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 the merchants and the artisans. " 40 min 35 sec " But why had science lost its way in the first place, what appeal could these teachings of Pythagoras and Plato have had for their contemporaries? They provided, I believe, an intellectually respectable justification for a corrupt social order. The mercantile tradition that had led to Ionian 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. http://spctv.feedbeat.com/spctv«http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4704681445702433281&hl=en&emb=1#
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