Material world Quote by John D. Barrow

““Plato argued that the material world of visible things was but a shadow of the true reality of eternal forms. He proceeds to explain the nether world of eternal blueprints most completely in the case of the elements of matter: earth, air, fire, and water. These he represents by geometrical solids: the earth by a cube, water by an icosahedron, air by an octahedron, and fire by a tetrahedron. His position is that ultimately the elements are just these solid geometrical shapes not simply that they possess geometrical shapes as one of their properties. The transmutation of elements one into the other is then explained by the merger and dissolution of triangles. This strictly mathematical description characterizes Plato's discussion of many other physical problems, For him, mathematics is a pointer to the ultimate reality of the world of forms that overshadows the visible world of sense data. The better we can grasp it, the closer we can come to true knowledge. Thus, for Plato, mathematics is more fundamental, truer, closer to the eternal forms of which the visible world is an imperfect reflection, than the objects of physical science. Because the world is mathematical at its deepest level, all visible phenomena will have mathematical aspects and be describable by mathematics to a greater or lesser extent, determined by their closeness to their underlying forms.””

— John D. Barrow