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How Pythagoras turned math into a tool for understanding reality

The ‘music of the spheres’ was born from the effort to use numbers to explain the universe

By Tom Siegfried, Contributing Correspondent, May 9, 2023 at 7:00 am

The Pythagoreans believed that the motions of the heavenly bodies, with just the right ratios of their distances from a central fire, made pleasant music — a concept that evolved into the “music of the spheres.” NASA, ESA, the GOODS Team, and M. Giavalisco (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)/T. Tibbitts

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.

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