Beauty

The golden ratio is a connection that appears in nature with bizarre regularity. I'll try to explain it as clearly as I can. Take two poles, one shorter than the other, and attach them together to make one long pole, let's call this a flagpole. Now measure all the poles; the short one, the longer one and the flagpole. Next, work out what percentage the short pole is of the longer pole and what the longer pole is of the flagpole. If these percentages are the same then we have a golden ratio. It's always the same percentage too, around 62%. This may seem just a mathematical nicety but this connection appears throughout nature, everywhere in the universe.

It shapes the spirals in the heads of sunflowers and the long arms of the milky way. It's in the proportions of bodies and, in more detail, of faces. Leonardo Da Vinci used it in the layout of many of his paintings, not as another code for some ludicrous religious mythology but because the human eye is drawn to this ratio. It makes things look how they are meant to, you could say it's beautiful. You could say it's beauty, maybe that is a measurable thing, anything could be if you found the appropriate connection; the whole world and everything beyond, laced like buttons on a line.