Dissenting voices in ancient Greece rebelled against the favored myth that Chaos was the original state of being: dark, formless, heartless — a gaping void. In the 6th Century B.C., one such small Greek circle adopted a very different concept: that while the Universe may be extremely complex, it is still intensely beautiful and orderly. Pythagoras coined the term Cosmos to express this idea, convinced by his geometrical investigations that hidden patterns of mathematical order not only do exist, but can be proven to exist.
Both the beauty of ancient Greek art and architecture, and the steady accumulation of mathematical knowledge, century after century, by Pythagorean mathematicians, were inspired by this insight. But as is common with inspiring ideas, the Pythagoreans over-admired it, hoping that the physical Universe was governed by the beauty of perfect geometric forms, such as the circle.
This hope for cosmic perfection got in the way of solving the mathematical problems caused by the non-geocentric model of our solar system, originally proposed by Pythagoras, for nearly two thousand years. It was Kepler who eventually successfully modified Copernican ideas by matching the data collected about the planets’ wanderings to “imperfect” ellipses, rather than to the “perfect” circular orbits the Pythagorean Copernicus was still hoping for.
Imperfect Circles are a reminder that our search for beauty often obscures our related search for truth, that it is probably an unfounded fear that truth will not be beautiful, and that that fear is probably due to our emotional attachment to beautiful figments of our imaginations that were produced in our pursuit of truth, but that our minds unconsciously know cannot be true.
We have not quite crawled out of Plato’s cave yet — we are still easily swayed by the shadows on its walls. But we are making progress, shedding mystical holdover ideas, and pursuing the inherent patterns in reality.
Plato called them Eternal Ideas. We call them concepts.
He imagined a world of perfection, of almost personalized Eternal Ideas, compared to which our world is just an imperfect copy. And that got in his way. But he was definitely onto something with his conclusion that getting your first principles straight would make everything else fall into place.