| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Physicists: ‘The universe is a holographic dodecahedron’
By Guest Writer Christian deBlanc (bio | articles | forum)
Since the time of Plato and Euclid, science, mathematics and philosophy have been enamored with the perfect, geometric form of the dodecahedron. Indeed, from the Parthenon of ancient Athens to the ultra-modern, Observatoire de Paris, observing physicists have considered the dodecahedron to be the building block of the universe since Euclidean geometry deduced the five, perfect, Platonic solids. To be sure, during the time of the Platonic philosophy, the Greeks were fairly convinced that the forms of the 4-sided tetrahedron, the 6-sided cube, the 8-sided octahedron, the 12-sided dodecahedron, and the 20-sided icosahedron comprised the forms taken by the 5 elements: tetrahedron (fire), cube (Earth), octahedron (air), icosahedron (water) and dodecahedron (ether).
Furthermore, the Greeks were convinced that all matter was composed of varying combinations of 4 elements; and, ether, as the 5th element, was the universal medium where the chemical and physical reactions took place. It wasn’t until Einstein’s theory of space-time relativity, and its philosophic presupposition that all space-time was curved due to the force of gravity, that the notion of the universal ether found its way to the wastebasket of physics, as the mathematics seemed to neatly tie Einstein to Newton, and thus Occam’s razor cut the ether out of Physics.
However, thanks to the nature of the ongoing debate about the true nature, size, scope and speed of the universe, (or multi-verse), the idea of the dodecahedron being the ultimate container of matter within a finite universe has come back to the observing academies. Indeed, according to physicist Jean-Pierre Luminet of Laboratoire Univers et Theories, “The latest astronomical data suggests that the correct answer could be a compromise between these two ancient viewpoints: the universe is finite and expanding, but it does not have a boundary. In particular, accurate maps of the cosmic microwave background – the radiation left over from the Big Bang – suggests that we live in a finite universe that is shaped like a (soccer) football or dodecahedron.”
