The Divine Proportion: An Indecipherable Code

The screen of your computer, your credit card, the petals of that flower, the building across the street–everything is governed by a principle.

From the Greek Pantheon to the Nautilus shell, the golden proportion is the gold standard for good design, yet scientists still do not understand why this harmonic ratio is found throughout the natural world. iStock/jsp

The newspaper you’re reading, the screen of your computer, your credit card, the petals of that flower, the leaves of that tree, the building across the street–everything is governed by a principle, a proportion, a harmonic value. The universe seems to whisper a code to us in each corner of nature, a unique and harmonically aesthetic code.

Behind the apparent chaos that reigns in the universe, in which each event and measurement logically follows an uncertain destiny, there nevertheless exists a hidden order. From the time of Pythagoras, the key to this order–which has intrigued so many mathematicians and scholars of various branches of knowledge–has never been fully understood.