The Quintessence Lecture Series

Why Quintessence?

The Northumberland Learning Connection aims to offer a multidisciplinary lecture program, called "The Quintessence Lecture Series" each year. Why Quintessence?

The word quintessence is frequently used colloquially to refer to the most typical essential characteristic of something. But where does the word come from? "Quint" suggests five. Why? Please read on.

The ancient Pythagoreans

To the ancient Greeks, the world was made up of four elements: earth, water, air, fire. The Pythagoreans added a fifth. This "fifth essence" (or 'Quintessence') was sometimes called the ether. More subtle and pure than fire it was thought to possess an orbicular motion and flew upwards at creation and formed the basis of the stars -- hence the word stands for the essential principles or the most subtle extract of a body that can be procured. In alchemy the term came to be used synonymously with 'elixir'. In short it was part of the stars and part of us -- connecting us all together in some subtle underlying way.

Modern science and the puzzle of accelerating expansion

Under modern theories of relativity, the "Big Bang" start of the universe, Guth's "inflationary theory" and so on, it is a given that the universe is expanding. It was always assumed that the expansion (caused by the initial Big Bang) was gradually slowing down under the gravitational force of the universe's mass pulling on itself and the big question used to be: would the expansion eventually stop and reverse into a Big Crunch or would the expansion continue forever but always slower and slower. In the first case the universe was called "closed" and in the second case "open". Imagine the surprise then when during the 1990s it was suddenly discovered that the universe's expansion was accelerating.

It was a bit like hitting the brake and finding the car begins to speed up. What's going on? The current hypothesis is that there is a form of "dark energy" pervading the universe which produces this outward force. In 1998 this dark energy was given the name of Quintessence.

Connectedness

So Quintessence links us both back to the ancient Pythagoreans and forward to the most recent cutting-edge scientific hypotheses. An appreciation of connectedness is fundamental to the NLC's Mission Statement.

"Woe be to him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest....All science is one: language, literature and history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather they all form a single system." Jules Michelet (19th C French historian)

"A wonderful harmony arises from joining together the seemingly unconnected."
Heraclitus (c.500 B.C)

The Five Platonic Solids

The ancient Greeks realized that there were only five "solids' that could be constructed geometrically using identical faces. The simplest is the tetrahedron (having four triangles as faces). The second is the octahedron (having eight triangles as faces). The third is the icosohedron (having twenty triangles as faces). The fourth (and most well known to each of us) is the cube (having six squares as faces). The fifth (and last) is the dodecaherdon (having twelve pentagons as faces). It can be shown mathematically that there are no more in this series of "Platonic solids".

The Greeks used these five Platonic solids to symbolize the five 'elements': the tetrahedron for fire, the octahedron for air, the icosahedron for water, the cube for earth, and the dodecahedron for quintessence.

The DODECAHEDRON symbol is at the top of this page. Now you understand its connectedness.