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.