With all the talk of "Intelligent Design" around here and in the general media lately, a wee light shined somewhere in my neocortex last night as I tossed and turned my way into a sloppy sleep of fits and starts. For starters, I've always believed in some form of higher power(s) or intelligence(s) but I've never been particularly interested in trying to define the God concept. I've never been comfortable with the way that most people treat the divine unknown. When beliefs form in people a self-righteous platform that they claim others must adhere to, or else...you have a dangerous situation in one way or another.

However, I personally don't know anyone who is strong in their religious beliefs and also a fanatic, let alone a deluded fool like Bin Laden. The people I know who are strong in their faith do not ask others to stare down the barrel of their beliefs. They live their lives as best they can according to their faith and they don't ask anyone to copy them. I respect that. For me...if there's one thing that I truly believe, it's that some things are unknowable. And I'm okay with that.

That being said, the debate over teaching the notion of "intelligent design" deserves to be controversial; it shouldn't be easy to jump onto one side of the fence or the other. It should be immensely difficult, and where you stand should be the product of heavy introspection, investigation, and open mindedness. It shouldn't come from one's own indoctrination, but that's another debate.

So...my watch implies a watchmaker. Does the world imply a worldmaker? One thing that does lend credibility, in my mind, to the notion of intelligent design is 1.618, or the golden ratio—also referred to as phi. Good ol' Euclid defined it way back in some year or other B.C. It's "the only number whose square can be produced simply by adding 1 and whose reciprocal can be produced by subtracting 1." Was that a yawn? Fair enough.

How about this: "If you take a golden rectangle—one whose length-to-breadth is in the golden ratio—and snip out a square, what remains is another, smaller golden rectangle. The golden ratio is also difficult to pin down: it's the most difficult to express as any kind of fraction, and its digits—10 million of which were computed in 1996—never repeat....It was this elusive nature that led the 15th-century Italian friar and mathematician Luca Pacioli to equate the golden ratio with the incomprehensibility of God." (Quote culled from an article in The Guardian.)

But in my opinion, it's not the math anecdotes (mathecdotes?) that make it interesting. It's that the number shows up everywhere in nature. It's in the patterns of leaves, the honeycombs of bees, the physics of black holes, the chambers of a nautilus, the shape of galaxies...it even shows up in some crop circles. It's everywhere.

You can even find an awareness of the golden ratio in the Parthenon, the Great Pyramid, in DaVinci's Vitruvian Man, and the musical compositions of Debussy and others. Even "a cross-sectional view of the top of the DNA double helix forms a 10-sided figure, made up of two five-sided figures, which have diagonal ratios of 1:1.618." The more you read about 1.618, the creepier—and the more exciting—it becomes.

Need a better explanation? Try this. It won't disappoint.

So, is phi a grand mathematical accident that just so happens to bind everything in the universe together? Or, could it be what the folks in encryption call a primer, a key that unlocks the door to greater truths...a key that allows us to understand and solve greater problems...? That's the question I asked myself and it kept me up all night. It just feels right.

I don't think of God as a dude with a white beard sitting on a golden throne with angels floating around him playing harps. I'd be more inclined to think of god as an unseeable thing; something without form as we know it, the same way math itself has no form. But maybe God, whatever that means, left 1.618 out there for mankind to find as evidence of intelligent design. Or maybe 1.618 existed before, or independent of God, and God merely used it to create the universe. Or maybe we created God out of a need to understand why these constants of nature exist. Or maybe nature itself is God, and vice versa, and we see it every day.

I have no idea. And that really, really works for me.

Labels: neat-o, ponderage