I stumbled across a book the other day, quite by chance, "The Power of Limits" by Gyorgy Doczi, a book about "proportional harmonies in nature, art and architecture. In it the spiral is conspicuous by its almost ubiquitous presence. A brief skim through its pages has revealed further connections, rewirings through time and space, between architecture, observation, geometry and history, regarding the telescope.
- Jacobs Ladder : "and behold a ladder set upon the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven" - - - > Tsiolkovsky's space tower / space elevators
- Ziggurats (eg Tower of Babel) : "hill of heaven" / "mountain of god". One of their functions was to observe the heavens, scanning for clues as to the change of the seasons. Ziggurats as ancient observatories - - - > the spiral tower as a base for a radio dish.
Reading further about the interconnection of spirals and the golden mean, an order and harmony of proportions appearing again and again both in natural creations and in the dynamics of growth, I am wondering : can they shed any light on the evolution and distribution of large scale structures of the universe ?
Posted by Jem Finer at October 10, 2004 6:04 PM