The Parthenon of ancient Athens is considered to be a cultural icon of Western civilisation. Recently it has revealed optical principles that are now transforming our basic understanding of modern science, bringing about a new Renaissance.
In 1687 a Turkish military commander used the Parthenon to store gunpowder during a military engagement against a Venetian cannon bombardment. One Venetian shot exploded the gunpowder leaving the Parthenon in a state of ruin. The present restoration of the Parthenon used computer technology to measure where the various parts of the original structure fitted into place. From that process an important find was made. The Parthenon had been very carefully constructed to conform to lost optical engineering principles.
While records of much of ancient Greek science have been destroyed as pagan heresy we do know that there once existed optical engineering principles for a spiritual reality. Plato recorded that engineers who did not understand such optical principles were barbarians who were unfit to call themselves philosophers.
In her online book, A Fuller Explanation, Professor Amy Edmondson, Novartis Chair at Harvard University, wrote about Plato’s optical discoveries. She admonished Buckminster Fuller for his enthusiastic delight in new found truths but forgave him for appearing to take the credit for Plato’s engineering principles relevant to spiritual optics. We can assume that these principles relate to the optical secrets hidden in the Parthenon. The term ‘spiritual reality’ can now be equated with holographic reality, which is known to be associated with the functioning of liquid crystal fractal logic. That logic is relevant to Buckminster Fuller’s theory of synergetics, a spiritual life-force energy that acts in defiance of the logic that upholds modern mechanistic science.
During the 5th Century AD such life-force speculation challenged the power of the Christian hierarchy. Pope Cyril of Alexandria appears to have excited followers of Christianity to riot and burn scrolls belonging to the Agora, or Great Library of Alexandria. The Custodian of the Library, the famous mathematician, Hypatia, was murdered by the rioting mob. The 2009 Hollywood film, Agora, records the events leading up to her death in 415. History records that Saint Augustine, at that time, wrote that Hypatia’s mathematics belonged to the work of the devil.
Recently the NASA High Energy Astrophysics library has published papers explaining that the Classical Greek World-view was constructed upon the geometry of fractal logic. Modern science readily accepts that fractal logic extends to infinity but remains governed by the second law of thermodynamics. Einstein classified the second law as the premier law of all of science. As this law, also known as the universal heat death law, condemns all life to eventual extinction, any infinite fractal logic life-science becomes inconceivable. Augustine’s classification of Hypatia’s life-science as the work of the devil can be now seen to have seriously contaminated modern science, a contamination of great concern to Buckminster Fuller. Following NASA’s fractal logic publications it would seem reasonable to be able to demonstrate errors in the 20th Century popular evaluation of Augustinian philosophy.
Encyclopaedia Britannica lists Augustine’s mind as the crucible which most completely fused the Platonic tradition of Greek philosophy with the religion of the New Testament, influencing both Catholic and Protestant beliefs today. Fuller’s synergetic life form mathematics, derived from Plato’s spiritual optics, is now the basis of a new medical chemistry developed by three 1996 Nobel Laureates in chemistry. If Hypatia’s mathematics was tied to Plato’s fractal life-science logic, then Western scientific culture would appear to be in a state of spiritual confusion. In his book, Beyond Socrates, the noted Cambridge University philosopher of Greek thinking, F M Cornford. included Plato as one of the greatest fathers of the Christian Church, which is simply an impossible concept if Plato’s work is considered to be the work of the Devil.
The second law of thermodynamics completely governs every aspect of mainstream Western technological culture. While mainstream science readily accepts that the fundamental property of fractal logic is that it extends to infinity, this fact can not possibly be comprehended within Einstein’s 20th Century world-view, in which all life is sentenced to heat death extinction. Now we can see the significance of the title of Fuller’s book, Utopia or Oblivion.
This book echoed the thrust of the famous 1959 Rede Lecture, delivered by the molecular biologist C P Snow, who warned that unless modern science reunited with the Classical Greek life-science ethos, civilisation as we know it must be destroyed. The Parthenon’s lost optical secrets can be seen to be a rather important discovery.
Copyright © Robert Pope 2010
