PHI: the Divine Proportion

To begin with, my feeble efforts in writing about anything relating to math ought to be rather amusing. I dreaded having to take even freshman math at Akron U because I had no interest in this subject...suffice to say, it's not one of my strong points.

There's a book that has been on the best seller's list for quite a while now...perhaps you've heard of it- The Da Vinci Code. I'm not about to talk about the big conspiracy theories found throughout- that can be left to the expert scholars; however, I'm re-reading the book in preparation for a series of sermons that our church is beginning today. Having finished the first 100 pages or so, again, chapter 20 mentions the role of PHI and the Divine Proportion- a topic that hasn't really surfaced in the uncountable number of criticisms that Dan Brown has received for his mystery story.

In this chapter, Langdon, a professor of religious symbology in Brown' novel, lectures an art class on the properties and role that PHI plays not only in art and architecture, but nature and the human body as well...

"PHI's ubiquity in nature, Langdon said, "clearly exceeds coincidence, and so the ancients assumed the number PHI must have been preordained by the Creator of the Universe. Early scientists heralded 1.618 as the Divine Proportion."

"Hold on," said a young woman in the front row. "I'm a bio major and I've never seen this Divine Proportion in nature."

"No?" Langdon grinned. "Ever study the relationship between females and males in a honeybee community."

"Sure. The female bees always outnumber the male bees."

"Correct. And did you know that if you divide the number of female bees by the number of male bees in any beehive in the world, you always get the same number?"

"You do?"

"Yup. PHI."

The girl gaped. "NO WAY!"

From this scene, Langdon goes on to give various other examples of how PHI is found in nature: the nautilus, a sunflower's seed head, spiraled pinecone petals, and even the human body...(Langdon, back in his class)- "Measure the distance from the tip of your head to the floor. Then divide that by the distance from your belly button to the floor. Guess what number you get..."

I've tried to think back to my biology days in high school, and for the life of me I can't ever recall covering this- maybe I was doodling in my notebook/ diagramming sentences or reading some Poe short stories- who knows? Anyway, this is mind boggling- PHI that is. For all the controversy surrounding the novel, here's a scene that pretty much cements the notion that only an all powerful and loving God could design a world so incredibly perfect- culminating with the perfection of the human body- supposedly illustrated in Da Vinci's Vatruvian Man.

On a lighter note, I did some quick calculations this morning, and it just occurred to me that 1.618 million years tend to elapse between Cleveland sport championships. The time is now- Go CAVS!