This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: One of Athens' crowning jewels is the Parthenon, a classical temple on the Acropolis that overlooks the Greek capital. According to legend, many historians, textbooks and tour guides say the ancient Greek architects who designed it added subtle curves and other variations to correct optical illusions that would have disturbed the building's clean lines.
But after reviewing ancient texts and using mathematical models, a UK mathematician has concluded that this idea about illusions is itself an illusion. However, exactly why the original architects introduced these refinements is still unknown. The idea behind the optical illusions largely traces back to the Roman writer Vitruvius, who wrote roughly four centuries after the Parthenon was built.
To test a 2,000-year-old story without taking the building apart stone by stone, Alain Goriely at the University of Oxford had to take a hard look at the numbers. He used detailed measurements from 19th-century surveys alongside modern data to mathematically reconstruct and analyze the temple's subtle curves and other refinements. He then compared their size with what research into human vision tells us people can actually perceive.
The results told a very different story about the temple. According to Vitruvius, a flat platform would look like it sags in the middle, so builders curved the platform upward to make it look straight. However, in this study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Goriely writes that our eyes naturally see straight lines as straight when no surrounding features distort our perception.
From some viewpoints, visitors can actually see the Parthenon's upward curve, while from others it may be difficult to see. The platform was not the only part of the Parthenon supposedly designed to fool the eye. Another popular belief is that the columns were built with a slight bulge in the middle to stop them from looking pinched or hollow.
However, Goriely found no evidence for this. The columns only bulge by 18 millimeters (0.7 inches), which is too small for the human eye to notice from most viewing distances. "The thesis of this paper is that there is insufficient historical evidence and no scientific evidence that the Parthenon's refinements were optical corrections," Goriely wrote.
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