Browse content similar to Shapes. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
Line | From | To | |
---|---|---|---|
OVERLAPPING VOICES | 0:00:03 | 0:00:06 | |
This is the Giant's Causeway at the northern tip of Northern Ireland, | 0:00:11 | 0:00:16 | |
and it's famed for these strange angular rocks. | 0:00:16 | 0:00:19 | |
There are 40,000 of them crammed into this small area of coastline. | 0:00:25 | 0:00:30 | |
What makes them so striking is that they're so regular, so simple, | 0:00:31 | 0:00:35 | |
they just don't seem to fit in to this rugged natural environment. | 0:00:35 | 0:00:40 | |
The mystery of these hexagonal rock formations has inspired | 0:00:45 | 0:00:49 | |
storytellers and composers. | 0:00:49 | 0:00:53 | |
But their strange beauty is only the start of the story. | 0:00:55 | 0:00:59 | |
Because these stones tell of a hidden geometric force | 0:01:00 | 0:01:04 | |
that underpins and pervades all nature. | 0:01:04 | 0:01:08 | |
And if we can uncover that force, | 0:01:14 | 0:01:16 | |
it'll help us to explain the shape of everything... | 0:01:16 | 0:01:20 | |
from the smallest microbe, to the construction of these stones | 0:01:20 | 0:01:24 | |
and the formation of the world itself. | 0:01:24 | 0:01:27 | |
As a mathematician, I'm fascinated by the numbers | 0:01:59 | 0:02:02 | |
and shapes we see all around us... | 0:02:02 | 0:02:05 | |
..connecting everything, from bees | 0:02:14 | 0:02:18 | |
to bubbles | 0:02:18 | 0:02:21 | |
and the handwork of our distant ancestors | 0:02:21 | 0:02:26 | |
to the imagination of our greatest modern artists. | 0:02:26 | 0:02:29 | |
These are the hidden connections that make up the Code... | 0:02:42 | 0:02:45 | |
..an abstract, enigmatic world of numbers that has given us | 0:02:51 | 0:02:55 | |
the most detailed description of our world we've ever had. | 0:02:55 | 0:02:59 | |
Ever since they settled here, over 30,000 years ago, | 0:03:11 | 0:03:15 | |
people have tried to explain these remarkable hexagonal columns | 0:03:15 | 0:03:19 | |
poking out of the Irish Sea. | 0:03:19 | 0:03:22 | |
Why are they the shape they are? | 0:03:22 | 0:03:26 | |
And where did they come from in the first place? | 0:03:26 | 0:03:29 | |
Legend has it that this peninsula was once home to a giant | 0:03:29 | 0:03:33 | |
called Fionn mac Cumhaill. | 0:03:33 | 0:03:34 | |
One day the giant got into an argument with another giant called Benandonner | 0:03:41 | 0:03:45 | |
who lived 80 miles away across the sea in Scotland. | 0:03:45 | 0:03:50 | |
The giants hurled insults at each other, | 0:03:55 | 0:03:59 | |
swiftly followed by a few stones. | 0:03:59 | 0:04:01 | |
And things soon got out of hand. | 0:04:01 | 0:04:04 | |
Benandonner swore that if he was a better swimmer, | 0:04:04 | 0:04:07 | |
he'd come straight over to sort Fionn out. | 0:04:07 | 0:04:10 | |
Fionn was so enraged that he started picking up huge clumps of earth | 0:04:10 | 0:04:14 | |
and throwing them across the sea | 0:04:14 | 0:04:16 | |
so he could create a pathway for the Scottish giant to come and face him. | 0:04:16 | 0:04:21 | |
And that, legend has it, is what I'm standing on now. | 0:04:21 | 0:04:24 | |
The handiwork of a giant. | 0:04:24 | 0:04:26 | |
It's a nice story, but the reality is even more extraordinary. | 0:04:32 | 0:04:37 | |
Because what's written into these rocks is a fundamental truth | 0:04:37 | 0:04:41 | |
about the universe. | 0:04:41 | 0:04:44 | |
A truth that we can find written throughout the natural world. | 0:04:49 | 0:04:53 | |
These orchards in California, | 0:05:09 | 0:05:11 | |
are the site of one of the largest animal migrations on the planet. | 0:05:11 | 0:05:16 | |
Every spring, billions of bees are brought here | 0:05:20 | 0:05:23 | |
to help pollinate the almond trees. | 0:05:23 | 0:05:25 | |
Several thousand of these hives belong to Steve Godling. | 0:05:33 | 0:05:38 | |
-You go ahead and smoke it when we get it open. -Yep. | 0:05:45 | 0:05:50 | |
