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what makes the Persian sun painting so unique?
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Posted
I'd still like to know just what the original poster meant, though, by the "product". Was he asking if he should buy an original... if he should fill his front room with them ... or just inviting our comments on the thing itself. Anyway, Bill's demonstration of the thing itself is fascinating.
Posted
Now this is expertise - far beyond most of us on here - certainly me. But fascinating and kind of Bill for elaborating on Paul’s thread.I don't really know much mathematics, so I wouldn't want to give the impression I'm a real mathematician. The work I've done is in an esoteric area known as gematria and it has revealed a mathematical substructure in the Bible (original scriptures and one modern version). For anyone interested, here's a series of Substack posts I did in the spring. They don't mention higher-dimensional cubes - that's elsewhere - but the Bible certainly does encode information suggesting an extra spatial dimension. About 50% of the findings in this brief introduction are mine. The rest is the work of others. https://bluetriangle444.substack.com/p/the-bible-is-a-mathematical-puzzle
Edited
by Bill Downie
Posted
Bill that is fascinating, that's something I had never heard of. I deleted the rest of this post because I've digressed off the original subject.I wish you hadn't deleted it, because I found it interesting when I read it this morning! I was going to show how the Paisley pattern is found in a famous superfractal known as the Mandelbrot Set. In fact I will, because I think exploring the set (there are lots of good Youtube videos on it) can be inspirational to artists and designers. Paisley Pattern
Detail from the Mandelbrot Set
and then alter the results in Photoshop. These are a couple of my efforts.
Posted
I like your images/artworks - they fire my imagination, especially the first one. Approximations of fractals are found everywhere in nature, from clouds, to coastlines, to trees, Romanesco cauliflowers (see below) and our own bodies. The patterns people see on psychedelics like DMT, Ayahuasca, LSD, etc, are fractal too. So I think a study of simple fractals like the Koch Snowflake can be helpful to an artist.
Fractal Patterns on a Romanesco Cauliflower
This is a deep zoom into the Mandelbrot Set, if you or anyone else is interested. There are an infinite number of possible journeys, each unique.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCpLWbHVNhk&t=95s
This is a deep zoom into the Mandelbrot Set, if you or anyone else is interested. There are an infinite number of possible journeys, each unique.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCpLWbHVNhk&t=95s
Edited
by Bill Downie
Posted
Here's a fascinating article on a fractal analysis of Jackson Pollock's paintings and human preferences for certain fractal dimensions: https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/e/12535/files/2015/12/ResponseFrontiers-1-qex935.pdf
Posted
Here's a fascinating article on a fractal analysis of Jackson Pollock's paintings and human preferences for certain fractal dimensions: https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/e/12535/files/2015/12/ResponseFrontiers-1-qex935.pdfI've just read it and it is fascinating. It confirmed some of my own intuitions about fractal patterns making art more compelling - we are exposed to fractals in nature from birth, so it only makes sense that we would prefer art with fractal properties. It would also be interesting to see if city dwellers prefer art with a lower fractal dimension (D) than country dwellers would prefer. Cities are full of Euclidean geometry (cubes, cuboids, triangles, circles, flat surfaces, etc). It also explains why I always feel depressed in cities. I'm more of a country bumpkin and used to being surrounded by trees, grass and hills, all with fractal properties. If art with a high D value is aesthetically pleasing, then cities with a low D value would be aesthetically displeasing. I think it indicates how necessary art and aesthetics in general are for a healthy, satisfying life. I've heard the music of great composers also has fractal properties and since fractals, only discovered around the turn of the 20th Century, were therefore unknown to the likes of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and since great composers often claim their music is inspired, I would speculate that the degree to which a work of music or art contains fractal patterns may be an indication of the degree to which it is inspired, ie, the music or art came not from the conscious mind but from a higher source. In other words, could fractal patterns in music or art be indirect evidence for the existence of a Transcendent Realm, from where all true creativity springs? Is this the real reason why we value our art forms so highly? After Stravinsky wrote The Rite of Spring, he claimed "I was the vessel through which it poured", implying that it came from somewhere else and he was simply the bringer of the gift, not the maker. Mozart's music often arrived almost fully formed in his mind. Pop composers like Paul McCartney and Barry Gibb have claimed they've woken up with fragments of new songs in their heads. Who composed it while they were asleep? Were they gifts from God? Since the universe is filled with fractal patterns and God is claimed by Christians to have created the universe by his Word (John 1.1), it might interest you to know that the Greek word Logos, meaning 'word' contains an image of a beautiful fractal snowflake, This is a pixellated representation of the second iteration of a famous fractal known as the Koch Snowflake. It has 373 individual counters. It is associated with Logos because, in Biblical times, Greek letters doubled as numbers and the Greek word Logos sums to 373. Here is the snowflake.
Posted
There are plenty of scientific explanations for fractal patterns in nature (for a starting point, check out Philip Ball's Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way It Does).A scientific explanation and a 'supernatural' one don't have to be mutually exlusive. Science deals with proximate causes, theology with ultimate causes. So we might understand why natural patterns such as the growth of snow crystals occur, but not why the laws of nature are as fine-tuned for life as they undoubtedly are, or the volumes of evidence and anecdote that natural laws can be overridden by thought (miracles, synchronicities, etc). That isn't as controversial as it might seem, if you know a little quantum mechanics. That concerns natural approximations of fractals. But fractals in art and music are of a different order, created not by natural forces but by the artist or composer. Jacksn Pollock's systematic method of creating fractal art may turn out to be a replication of natural forces, and therefore not inspired (albeit very inventive). But There are numerous examples in music, art and science itself of inspiration (for instance, Kekule's hypnogogic vision of snakes biting each others tails in a ring, which gave him the ring structure of benzene), to suggest that fractals in music in art may be a signature of divine inspiration. The example I gave of the Greek word Logos having the numerical value of a 2nd iteration fractal snowflake is one of many I could give. The equivalent anti snowflake has 142 counters and the numerical value of the Hebrew word B'golii, which means 'My Word' (referring to God). In fact the Bible is filled with fractal geometry that can have no natural explanation, unless you fall back on incredible coincidence. Thanks for your book recommendation. Can I recommend The God Theory, by Bernard Haisch? He discusses the Zero-Point Field and the growing opinion of many thinkers that Consciousness, not matter, is the ultimate basis of reality.
Posted
Only if I can then recommend 'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins.Thanks, but I read it not long after it came out. Dawkins is weakest where the case for God is strongest: spiritual experience or gnosis. He generally focuses on the easiest of targets, the fundamentalists and their literal reading of Scripture, which even I wouldn't defend, other than to say the Bible speaks to people at all levels of understanding. Alister McGrath's tiny volume The Dawkins Delusion is a masterful rebuttal. If you want t see direct evidence for the Divine inspiration of Scripture, please see my Substack posts: https://bluetriangle444.substack.com/p/the-bible-is-a-mathematical-puzzle I'm happy to discuss it with you or anyone else, but I fear we're going a little off-topic now, so please send me a private message if you're interested.