Pattern Makers as Copycats of Nature?

What does it mean to make something? When we make a pattern out of some materials, aren't we just recreating a pattern that already exists in our physical world, in nature? Are pattern makers really just copycats? We are, but there's something more to our abilities...we can arrange and rearrange patterns to result in entirely new configurations.

Thoughts of Biomimicry...

Harmonic Resonance Theory

http://www.miqel.com/jazz_music_heart/vibrational-truth.html

Fascinating theory by Steven Lehar....
http://sharp.bu.edu/~slehar/webstuff/hr1/hr2.html
It struck me this morning that in a world filled with standing and travelling wave fields, there is no such thing as one of anything, just greater and lesser variations of peaks and troughs within a defined field.

Superlattice Turing Patterns

Quite extraordinary!

"The study of pattern formation in nonequilibrium reaction-diffusion systems began with the theoretical analysis of Turing structures, which are stationary, spatially periodic patterns resulting from the interplay between pure diffusion and nonlinear reaction kinetics. Turing suggested that such structures could play a role in morphogenesis, and his point of view has gradually become prominent. The first experimental observation of Turing patterns occurred nearly 40 years after Turing's work, in a chemical reaction-diffusion system. Later, Kondo and collaborators showed that skin patterns in various small fish also develop according to the Turing mechanism."

- Dr. Lingfa Yang

http://hopf.chem.brandeis.edu/yanglingfa/pattern/ptn.html

Pattern in a Pattern

The sephirot pattern fits beautifully inside the Flower of Life pattern. Coincidence? I think, most likely, not.

Transient Equilibrium

Everything around us, and everything inside of us, is always moving, transitioning from one state to another. A steady-state is reached, and then another transition is underway, striving towards yet another steady-state, and yet another state of transient equilibrium. It continues. Life evolving.

My recent studies of sacred geometry (The Flower of Life) have me considering geometric structures as patterns of equilibrium that are never quite reached or held for long in a world that is always shimmering with movement. It's as if physical matter aspires to realize these configurations, perhaps because they are economical, and cost the least amount of energy.

There are certain arrangements, certain configurations that are more optimal for the form of physical structures. Why? Because they represent a state of equilibrium that is balanced amongst oppositional forces? This is beginning to sound very much like chemistry...

Flower of Life 6 shown above is by Peter W. Michel

http://www.petermichel.com/About.html

Rules: Paths Across Mountains of Data

This morning, I started thinking about Rules as Patterns of High Probability, like tributaries that stretch out across a vast landscape of information, as well-trodden paths across mountains of data.

How is a Rule formed? And how does one Rule become the rule of "best practice"?

In the beginning, there are no rules, just an information landscape to traverse. Over time, a path forms, based on trial and error. A Rule acts as an averaging principle that only evolves after repeatedly confronting similar situations, dynamics and consequences. A well-tested Rule could evolve into a Law, to embody a pattern with an extremely high level of persistent probability, within a broad range of contexts.

Mirror Writing - Natural Skill in a 3-D world

Mirror writing is a strange thing. I discovered I could mirror-write quite easily when I was 9 or 10 years old. It was fun to write backward messages on paper that could only be read in a mirror or flipped over and held up in front of a bright window. But why can some people do it, and others can't? Why do small children struggle to remember which way a lowercase b or d goes; or a g or p?

I did a search on mirror-writing and came across an interesting article written in 2002 called, Acquired mirror writing and reading: evidence for reflective graphemic representations by Gottfried, Sancar and Chatterjee.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/947583/Mirror-Write

They concluded:
"In summary, we suggest that mirror reading and writing, which at first glance appear to be a neuropsychological oddity, point to general principles underlying the processing and representation of visual forms. The adaptive advantage of mirror equivalency means that the nervous system harbors visual representations in their normal and reflected forms. The need for orientation specificity means that these different forms must also be distinguishable, and thus can be damaged selectively. These organizational principles that apply to objects int he world generalize to other visual objects, such as letters and words, even thought the adaptive advantage for these visual forms no longer applies. Finally, the functional modularity of visual representations themselves means that better access to one kind of mirrored visual form (lexical graphemes in this case) does not mean that access to all mirrored visual forms is privileged."

My thoughts:
In real life, we see an object and it can flip over and we know it is still the same object. What is unnatural is that something would remain forever rigid and fixed in one direction orientation. For example, a leaf on a tree doesn't remain fixed, forever pointing in the same direction for the duration of its lifetime. It can move around and flip over and we still see it as a leaf.

What is unnatural is than an object outline or shape would remain fixed in such a way as to always be pointing in the same direction. For example, in the case of lower case letters b and d, children have difficulty learning which way they go because they are the same reflected shape. The direction of the letter is learned, based on knowlege about the letter and its context in words that are also learned. This learning has to override our natural ability to see and know a shape and its mirror reflection as one and the same object. The child has to learn through repetition that the b and the d may look the same, but point in different directions, so they are not the same letter. This learning, applied to two-dimensional representations, runs counter to our natural categorization of visual images in a three-dimensional world. So the child learns that certain letters are directional, really that all writing is directional. But for those people with strong visual mirroring abilities, the learned process of writing letters with a particular direction can easily be inverted.

So, shape direction or orientation (reflection) is an attribute of shape form.