In "The Origins of Geometry", Michel Serres sees Thales' conception of a model as uniting scale, module, and light to establish a 'rational and universal approach'. Thales uses the gnomon (a simple geometrical tool, like a shadow-casting stick) to measure and abstract relationships across scales, such as linking the height of a pyramid to its shadow. This process introduces the concept of a module (the gnomon operates in terms of modules), a replicable unit and a building block that can bridge observation and theory. Thales creates a model that connects local phenomena to universal principles, laying the foundation for algorithmic reasoning. Here, the notion of “scales” relates to models that “realize,” not models that “represent.” As such they are distinctive from the scale of Euclidean space and relate more to a notation-related understanding of scale like musical scales, or the measuring of spectrality in information technics and quantum physics.