Pythagoras

I had my first class in Philosophy last week and it was rather enriching. I learnt that the word "philosophy” means the love of wisdom. Prof Wayne shed some light on the topic of Philosophy; a subject that has eluded me all these years. Prof Wayne also told us more about himself as well. I was reading the assigned reading for the week and I felt somewhat inspired and amazed by what the ancient philosophers said. In the reading, I gained some insight about Pre-Socratics, Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes and Pythagoras.

Thales came up with a very interesting theory that caught my attention. The theory revolves around water, and he believed that our earth rests on water. He also believed the "quakes" that the earth experiences are a result of the water movement, which I thought was intriguing. In my heart I was thinking, “How could someone conceive such a revolutionary concept at that point of time when there was little or practically no science at all?” Although we now know that the theory holds no truth, we cannot deny that his idea probably served as a precursor to our plate tectonic theories today. We know that modern day "quakes" are due to plate movements and the plates can be said to rest on magma, somewhat similar to the “water” that Thales mentioned. Hence, in that sense, his theory did hold some water (pun intended).

I had learned the Pythagoras theorem before and have been using it since algebra came into my life. I use the theorem for most of my math classes, but it never occurred to me that the Pythagoras theorem was found by Pythagoras himself! I had always thought that someone much later on discovered it and named it after him. Anyway, it is really inspiring how he managed to come up with that given the limited resources and technology of the ancient times. 10 is the very nature of number as all Greeks and barbarians alike count up to 10 and then revert again to the unit and that the power of number 10 that lies in the number 4 are really interesting ideas. 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10, if 1 exceeds the tetrad (number 4), 1 will exceed 10 too. I would have never have thought of something like that. So he said that 1 will make up the number 10 and the power of 10 lies in 4. It is mind baffling and amazing, how these ancient thinkers could come up with such brilliant theories that were way beyond their time.

All these make me wonder what I could have come up with, had I lived in those days. In mean time, I will continue to mull over those theories. If philosophy means the love of wisdom, I couldn’t agree more. I love feeling wiser with all these newfound knowledge.