-Right there. -That's good. | 0:05:50 | 0:05:53 | |
Got this glued together very tight. | 0:05:56 | 0:06:00 | |
You want to try to get an outside one so as not to kill the queen. | 0:06:00 | 0:06:03 | |
You don't want to kill any of them but you particularly don't want to kill her. | 0:06:03 | 0:06:09 | |
-If you kill the queen, you've killed the hive. -Wow! | 0:06:09 | 0:06:12 | |
That's one of the wonders of the natural world. | 0:06:14 | 0:06:17 | |
It's beautiful. | 0:06:17 | 0:06:19 | |
'The bees' honeycomb is a marvel of natural engineering.' | 0:06:21 | 0:06:24 | |
They've got plenty of honey. | 0:06:24 | 0:06:28 | |
'Everything they need is here. | 0:06:28 | 0:06:30 | |
'It's a place to raise their young and store their food. | 0:06:30 | 0:06:33 | |
'And it's all made from wax, | 0:06:35 | 0:06:37 | |
'a substance so labour intensive that the bees have to fly the equivalent | 0:06:37 | 0:06:41 | |
'of 12 times round the Earth to produce a single pound of it.' | 0:06:41 | 0:06:46 | |
-This almost looks man-made, manufactured. -Yeah. | 0:06:48 | 0:06:52 | |
It doesn't look like something from the natural world. | 0:06:52 | 0:06:55 | |
-The precision, the fine straight lines that they've created is extraordinary. -Right. | 0:06:55 | 0:07:00 | |
It's an engineering wonder, for sure. | 0:07:00 | 0:07:04 | |
-Look at the... It's perfect hexagons here. -Yeah. It's amazing. | 0:07:04 | 0:07:10 | |
And, er, the hexagon is a very strong structure. | 0:07:10 | 0:07:15 | |
'The bees have made an identical pattern to the columns | 0:07:15 | 0:07:19 | |
'on the Giant's Causeway. | 0:07:19 | 0:07:22 | |
'Each cell is exactly like the others - | 0:07:22 | 0:07:25 | |
'six walls meeting precisely at 120 degrees. | 0:07:25 | 0:07:29 | |
'And every honeybee, everywhere in the world, | 0:07:29 | 0:07:33 | |
'knows how to build these shapes. | 0:07:33 | 0:07:36 | |
'It's as if the hexagon is built into the bee's DNA.' | 0:07:36 | 0:07:40 | |
You can see the bees going down inside the cell. | 0:07:40 | 0:07:43 | |
-It's almost exactly the same size as their bodies. -Right. | 0:07:43 | 0:07:46 | |
Are they using their body like a ruler in some sense, to do the geometry? | 0:07:46 | 0:07:49 | |
That's an accurate description. | 0:07:49 | 0:07:51 | |
I know different races have a smaller body | 0:07:51 | 0:07:54 | |
and the cell size in their comb is smaller. | 0:07:54 | 0:07:57 | |
And each of the hexagons, how do they actually make a hexagon rather than some irregular shape? | 0:07:57 | 0:08:02 | |
They've just done it for thousands of years. | 0:08:02 | 0:08:05 | |
They were born to do it, they just instinctively know | 0:08:05 | 0:08:08 | |
that this is the shape of their home. | 0:08:08 | 0:08:13 | |
But there's more to the bees' behaviour than raw instinct. | 0:08:15 | 0:08:19 | |
There's another reason why they build in hexagons. | 0:08:20 | 0:08:25 | |
And to reveal that reason, | 0:08:25 | 0:08:26 | |
we need to turn to the universal language of all nature. | 0:08:26 | 0:08:30 | |
Mathematics. | 0:08:30 | 0:08:32 | |
The bees' primary need is to store as much honey as they can | 0:08:37 | 0:08:41 | |
while using as little precious wax as possible. | 0:08:41 | 0:08:44 | |
The bees' honeycomb is an amazing piece of engineering, | 0:08:52 | 0:08:55 | |
but why have they evolved to produce this hexagonal pattern? | 0:08:55 | 0:09:00 | |
They don't have too many choices. | 0:09:00 | 0:09:02 | |
If you try to put pentagons together, for example, they just don't fit together nicely. | 0:09:02 | 0:09:07 | |
Or circles leave lots of little gaps. | 0:09:07 | 0:09:10 | |
If they want to produce a network of regular shapes which fit together neatly | 0:09:10 | 0:09:14 | |
then you've really only got three options. | 0:09:14 | 0:09:18 | |
You can do equilateral triangles, or you could do squares, | 0:09:18 | 0:09:23 | |
or you can do the bees' hexagons. | 0:09:23 | 0:09:25 | |
But why of those three does the bee choose the hexagons? | 0:09:25 | 0:09:30 | |
