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The Fifth Hammer - Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World (Hardcover)
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The Fifth Hammer - Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World (Hardcover)
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How the ordering of the sensible world continues to suggest a
reality that no notes or letters can fully transcribe. An ancient
tradition holds that Pythagoras discovered the secrets of harmony
within a forge when he came across five men hammering with five
hammers, producing a wondrous sound. Four of the five hammers stood
in a marvelous set of proportions, harmonizing; but there was also
a fifth hammer. Pythagoras saw and heard it, but he could not
measure it; nor could he understand its discordant sound.
Pythagoras therefore discarded it. What was this hammer, such that
Pythagoras chose so decidedly to reject it? Since antiquity,
"harmony" has been a name for more than a theory of musical sounds;
it has offered a paradigm for the scientific understanding of the
natural world. Nature, through harmony, has been transcribed in the
ideal signs of mathematics. But, time and again, the transcription
has run up against one fundamental limit: something in nature
resists being written down, transcribed in a stable set of ideal
elements. A fifth hammer, obstinately, continues to sound. In eight
chapters, linked together as are the tones of a single scale, The
Fifth Hammer explores the sounds and echoes of that troubling
percussion as they make themselves felt on the most varied of
attempts to understand and represent the natural world. From music
to metaphysics, aesthetics to astronomy, and from Plato and
Boethius to Kepler, Leibniz, and Kant, this book explores the ways
in which the ordering of the sensible world has continued to
suggest a reality that no notes or letters can fully transcribe.
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