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Join date: 16. Nov. 2022

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Within a week of my cosmic background radiation talk,I sent a memo to Professor Maro asking her to coffee.She suggested the Grotto,a small cafe that stood across from the railroad tracks running along the Narrows,the body of water separating Tacoma from the Olympic Peninsula.For decades the restaurant had been the only food establishment in the area,but in the previous year an International House of Pancakes had emerged that blocked the view and left the Grotto in the shadows every evening.The sky was a solid gray cloud cover that made the sea white.The tide was out,the beach a stretch of brown sand.A small boat with an outboard motor was stranded on land,tilted to one side.Bright green seaweed,flattened in bunches,waited for the water to return.Dolores had fastened her long gray hair with a bright red rubber band and let the ponytail fall down to her waist.The older waitress plunked down two mugs thick enough to bounce on concrete.She poured our coffee from an overcooked glass pot and said she would keep returning for as long as we wanted more.I began by apologizing.But as to what I was apologizing for,I wasn’t entirely clear.That was my first question for her.What had I said that was so objectionable?Before she could answer,I added that whatever it was,it was indeed done out of confusion,not cunning.You suffer from unconscious intellectual arrogance,she said.In your quest for the true cosmogony,you see no need to consult works of philosophy or poetry.But that’s why I’m here,I said.I chose Puget Sound because interdisciplinary research is encouraged.Is that so?she asked.It was the main topic at my interview.With President Phibbs.Ohhh!Then I was wrong about you.She blinked her eyes,smiling.She was laughing at me.Not just a pretty face.Her mind centered on the current of thought these ancients offered and she explored their ideas by roving through poems and treatises without needing to consult the texts as she unleashed a stream of sparkling insights into Plato or Homer or Aristotle.I took endless notes.As she reveled in the power of these ancient ideas,I marveled over how different I felt in this ancient Greek mind.Our meetings at the Grotto became a regular feature of my new life.At the end of each session,I staggered home and relayed the highlights of what I was learning to Denise.I found myself swimming in a new world.His intuitions brought to life a mood,or a consciousness,or maybe just a feeling that was different from what I experienced in my study of contemporary mathematical cosmology.Dolores quoted Aristotle’s summation of Pythagoras’s central insight as,he harmonia ton sphairon,the music of the spheres.The instant I heard the phrase,my mind flared.Pythagoras and his colleagues,she explained,had discovered a fundamental relationship between mathematics and the order of the universe,an eerie connection between the inner experience of listening to plucked strings and the mathematical ratios of the string lengths out there in the physical world.Even before a musician would play,a mathematician could examine the lute and say something accurate about what the sound would feel like to a listener.If the ratios of the lengths of the frets were rational numbers,a feeling of harmony resulted.If the ratios were not,an experience of dissonance emerged.For these ancient minds,mathematics bridged the outer order of the universe with the inner qualities of mind and soul.Overjoyed with his unexpected and even bizarre discovery,Pythagoras leapt to the conviction that the cosmos created music as harmonious as the Greek lyre.Everything in the universe worked together to give birth to song,a song utterable in the symbolic form of mathematics.As I reflected on her words,I came to understand an experience I had had years before.The freshmen of Bellarmine Prep were off to see the Pacific Science Center in Seattle.We parked at the base of the Space Needle.Freed at last,we stumbled off the bus,horsing around and cracking jokes.Though I wanted to join in,I held back.It happened the instant we reached the white steps of the grand entrance to the center.The architects had constructed half a dozen massive white buildings that enclosed a spacious network of streams.Knowing that all the knowledge of the universe was just beyond those white walls ignited a thrill within me.We marched single file on a suspended walkway.Beneath us water gushed skyward from a monumental libation vessel.The path led to the group of towers in the center of the plaza,and I wandered inside one of these.When I stared up,I saw the delicate lattice work at the top of the tower become part of the blue sky.It had touched something in a wordless way when I was child,but now,under the tutelage of Dolores Maro,I think I understood.The architects had created a temple to experience the order in the universe.The blue sky was not a vast amorphous thing,as I had thought.The Pacific Science Center was their way for contemplating this sacred geometric structure of the universe.Perhaps that is what Pythagoras was referring to.I liked thinking that my work was rooted in an ancient lineage.But were his insights of any value for contemporary scientists?Was there any connection between his early cosmological speculations and our current work of mapping the universe?