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From Pete Stewart

I was fascinated to come across the article “Does the universe go on for ever?” (11 October, p 6), in which it is suggested that “our universe seems like an endlessly repeating set of dodecahedrons, football-like shapes with a surface of 12 identical pentagons”. I was reminded of Digory’s remark at the end of the C. S. Lewis’s Narnia cycle “It’s all in Plato,” he says. “Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!”

This particular bit of it all is in Phaedo: “The true earth is said to appear to anyone looking at it from above like those balls which are made of twelve pieces of leather.”

It should go without saying, that this “true earth” represents the cosmos for Plato. In Timaeus, having assigned the four kinds of geometrical solid to the elements, Plato describes how God used up the fifth, the dodecahedron, “for the Universe”, decorating the 12 faces with figures.

It was left to Plutarch to explain that this figure, “the true earth”, represents “both the Zodiac and the year”, since it has not only 12 pentagonal faces, but these are composed of five isosceles triangles made up of six scalene triangles, that is 30 in each and 360 in total.

Pencaitland, East Lothian, UK