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Wellsprings
cosmology

The Harmony of the Spheres

ἁρμονία τῶν σφαιρῶν

The planets sing — but we have heard it since birth, and so, like the smith beside his hammer, we no longer hear it at all.

The Pythagoreans noticed that musical intervals correspond to simple whole-number ratios of string lengths, and concluded that the same ratios must govern the spacing and speed of the heavenly bodies. If number rules both the lyre and the cosmos, then the planets, sweeping through the heavens, must produce tones — a vast, perpetual chord. We do not hear this music, they said, only because it has sounded ceaselessly since our birth. Plato dressed the doctrine in myth, seating a Siren on each whirling sphere, while Aristotle reported the idea respectfully and then rejected it as physically impossible.

Where this idea shows up

7 Greek sources·1 Jewish-canon citation

Where to read it