Was: Silver: An element of good health
These and many similar questions bothered me for a long time. But when I have read "Fractal Geometry of Nature", I noticed remarkable similarity between jewellery designs and Julia Sets. Could it be possible that Goldsmithing Traditions carry encoded messages from the Past. That is a fascinating subject to ponder." - Leonid Surpin
I’ve always been a lover of fractals. Not only are they abundant in
nature, but I think we have an internal system for either creating
them or finding them everywhere. If you want direct visual evidence
of that, try some tryptamines,but even in normal states of mind, the
machinery is still there.
Few of us can describe what has good proportion in any rational way
- things either have good form or they don’t. Sure, individual taste
makes things beautiful or ugly to the viewer, but good proportion is
hard to argue with.
To Leonid’s question, about encoded messages from the past, I say,
proba= bly not - I think it’s more likely that jewellers and other
artists have a keener sense of proportion that other people, and
that sense of proportion is built on a foundation of fractal
patterns.
This could extend back to the beginning of life - I think that the
first multicellular organisms were fractal in form, consisting
initially of numerous cells in a colony. There are some examples of
that on the website Leonid linked to at:
http://miqel.com/fractals_math_patterns/visual_math_varieties.html
As living things developed a nervous system, perhaps we evolved
"fractal finding" systems, to allow us to find food or a mate.
Some of the Julia set fractals really remind me of 2-stone and
3-stone engagement rings. All of us might do well to use these kind
of fractals as a system for deciding relative sizes of center stones
in clusters…etc, just like the Greeks had a system of proportions
for drawing a beautiful face.