Kind: captions
Language: en
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you're watching a Nova Video
podcast the Parthenon would be the
largest building in the world
constructed entirely of marble and in
tracing the path of that marble lies the
first clue as to how it was
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built before the Parthenon marble had
been imported from quaries on islands in
the aan
sea on one of those islands noxos
archaeologists discover a small
temple on the beautiful island of naxus
we see this Temple which is one of the
early archaic Greek temples Made of
Stone the Temple of demer was
constructed about 100 years before the
Parthenon it too was built with few
right angles or straight lines we can
indicate already the curvature of the
base of the
temple also the widening of the lower
part of the
columns why are these Builders
deliberately constructing their temples
with curves and few right
angles Professor Margaret Livingstone a
Harvard neurobiologist believes the
ancient Greeks might have been aware of
optical illusion
the function of the visual system is not
to transmit an image to the brain
there's nobody up there to look at an
image it's to transmit information about
the world up to the
brain our brain translates visual
information like converging lines to
help us assess distance and relative
size but sometimes something's Lost in
Translation here the converging lines
are telling us that the line on the
right is taller than the line on the
left the result an optical
illusion this is another classical
illusion if you have two straight lines
if you add converging lines these two
lines seem to bow in the
middle so if the floor of the Parthenon
has converging cues as to depth and
perspective you could have an illusory
sag in the floor of the
Parthenon perhaps to compensate for the
elusory SAG the builders left extra
marble in the
middle the ancient Greeks realized that
to construct a building that appears
perfect they would have to come up with
a design that tricks the eye what they
invent is a system of optical
refinements their concern was the visual
Perfection of the
building this small Stone Temple on
noxos provides evidence of the Greeks
Keen observation over hundreds of years
here we can see the first Optical
refinements already experimented by the
people building the
Temple here lies literally the DNA of
the
paron to find out more about how the
Parthenon was built and how its ruins
are being reconstructed today watch
secrets of the Parthenon aing January
29th on PBS or join us online at
pbs.org NOA
paron