The Dandelion Fluff

DO YOU SEE GOD OR DO YOU SEE MATHEMATICS?

Sitting in my garden on an absolutely normal day, two days ago, I experienced the natural beauty of our universe. The above photo is of a dandelion fluff moments before a gust of wind blew most of it away.

Lately I've been reading a lot about the Physics and Mathematics that govern our universe. There are set laws that everything follows, from the sub-atomic to cosmic levels. These laws, when laid out, are often quite elegant and even beautiful. There are symmetries, fractals and self-organising phenomena that would impress anyone with an artistic eye.

Some call them the Laws of Physics, while others refer to them in more spiritual ways, relating to God. Whatever your views and beliefs are, you can't deny that the laws are there, and they are beautiful to look at.

A lot of the beauty of the universal laws are hidden from us because we are unable to directly perceive them. Either their effect are too grand, so we are unable to see the entire thing, too small for us to see at all, happen too far away or cease to exist too quickly.

There are phenomena that come into existence who's lifespans are in the order of magnitude of thousandths of microseconds. These events happen so fast, and their effects are felt so briefly, that it's as though they never happened. If we are able to slow time down enough to visually perceive our environment, our minds would be blown clean off.

Actually we can slow things down remarkably now. Most of us are amazed by ultra-slow motion video and super high speed photography and what they reveal. We can now capture bullets in mid-flight, a bee's wings in mid flap, microseconds before a droplet hits the surface of water, and so on. It seems like a totally different world, but it isn't. It is the same world we live in now. That is us.

We also now can see all the way down to atomic levels using a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope (STM). The images produced by STMs are real, physical representations of the fabric of our reality on the molecular scale. We can now see actual molecules. As it happens, the shapes that we see are remarkably close to what mathematicians and theorists represented on paper centuries ago!

Nature is highly organised, and very beautiful.

I was originally trying to capture a bee buzzing around a flower on video when I noticed something even more beautiful. It was the standard, usually considered boring, dandelion fluff. I was blown away by the symmetry and fractals presented before me, and how incredibly efficient it is at it's job. It's primary job, as far as I know, is to be blown in the wind, and act as a parachute for the dandelion seed as it finds a place to rest - hopefully in good soil and away from the parent plant. The fluff doesn't exist in this perfect form for long, so you have to catch it at the optimum time, as well as have the equipment to see it in it's full glory, in order to fully appreciate it's beauty.

As it happens, I had my Olympus Zuiko 50mm Macro lens which was able to capture this above photo. Moments after photographing it, a gust of wind blew about a third of the fluff, and seeds, away hopefully to germinate somewhere good.

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SELF ORDER OR A CREATOR?

I am very familiar with many religions, specifically the Abrahamic faiths. The concept of a "God" being the all powerful creator and maker of everything is one that prevails across most of them.

You understand how human beings, seeing the beauty and order all around them, would come to this conclusion most of the time - that there's got to be someone or something greater than our consciousness that is in control of things.There are clearly laws that everything obeys that appear to be unbreakable.

However, because of said laws, things tend to self-organise when given enough tries. There are several examples of self-organising chemicals that have been demonstrated or observed by scientists.

I have witnessed some of these myself - not molecules, but shapes and items. Given enough time and in the right environment, apparent order ensues.

I'll give you an example: One day I had placed a bunch of marbles on a window seal. They weren't actual marbles since they were made of rubber, but you get the idea. They were the size of snooker balls. The window was open and it was quite a windy day. Suddenly it happened right in front of my eyes.

A gust of wind blew the curtains up, and on the way down it tipped a statuette I also had on the window seal. The statuette was what was keeping the marbles on the window seal, stacked up on each other. The marbles hence came falling down from the window into a large cardboard box I had sitting just below the window.

This is the beautiful part. When I went to retrieve the marbles, seven of them had formed a perfect hexagon shape in the box. A perfect hexagon!

"Woah! What are the chances of that?"

Actually, now that I've looked into the matter more since it happened, it occurred to me that indeed that was very likely to happen. One of the lowest energy ways for seven perfect spheres of the same size to interact with each other is to approximate a hexagon, much like four or nine or sixteen of them would eventually form a square. It's geometry - a mathematical law. You could say it's in their nature. That is Mathematics.

Now imagine if I hadn't witnessed the whole process. Say I had gone to have a shower and come back to see my statuette on the floor and a perfect hexagon in a box. I would likely come to the conclusion that someone had been inside my house. It would be a rational reaction to such an orderly, apparently intelligent, occurrence.

Talking of shapes, a perfect sphere is the most efficient shape in our three-dimensional world. Every dot on the surface is equidistant to the centre point. If you throw in factors like the forces; gravity, electromagnetic and nuclear forces, all objects want to spin around an axis, and they want to form a sphere. So, given the correct environment and enough time, that is exactly what happens. This is why we have spherical objects spinning around an axis all over the universe, no matter how large or small you go. That is Physics.

So now we have spherical entities, atoms, interacting with each other with the results also trying to tend towards a sphere (in search of equilibrium) given their parameters. Molecules are formed, bonded together by electromagnetic forces. This interaction and search for equilibrium of sub atomic particles is responsible for all the elements we have in existence. That is Chemistry.

So now we have chemicals interacting with each other, causing changes in each other. We have molecules finding new partners under the newly available circumstances with newly available pairs. These follow the same laws set by their fabric, physical and mathematical. Certain shapes self organise inevitably, while certain existing templates like proteins are created from amino acids molecules in a cookie-cutter fashion by other molecular entities such as ribosomes. Another molecular entity, DNA, holds the blueprint of what and how said proteins are made. Each different type of protein, possessing unique sets of characteristics hence perform set functions in an organism. That is Biology.

Reality is infinitesimally more complicated than is laid out above, but you get the idea. Everything is highly ordered, and very beautiful. You can look upon it as nature simply living out it's inevitability - mathematical laws, or you can call it the active work of a creator entity, if you like.

So, back to the dandelion fluff. It is one of the most ordinary things one can encounter outdoors. It's ubiquitous and even a little annoying. Believe it or not, most people probably don't see it as "beautiful" in the same way I've described it here. I think, though, that if you can capture it in the moment of it's perfection - within an hour or so of it being fully formed, you might change your mind. It's one of the most beautiful demonstrations of the orderliness and natural symmetry of nature I've ever witnessed.