This book is a collection of photographs that demonstrates the ways certain patterns repeat themselves throughout the natural world. In the introduction, Ball writes, “Perhaps the most curious thing about natural patterns is that they come from a relatively limited palette, recurring at very different size scales and in systems that might seem to have nothing at all in common with one another… it seems that there are types of pattern-forming process that don’t depend on the detailed specifics of a system but can crop up across the board, even bridging effortlessly the living and non-living worlds.”
This observation originates with D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, a Scottish zoologist who in 1917 published a landmark book called On Growth and Form that collected all of the current knowledge about pattern and form in nature. At the time, Darwin’s theory of natural selection was wildly popular, and people generally considered it to be the ultimate explanation of natural forms. Under this school of thinking, patterns developed with a specific adaptive purpose that helped an organism survive. Thompson was more hesitant, suggesting that there were physical forces at work. His book explained that the similarity of patterns was not coincidence– that there was a reason why the arrangement of soap bubbles resembled those of clusters of living cells. I am going to look more in depth into Thompson’s theories and what those physical forces are.
Ball’s book goes on to visually illustrate these similarities across several different categories: symmetry, fractals, spirals, flow and chaos, waves and dunes, bubbles and foam, arrays and tilings, cracks, and spots and stripes. “When you see several of [the photographs] side by side in glorious detail that you start to get a sense of how nature takes a theme and runs with it,” Ball said.
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