So far, we have examined how Arthur M. Young, inventor of the Bell helicopter, engineer and astrologer/philosopher, used his skills and insight into how our minds determine meaning. Within this, he began to discover that there was a graphical symmetry to this process; a set of shapes that explained many of the ancient symbols that mankind has come to view as sacred. These will shortly be unveiled in more detail, but, first, we need to complete our tour of the foundations of how he approached it, for the symmetry emerges from those foundations and how we represent them.

In the last post, we looked at how Isaac Newton investigated the motion of things that move, discovering that – for example in the motion of a cannon ball – there were different aspects, faces, of that motion; and that although they were often hidden, they were tightly related to each other. Arthur Young used the equations that Newton produced for this. Unfortunately, this led us into numbers, squared numbers and, and horrors, cubed numbers! Several brave readers made it to the end of last week’s post, but not without difficulty. So, for this week, I decided to take a small detour to illustrate how these types of numbers can be see as pictures instead of fear-inducing maths.

As a child, I had a terror of maths, assisted by an ex military ‘Desert Rat’ of a headmaster who believed that beating boys and throwing board-dusters at girls would help their education. That was the 1960s, not Victorian England; and the dubious joys of a Church of England country primary school. Times have changed, but the horror of seeing something squared or cubed has not. So, by way a small gift, let me share with you one of the most beautiful insights I ever learned – though, sadly, beyond my school days.

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