Part 3/8:
The breakthrough occurred in southern Italy when Pythagoras and other Greek philosophers made the metaphysical claim that the cosmos consists of numbers. According to legend, this audacious speculation originated from musicians' discoveries regarding the qualities of the sound produced by their instruments. In the case of a Greek lyre, what truly mattered were the proportions of the string lengths. If these proportions were correct, the result was music; if inaccurate, it amounted to mere noise.