The patterns of the world

If you look around you will find patterns in nature. Famous examples include the Golden Mean and the Fibonacci Sequence. Those patterns describe the number of petals that grow on most flowers, or the distance between leaves growing from a branch, or the size and spacing of the chambers in the nautilus shell. Snowflakes are made of fractals, honeycombs are tessellated hexagons, and the wind forms waves on deserts and oceans. These patterns tend to extend to the micro and the macro levels, where subsequent orders of magnitude follow the same patterns as the ones in the objects from which they are built. The shape of a crystal follows the alignment of the bonding of the compounds and the elements from which it is made. The patterns repeat all the way up, and all the way down. 

But it's not just the physical structure of items that follow patterns. There are other dynamics that can be observed. The spiral formed in clouds when a fighter jet passes through is mirrored in the whirlpool left behind by a passing paddle from a canoe. The paths that people, animals, and water take between locations follow similar routes, and the way water flows through channels and around obstacles mirrors the flow of vehicular and foot traffic in the same way. The spiral of a mountain sheep's horns mirrors the path of the moth drawn to a light. Patterns, patterns everywhere. 

People see patterns everywhere. In fact, we are predisposed to it. Noticing patterns and variations in pattern and movement is why we were able to distinguish fruit on trees, or identify a still animal, or an active camouflaged predator.  It's so ingrained in our beings that we tend to perceive patterns or connections between unrelated or random things (apophenia) or to perceive a specific, and often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous pattern (pareidolia). We see dinosaurs in clouds, a rabbit formed from the craters of the moon, or a face that is sticking out a tongue in our shoes resting on the floor. 

And such lovely words are applied to patterns: alternate, opposite, whorled, venation, reticulation, parallel, dichotomous, tesselate, spiral, striped, spotted, waves, ripples, curls, vector, eddy, vortices.

The orbit of the planets around the sun is a microcosm of the solar systems orbit around the center of the galaxy, and at the same time a macrocosm of the electrons orbiting the nucleus of the oxygen atom in the water in the coffee you are drinking. Different scales, different orders of magnitude, but the same pattern repeated. 

Your life, your choices, your interactions, your loves, and the lives and histories of everyone you've ever known or read about, all follow patterns if you just take the time to examine them. 

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