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Meditation 896
Formulaic Beauty

by: Rev. Dr. Kristine Robinson

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Sometimes I feel that perhaps the universe is an artefact

I don't hold with any religion.  Not any more  They're all too small, they all put humanity as the sum aim.  I think that's short-sighted and egotistical.  We're just a blip.  The universe isn't here for our use, we just happen to be experiencing a very small part of it for a minute amount of time. 

But perhaps there is something external.  An architect who constructed the universe.  An artist who has created a thing of beauty, that is made not out of matter, but out of mathematics.

e is Euler's number, the base of natural logarithms
i is the imaginary unit, which satisfies i2 = -1
π is pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter

It is Euler's identity.  This is the thing that gives me pause.  This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.  When I look at it through the eyes of an artist, it makes me want to cry at the sheer simplicity and wonder of it. 

The universe is a closed system.  An external creator could not impact this fully formed universe any more than I could rummage around the inside of a soap bubble after I've blown it.  The only creator I can envision is one I will never know with certainty.  A creator who can never intervene, who didn't have to break physics or avoid the Big Bang.  The creator I envision will never be more than a vague maybe.  The creator I envision is not an observable phenomenon.  It is only a possibility.  I cannot even say that I am a deist, because beauty alone is not enough for me to say, That is a made thing.

But maybe the universe is an artefact.  Because certain numbers with simple relationships to each other repeat themselves throughout everything.