Peter Klein is a celebrated German educator and honorary member of the Symmetry Society. Here and elsewhere he presents a view that is tantalizingly close to Kutachi Project matters. The foundation is German romantic natural philosopher-scientists of the 18th century. Klein notes the basis of this philosophy is that the world is an autonomous system following the underlying laws of mathematics. Math here is not descriptive but prescriptive.

Many of the men, he notes, preferred to express the foundations of this foundation mathematics in terms of (what we will call here) simple symmetries. This trend fed developments in group theory and evolved to the standard model in physics and what we noted elsewhere from Ne’eman.

The idea is similar to that of the Katachi Society, where beauty informs the scientific quest. Unfortunately, this and other papers of Klein’s are historical reports and give us little of direct use to the project. Though it could be helpful to study Oken, Richter, Steffen and Oersted, it seems more fruitful to study more modern thinkers who work with better (meaning more mature) mathematical concepts.

The Relationship to Kutachi

The Kutachi Project does leverage Geometric Cosmologies and separately is modeled after a Japanese philosophy of katachi. But except for general guidance, we don’t use German romantic philosophy.

Links

Symmetry Arguments in Romantic Natural Philosophy. Peter Klein. 1992. [Culture & Science v3]

The Kutachi essay on Geometric Cosmologies. (not online yet)