Science & Perception
The Observer Chronicles - Dialogue I
Description:... The history of science in the West can be traced back almost 2500 years, to a time when science, religion, and the arts all fell under a single discipline, the area of study known as Natural Philosophy, or Philosophia Naturalis.
The philosophers of this time period, individuals such as Pythagoras, Plato, and Euclid, literally set the stage for much of modern science, developing tools that are still used to this day. Despite the large swaths of time that have managed to pass, instruments such as number and geometry have remained essentially unchanged, as evidenced by the continued publication (and translation) of texts such as Euclid’s Elements.
While many of the tools used by modern science can be traced back to the Platonic and Neoplatonic schools of thought, the current scientific world view is more closely aligned with an altogether different school of thinking. Philosophers such as Democritus posited that the objects found within the physical world were actually composed of small, discrete parts — a world view still held by most of the modern world to this day.
Few people stop to consider that this perspective, the atomistic view of the world, is in direct contradiction to the principles espoused by Pythagoras and Plato. This book provides a modern interpretation for the Platonic model of the Universe by making use of both dialogue and diagrams — the same techniques employed by Plato and Euclid more than 2000 years ago to explain their ideas.
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