NATURE weaves a pattern in all its manifestations — waves, water flow, snowflakes, leaves falling, branching of trees and even the movement of the ants and humans. But these need a discerning eye to catch, the inner eye that opens a world of colours, drawings and shapes. Philip Ball in his three books Flow, Shapes and Branches initiates the readers into this fascinating world. He describes how remarkably Nature creates and perpetuates shapes and symmetry.
Flow is all about those that move. Liquids, waves, flocks, swarms, and believe it or not, the human crowds. The captivating narrative by Ball in itself is a flow. The book kicks off with Leonardo da Vinci, the genius, ‘The man who loved fluids. ’ The importance of Leonardo can only be understood if one reads this chapter. He observed, for hours together the movement of water and fluids. “Leonardo saw nature as weaving an infinite variety of elusive patterns on the basic warp and woof mathematical perfection” says art historian Martin Kemp.
With drawings, photos, illustrations and colour images, Ball explains the beauty of nature’s patterns. The astounding design of the sand dunes, even as they shift, the perfect angle of the splash of the milk drops, the flocking of the birds, the movement of the fishes, and the trail of the ants – the wonders never cease. Following two successive stampedes during the Haj pilgrimage, the authorities sought the help of Dirk Helbing in 2006 who had worked on crowd behaviour, based on ‘social forces. ’ He had proposed that the pedestrian motion was the result of attraction and repulsion. Of course panic situations defy this logic. However, after monitoring the movement of the faithful masses at Haj pilgrimage he evolved a plan. There have been no stampedes since then.
While Flow is absorbing, Shapes is awesome. The colours and designs nature knits is amazing. In Shapes Philip Ball goes through an enormous number of species, especially those that distinguish themselves with complicated designs and patterns. Bacteria that look like flower, the ornately ‘painted’ fish, the artistic jellyfish, it goes on and on. Even the humble soap bubble has a definite shape. Ball says to understand shapes, one needs to understand maths. “There is, however, no escaping the fact that mathematics is the natural language of pattern. That may seem disappointing to those who never quite made friends with this universal tool of science – for patterns can be things of tremendous beauty, whereas mathematics can often appear to be cold, unromantic and, well, calculated practice… But mathematics has its beauty, too, … Maths enables us to get to the heart of pattern and form — to describe it at the most fundamental level, to reveal its Platonic core.”
Ball also provides models that can be prepared by anybody in separate appendices. Shapes is more exhaustive than Flow.
And then comes Branches. Scientists have long noted that the shape of the snow crystal is hexagon. From 16th century onwards, they have studied the snowflakes and snow crystals and marveled at the huge variety it offers, and yet retaining the basic shape. A scientist, Wilson Bentley, between 1885 and 1931 captured over 5,000 images of snowflakes and compiled 2,000 into a book called Snow Crystals. He died before the book was published, from pneumonia he contracted while collecting these images in New England winter. “Snow Crystals is rightly regarded as a work of wonder, but it is more than that. The scientist, gazing at page after page of seemingly infinite variety on the theme of the six-pointed flower of ice, faces a mystery of an order not previously encountered in the non-living world. Not only were the forms indescribably complex, but there was no end to them.”
The study of the snowflakes gave the scientists the insight that the complexity of form is not a special attribute of the living world. In fact in the snowflake “they found an echo of the shapes of trees and flowers, ferns and starfish: patterns that hint at an exquisite conciliation between geometric purity and organic exuberance.” The way the river branches, the tree extends, the animals grow, the flowing liquid splits are all discussed in this marvellous third book of the trilogy.
Leonardo da Vinci felt that the branching of a tree is guided by algorithmic rules. He suggested “at branching points, the rule is that the central trunk is bent by some specific angle when a side branch occurs on its own, but is not bent at all if two side branches are positioned opposite one another.”
From tree branching and networking to social networking and family networking, Ball discusses all and says that we are all in it together.
All the three books, under the general title Nature’s Patterns: a tapestry in three parts together offer an enthralling view of the universe, Nature and our own connectivity with it. Ball set out to do them under one volume but was well-advised by his publishers to separate them. There is a common thread running through the books and yet, Flow, Shapes and Branches are discussed autonomously. There are a lot of illustrations that make the reading comfortable. It is definitely a book worth reading.
(Oxford University PressGreat Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6DP)
