Science Historian Deciphers Plato's Code 402
Reader eldavojohn tips the news of a researcher in the UK, Jay Kennedy, who has uncovered a hidden code in the writings of Plato. From the University of Manchester press release: "[Dr. Kennedy said] 'I have shown rigorously that the books do contain codes and symbols and that unraveling them reveals the hidden philosophy of Plato. This is a true discovery, not simply reinterpretation.' ... The hidden codes show that Plato anticipated the Scientific Revolution 2,000 years before Isaac Newton, discovering its most important idea — the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. ... Plato did not design his secret patterns purely for pleasure — it was for his own safety. Plato's ideas were a dangerous threat to Greek religion. He said that mathematical laws and not the gods controlled the universe. Plato's own teacher [Socrates] had been executed for heresy. Secrecy was normal in ancient times, especially for esoteric and religious knowledge, but for Plato it was a matter of life and death." Here is the paper (PDF), which was published in the journal Apeiron: A Journal of Ancient Philosophy and Science.
Completely misses the "News for Nerds" bit (Score:5, Interesting)
The summary and press release it links to both completely miss the part where this is "News for Nerds". This paper is apparently the first time Plato's writings have been stichometrically [wikipedia.org] analyzed by computer. Somehow, people have managed to miss him while analyzing other works. Apparently, it was commonplace back then to arrange parts of your work according various mathematical structures, though honestly I'm not sure how you get from that to this press release; I'll have to finish the paper to see if it is reasonable.
Seriously though, RTFP. It's not written very densely at all.
Re:Socrates, not Aristotle (Score:4, Interesting)
I came here to make the same correction. What lowbrow editor posted this summary with such an ass-backwards statement in it?
What is worse is that the majority of the submission is copy and paste. All except the "[Aristotle]" inclusion.
So the ONE THING that was added (apart from a couple of links in sentences circumfixing the quote) is wrong.
Re:Socrates, not Aristotle (Score:4, Interesting)
Socrates was "executed" for several crimes -- including heresy.
An argument can be made that Socrates caused himself to be sentenced to death by pissing off his jury -- essentially insulting them by saying his punishment should be to have himself, wife and kids should be taken care of for the rest of their lives. After pissing them off, his friends basically said "NONONO! He'll pay a fine! We'll cover it!" The prosecution offered death. The "jury" picked death.
Further, can it REALLY be called an "execution"? The Athenians' bent over backwards to let him escape. He refused. When the day came, he happily drank the poison -- even offering a bit to gods before drinking. I'd say it was more of voluntary martyrdom...
Re:Socrates, not Aristotle (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Completely misses the "News for Nerds" bit (Score:3, Interesting)
Code or die (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the Renaissance was when a sea change in the attitude towards learning began to take hold. Before that, was pretty routine for leaders, especially those whose power rested on religious beliefs, to regard much of education, exploration, and discovery as a waste of time, if not outright subversion. Guilds and other clubs of that sort treated knowledge as proprietary secrets and weren't above murder to preserve those secrets.
So, yes, Plato would have had to hide certain things, or leave them unsaid. The execution of Socrates was certainly a powerful example and motivation.
Why the steganography, though? Why not write it down plainly, and hide the manuscript?
Re:Good article (Score:4, Interesting)
Our brains are the same size and of the same stuff as humans 5000 years ago, so it goes to follow that our philosophical and social habits haven't changed at all. But now, there are 6 billion of us.
Which goes to show, we're really no different from any other living organism. Despite all of the posturing by society to make it sound as if we're somehow more "civilized" now than ever before, the only thing we've actually succeeded in doing is scale up our old behaviors.
Plato in "The Mask of Apollo" (Score:5, Interesting)
Mary Renault's excellent historical novel The Mask of Apollo [wikipedia.org] is a masterful portrait of -- among other things -- Plato and his world. Engaging, informative, and moving: highly recommended.
We commonly think of Plato as a philosopher, and philosophers as unworldly; but Renault reminds us that Plato was also a soldier, a statesman, a man who repeatedly put his life on the line, for his friends and for his ideals, in the face of deadly opposition.
Re:Socrates, not Aristotle (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Riiiiight (Score:1, Interesting)
This, and your addendum below, show that Kennedy's paper needs tables of data and a clearer explanation of methods. K claims on pp. 9 and 10 that these numbers come out evenly, with only a 1%-2% error; either he's just wrong, or he's employed some other techniques to determine line length that what he reveals in this paper. His footnote 35, "My work in progress will discuss the principles determining the absolute lengths of the dialogues," points to the possibility of the latter, but this paper shouldn't have passed peer review with the lack of clarity it possesses because of his reluctance to explain his work other than to promise forthcoming materials. Peer review should have involved checking the calculations according to the methods provided in the article—what the parent and sibling post here on Slashdot carried out in an evening—and recommended against publishing until the methodology and data were transparent.
This doesn't necessarily invalidate K's theories about the structures Plato might have used for organizing his text, but it is too sloppy to buy into as it's written. Has anyone run the calculations to see whether the Golden Ratio occurs where K claims that it does? That would be a good touchstone for how well (either in terms of clarity or honesty) K is representing his methodology.
Re:Socrates, not Aristotle (Score:3, Interesting)
It wasn't quite that reasonable, since there had been granted an amnesty for the crimes Socrates were really accused of. Therefore the charge was the more nebulous "corrupting the youth" rather than "getting cozy with Critias" - which he probably was guilty of.
In his defense, he boasted that he had ignored orders to round up the tyrant's political enemies - which may be noble in itself, possibly, unless it was just to avoid getting his hands dirty - but the fact that Critias and the tyrants were comfortable making such a demand of him, and let him alone when he refused, says something about his relationship to them.
Re:Riiiiight (Score:2, Interesting)
Your version uses rigid 35-character lines, even when that breaks a word at a place no Greek would have (e.g. your very first line chops off a sigma from ameletêtos and puts it on the next line; a scribe would have broken at a syllabic division, surely). If the 35-character length is taken as a maximum for a line, then allowing for this will make some lines shorter than 35 characters and thus bring down the counts. Of course, you could adjust so as to get an overall average of 35. Either way, you'd need to do a lot of manual work to insert plausible breaks. I have no idea whether this would bring things more into line with Kennedy's data or whether Kennedy is allowing for it as well. It would be useful to have the details of Kennedy's algorithm.