HOW THE WORLD WE SEE BECAME GEOMETRIC

HOW THE WORLD WE SEE BECAME GEOMETRIC, MAYBE


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 30, 2019

Amir Alexander, a historian, author, and academic, studies the interconnections between mathematics and its cultural setting. Born in Rehovot, Israel in 1963, he grew up in Jerusalem where his father was a professor of physics at Hebrew University and his mother was an economist. Amir obtained a B.S. from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in mathematics and history, and a Ph.D. in history of science from Stanford University.

He writes in PROOF: How the World Became Geometric (2019) that on a cloudy day in 1413, Flippo Brunelleschi, an architect and engineer, stood at the entrance to the Cathedral of Florence and proved that the world and everything in it was governed by Euclid geometry. Anyone who has taken high school geometry may remember how comforting its logical tenets were.

Amir, surveying the intervening 600 years, offers an overview of our societies, politics, and ideals, and how they have been shaped by a geometric view of provable universal truths. He insists that the Terraces of Versailles to the broad avenues of Washington, DC to the boulevards of New Delhi and Manila, display the geometry that began with Euclid (c. 300 BC); that this mindset has been carved into the landscape of the modern world by kings, empire builders, and revolutionaries in a rush to cast their sense of things in something approaching universal order. I think we do the same when we attempt to make sense of our own world.

It doesn’t mean Amir Alexander is right but he does fly an interesting proposition, as do these three thinking individuals.

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The comments that follow were received after publication of SCIENTISTS & GOD in the INFORMATION AGE.

We read, we think, and then we do, processing information in light of our experience and natural curiosity.  This produces a kind of symmetry that reflects the intellectual domain that might be judged geometric.

Comment One

Bravo! This composition is the verbal equivalent of Gershwin's musical Rhapsody in Blue, mixing classical style with jazz and the blues. In this case, you mix science, religion, philosophy, psychology and the arts. It's a symphony that elicits sympathy for the plight of man, empathy for his pathetic mistakes and sins, pathos for his suffering and elation for his redemption through the atonement of Christ.


Comment Two

I don’t' remember the name off-hand, but some English theologian said something like 'when you see a watch, you know there exists a watchmaker.' A -- or the -- scientific explanation is the long period over which evolution has unfolded.

But even so, I somehow have a sense of doubt about evolution being the entire, 100 percent explanation. In my spare moments I am looking now at protein chemistry and even though it’s folding to form distinct parts of an organism are not entirely understood, it looks like a reasonable assumption that these processes are influenced by immediate material environments.

But still, the assembling of 20 proteins, their organization in DNAs that form both body and mind ..., the assembly of other chemical components to make it all work ... I have difficulty setting aside the notion that the big bang was a bit more than photons and their offspring or natural companions. End then we have neuroscientists like Gazzaniga writing about the spiritual brain and the ethical brain. And where does conscience enter the picture, to say nothing of consciousness?

What the deuce do we know anyway? With our minds that need two distinct models - the particle model and the wave model - supplementing one another to give us a grasp of the properties of electromagnetic radiation.

As for me, instead of praying to a watchmaker, I simply say: "I don't know." Human understanding expands asymptotically, i.o.w. it will not ever arrive at a Theory of Everything. Like it or lump it.


Comment Three

When I was still teaching, I had a book that named about 2,000 gods and the culture in which they existed. Like Carl Sagan I have no problem with people believing in a god. The issue becomes when some of the people who believe in a certain god want to convince others. I have a half-brother like that who went to China to try and convert the Chinese. 

Then there are Muslims who want to kill all nonbelievers. Or like the Catholics and the Protestants killing each other in the 16th and 17th century in Europe. A long time ago I was reading a book about Zen, and some person asked a Zen teacher what books to read and was told not to read any just listen to the Zen master. 

I always wonder what the Jesus that is worshiped every Sunday would think about the Catholic and Protestant churches. In my 80 years I have read many books on religion. When the Buddha finally found what he was looking for, the first thing he did was try share his insight with others and establish another religion. The only thing I have found through all these years is that no one knows the answer including all the people mentioned in your piece below because a belief is just that and they vary with the culture and the individual.


FINAL WORD

 Yuval Noah Harari, the Jewish scholar, got us thinking with SAPIENS and HOMO DEUS, which I reviewed in this blog (www.peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com), while wondering if readers found some of his findings as bizarre as I did. 

Curiously, when I write about science and religion the reaction is always most revealing. Is it because the emphasis is on the “why” and not the “what” of the subject?

Pascal on writing about love touched on two two types of mind: the geometrical and the intuitive.  By geometrical, Pascal means the mind when it works with exact definitions and abstractions in science or mathematics; by intuitive, the mind when it works with ideas and perceptions.  A right angle triangle is a definite idea; poetry, love, religion or good government is not definable.  Everyone has their own view.

This lack of a precise definition is not due to a lack of correct information.  It comes from the very nature of the subject.  Geometrical matters are handled without any argument over interconnections.  In matters of intuition, the details to take in are so numerous to be chancy.  And good minds arrive  at all sorts of different conclusions.   

It is from this incapacity that the belief that science and mathematics is the only form of truth has come into prominence.  Yet, truths of a different order are attainable by intuition even without consensus.

Man as scientist has come to know a great deal, but as a human being the mind and heart reach deeper than the power of reason, alone.

The "two minds" that Pascal refers to do not describe two species of individuals.  They are two directions that the human mind can take: geometric as a scientist or engineer, or intuitive as a creative writer or intuitive problem solver.  Indeed, a supple mind can think like Euclid on one occasion and like Walt Whitman on another.  We see evidence of both in the brief comments above.