The unexplained
High atop the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, stands one of the most magnificent and most aesthetically pleasing structures in the world,
the Parthenon.
This 23,000-square-foot temple was constructed
using 100,000 tons of radiant white marble.
The exterior of the Parthenon
was lined with 46 colossal columns,
which strikingly appear to be laid out
in the shape of an exact rectangle,
and what's more astonishing is that the more
than 13,000 stone blocks used to assemble the Parthenon
were precisely fitted together without the use of mortar,
which begs the question, how were the ancient Greeks
able to build something that looks so perfect?
The Parthenon is an amazingly beautiful structure.
The design, the spacing of each stone is so perfect
that it inspires just to look at.
The proportions are so exact for a large building.
It is an amazing thing, and it lifts the spirit upward.
Built beginning in 447 B.C. n
the orders of the famed statesman and general Pericles,
the Parthenon celebrates the Athenians' victory
over Persian invaders,
who had tried to conquer the city for 50 years.
Athens during the time of the building of the Parthenon
is an incredible cosmopolitan, vibrant city.
It's producing art, literature, sculpture, architecture.
It's the Manhattan of the 5th century B.C.,
and I think if you're an Athenian citizen walking,
doing your everyday work
and then you see the Acropolis in the center of the city,
this incredible shining hill, and then you see the Parthenon,
the gleaming marble, the biggest and most beautiful Greek temple that existed at least in mainland
Greece at this point, you'd be filled with a sense of wonder.
Although most of the interior of the Parthenon has decayed
due to the ravages of time,
the rectangular symmetry of its exterior
looks flawless to this day, but strangely for a temple
that was clearly built with perfection in mind,
what makes the Parthenon so fascinating
is actually its imperfections.
Not only were the Greeks masters of geometry,
they were also masters of optical illusions.
They knew the fact that your eye plays tricks on you.
Therefore, they built the Parthenon slightly incorrectly,
quote, unquote, to compensate for this
so that the net results is perfection.
The Parthenon is a rectangle,
but there are no right angles in the entire building.
Everything is slightly off.
The columns look straight from below,
but they are slightly tilted toward each other,
so if you were standing at the base of the Parthenon
and if the columns didn't stop after a certain number of feet
but they kept on going all the way up into the sky,
you would see the columns meeting
if they were long enough to actually meet.
This is a very curious thing that the builders did.
It turns out that the Parthenon does not have straight
parallel lines at all.
The columns are not vertically cylindrical at all.
They bulge by about an inch at the center of the cylinder,
so for example, the human brain looking at a column
will actually think that the waist is pinched.
Your eye thinks that the center of the cylinder is shrunk.
To compensate for that,
the columns of the Parthenon bulge.
There's no way this could've been an accident.
But is that all the Greeks were trying to achieve,
an optical illusion,
or could they have had another purpose in mind
when they built the Parthenon?
Why do we create monuments like the Parthenon?
And the answer is, we want to try and imitate the divine.
The divine was seen as perfection.
The gods are seen as perfection, and so sacred geometry
has been incorporated into the Parthenon in the belief
that it was now endowed with some kind of divine power,
and this was done very specifically to connect
the mundane with the divine,
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