[Pythagoras's Trousers God, Physics, and the Gender War] [Author: Wertheim, Margaret] [January, 1997]

So Pythagoras believed that the numbers were literally gods and that when we found mathematical relationships inherent in the world around us, that what we were discovering was as it were the true reality behind the material phenomenon.

When I set out to write my book, I had no intention of writing about religion. I wanted to write a book about the cultural history of physics because I wanted to explain physics to my friends.

And I thought about this and I thought, well what's the problem here? And my view of long thought, I came to the conclusion that the problem with most books about physics is that they tell you the answers and they focus on the answers but they don't explain the questions and why the questions matter.

And what was interesting to me was I had been a physics student and we had got no grounding in the history of science. In our degrees. Then I thought, what if I'm going to explain the cultural history of my physics, my friends, I'd better find out a bit about the cultural history of myself.

So the reason this is what I proposed in my book, Pythagoras' Trollers, is because what happened was that Platonism or Pythagoreanism was crystallized.