What do Fifth Century B.C. Pythagoreans have in common with modern state-of-the-art cosmologists & physicists? In a word – strings! For the ancient Greek Pythagoreans, it was the lyre string; modern scientists postulate infinitesimally small strings as the ultimate building blocks of the universe.
The Greeks found that the tone of a plucked lyre string corresponded to its length. Changing the length of the vibrating string changed the tone in a precise way; double the length and the tone goes down by a full octave; reduce the length by two-thirds, the note changes by a fifth. The laws of music and harmonics are discovered and reduced to mathematics. The Pythagoreans believe everything is based on music and math.
Modern scientists now feel that they have the theory-of-everything, based on incredibly small strings. These vibrating strings are the fundamental unit of all matter and energy. When a string vibrates in a certain way, electron results; change the vibration of this same string and another particle appears – the electron changes into a neutrino. As with the plucked lyre, it is the string that is fundamental; the tone (in the musical example) or the subatomic particle arises from the way that the string is vibrating.