The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number
Mario Livio's book The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number (2002) chronicles the history, not of a person, thing, or concept, but a number. However, this number or notion of proportionality or the 'Golden Ratio' has been invested with such cultural, emotional, and religious importance it has taken on a character in and of itself. Philosophers and poets have used the idea of proportional perfection in the universe to justify the aesthetic behind their works and also to prove the existence of God. Deny the Golden Ratio, and deny the idea that aesthetics or religious principles exist independently of human craft and culture.Phi has fascinated mathematicians for centuries, but it is less famous than its similarly named cousin Pi, which and even inspired a holiday (3.14, March 14th or 'Pi' day). So what exactly is Phi? Although 3.14 may be more famous, phi may be, according to Livio, "even more fascinating," and have a more notable impact on our daily lives, in the ways that it relates to our culturally ideas of proportion and goodness. Livio does not believe that the assumption that proportionality equals beauty and quality is inherent in nature, rather he believes it is a long-standing cultural const
Because it is so important in our culture, it must be debated. The Parthenon in Greece, crosses in graveyards, the ratio of the height of the navel to a woman's total height, sunflowers, Salvador Dali's paintings of rose petals, mollusks and Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" all exhibit this ratio, according to the credo of believers in Phi. Livio finds these studies somewhat dubious, small, and often contradictory, however. Pythagoras is credited with discovering the harmonic scale of musical pitch, which is similarly credited with why certain music is, he believed, inherently pleasant to the ear and other music sounds dissonant (28). (However, it is important to remember that modern classical music is often deliberately atonal and non-Western forms of music use a different musical scale). We see perfection and proportionality because we are looking for it in nature, and we see it in art because it was imposed upon by the artist, like that of Salvador Dali's "Sacrament of the Last Supper" in a conscious matter, or because we are intentionally looking for this ratio in the natural artifacts that we examine. It is true that repetition and symmetry even extends to nature, and the existence of so-called Fibonacci numbers (reliable sequences of repeating numbers) are found on the skins of pineapples, in trees, and on the shells of invertebrates. The reason that Phi astonishes us is because we, as a product of centuries of fascination with proportion and beauty, have made its properties an object of wonder. These qualities have been infused with principles of human beauty and morality since Pythagoras and Euclid respectively established their principles of symmetrical, naturally occurring proportions in triangles and geometry. This may be the earliest advocacy of so-called 'intelligent design' in literature. It is evidence of humans looking at nature, not that nature or God through nature looking back at us. But ultimately, astrophysicist Mario Livio says that creating this mysterious proportion is no different than a person cutting a piece of string into pieces.
Common topics in this essay:
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Pi Phi's,
Sacrament Supper,
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Pythagoras Euclid,
Inspired Fibonacci,
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World's Astonishing,
Pyramids Parthenon,
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salvador dali's,
love proportionality,
looking nature,
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