One of the most popular books of the new Millennium has to be The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, published in 2003 by Doubleday. If you’ve read it, then you’re no doubt familiar with the number 1.618. As the lead character in the novel, Robert Langdon, said, ‘The most beautiful number in the universe.” In that short section on the best-seller, The Da Vinci Code, you can see our interconnection with the world around us, and it does give us pause to consider some kind of divine arrangement, doesn’t it?
Is there such a thing as ‘the most beautiful number’?
You would have to take into account these numbers: 4-8-15-16-23-42. Those were the numbers that made Hurley super rich in the hit TV series, Lost. They proved to be a nightmare to him in the end, though. He so hoped his newly acquired wealth wouldn’t change his relationship with those around him. In the first season, we saw that it did. Ask any lottery winner if their new-found riches solved problems or created more, you might be surprised to discover the latter to be true in most cases. I often wonder how many times that number sequence has been put through the lottery terminals since they first appeared in the series. The numbers become even more of a nightmare, when it is discovered this same sequence had to be put into the computer in that underground complex accessed by the hatch the survivors blew open.
“The greatest displeasure of the largest number / Is the law of Nature” an excerpt from a very old poem called The Ruined City by Pao Chao (416-466)(China) translated by C.J. Chen and Michael Bullock.
I was never very good with numbers in school. My mother was a whiz with numbers. She could add and subtract all kinds of number in her head. I routinely failed mathematics in school. My mother had a hard time with spelling. I excelled in spelling. (That said, I’m careful to use the spellcheck feature on this blog before publishing.)
“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only the truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.” -excerpt from The Study of Mathematics by Bernard Russell, Earl Russell (1902).
Lewis Thomas in The Medusa and The Snail, wrote: “Photographed from the moon (the earth) seems to be a kind of organism. It is plainly in the process of developing, like an enormous embryo. It is, for all its stupendous size and the numberless units of its life forms, coherent. Every tissue is linked for its viability to every other tissue.”
The greatest number in the Universe, I believe, is ‘one’. One is the total number of living entities that carry your unique set of genes, memories, personality, character. There is only one ‘you’. Cherish the fact that you are unique, one of a kind. There will never be another person exactly like ‘you’. But we are linked with every other living thing on this planet, as Lewis Tomas alluded to. Most importantly, hopefully, we will be inextricably bound to at least ‘one’ other life form.
“You and I / Have so much love / That it burns like a fire, / In which we bake a lump of clay / Molded into a figure of you / And a figure of me. / Then we take both of them, / And break them into pieces, / And mix the pieces with water, / And mold again a figure of you, / And a figure of me. / I am in your clay. / You are in my clay. / In life we share a single quilt. / In death, we will share one coffin.” Married Love, written by Kuan Tao-Sheng in the 13th century, featured in the collection, The Oxford Book of Marriage edited by Helge Rubenstein, published in 1992 by the Oxford University Press. Its ISBN is 0-19-282930-0
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Don Jackson
