The first thing I saw when I walked into the temporary exhibition Ancient Greeks: Science and Wisdom at London’s Science Museum was a bas relief from a sarcophagus depicting the nine muses flanked by the gods Apollo and Athena. Today we usually associate the muses with the arts, not the sciences — but to the ancient Greeks science and art were inextricably linked, and the muse Urania was credited with inventing astronomy. Seeing both the god of the arts and the goddess of wisdom among the muses may surprise a modern visitor, but it was an obvious choice to the ancient Greeks.
One theme running through the exhibition is indeed the deep connection between ancient scientific practice and aesthetics. From human bodies to musical instruments like the aulos flute or the monochord to the movements of celestial bodies, the Greeks sought to frame the gifts of the muses in mathematical terms, or more precisely in terms of simple ratios — “everything is number”, as Pythagoras and his followers put it. But this conviction went both ways. Philosophers described the world using numbers and artists created sculptures with carefully calculated proportions.
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