Well, it turns out that the triangles actually use | 0:09:30 | 0:09:34 | |
much more wax than any of the other shapes. | 0:09:34 | 0:09:37 | |
Squares are a little better, but it's the hexagons which use the least amount of wax. | 0:09:37 | 0:09:42 | |
'It's a solution that was only mathematically proven a few years ago. | 0:09:42 | 0:09:48 | |
'The hexagonal array IS the most efficient storage solution | 0:09:48 | 0:09:52 | |
'the bees could have chosen. | 0:09:52 | 0:09:54 | |
'Yet with a little help from evolution, | 0:09:54 | 0:09:57 | |
'they worked it out for themselves millions of years ago.' | 0:09:57 | 0:10:01 | |
This is nature's Code at work, | 0:10:02 | 0:10:05 | |
and the bees are in tune with it. | 0:10:05 | 0:10:08 | |
It's easy to see why efficiency is important to the bees. | 0:10:12 | 0:10:15 | |
After all, it's hard work making wax. | 0:10:18 | 0:10:22 | |
But what could be the reason for the same pattern | 0:10:22 | 0:10:27 | |
being permanently engraved in the rock of the Giant's Causeway? | 0:10:27 | 0:10:32 | |
The geological processes that form these columns took place over thousands of years. | 0:10:33 | 0:10:39 | |
But to understand what happened, we need to look at structures that last for only a few seconds. | 0:10:39 | 0:10:46 | |
Soap films are mostly thinner than wavelengths of light. | 0:11:03 | 0:11:07 | |
About 20,000 times thinner than a human hair. | 0:11:07 | 0:11:12 | |
They're almost not here. | 0:11:16 | 0:11:18 | |
Probably the thinnest thing you've ever looked at | 0:11:18 | 0:11:21 | |
and got information back from was a soap film. | 0:11:21 | 0:11:24 | |
Tom Noddy is one of the world's foremost exponents of bubble art. | 0:11:25 | 0:11:32 | |
The different colours on a bubble are different thickness of soap film. | 0:11:36 | 0:11:41 | |
So looking over the colours of a bubble, | 0:11:43 | 0:11:46 | |
you're actually looking at a contour map of the surface of the bubble. | 0:11:46 | 0:11:50 | |
Bang. | 0:11:57 | 0:11:59 | |
So, like everything in nature, bubbles are just trying to economise, | 0:12:03 | 0:12:06 | |
they're trying to get as small as they possibly can. | 0:12:06 | 0:12:10 | |
But in the case of bubbles, they can do it perfectly. | 0:12:10 | 0:12:13 | |
A single bubble in the air is always a sphere. | 0:12:13 | 0:12:17 | |
At first sight, it seems obvious that the bubble should be round. | 0:12:20 | 0:12:23 | |
But why is the sphere so special? | 0:12:24 | 0:12:28 | |
The sphere is one surface, no corners, infinitely symmetrical. | 0:12:36 | 0:12:40 | |
Of all the shapes this bubble could be, | 0:12:40 | 0:12:43 | |
the sphere is the one with the smallest surface area, | 0:12:43 | 0:12:46 | |
which makes it the most efficient shape possible. | 0:12:46 | 0:12:49 | |
And it is because nature loves to use her resources effectively | 0:12:53 | 0:12:57 | |
that we can see spheres everywhere we look. | 0:12:57 | 0:13:00 | |
The Earth is round | 0:13:01 | 0:13:03 | |
because gravity pulls the planet's bulk into a ball around its core. | 0:13:03 | 0:13:08 | |
Water forms into spherical droplets - | 0:13:10 | 0:13:12 | |
the shape minimises the amount of surface tension needed to hold the droplet together. | 0:13:12 | 0:13:18 | |
And a spherical shape gives simple life forms, | 0:13:21 | 0:13:24 | |
like this Volvox plankton, | 0:13:24 | 0:13:26 | |
optimal contact with their surrounding environment. | 0:13:26 | 0:13:29 | |
But not everything is spherical. | 0:13:32 | 0:13:35 | |
And because bubbles are so thin and flexible | 0:13:35 | 0:13:38 | |
?we can use them to create other shapes. | 0:13:38 | 0:13:41 | |
So, a single bubble in the air is always a sphere. | 0:13:43 | 0:13:46 | |
But if they touch each other, they can save material for both of them by sharing a common wall. | 0:13:47 | 0:13:53 | |
And so they do. | 0:13:53 | 0:13:55 | |
If they can save surface area by taking advantage of their environment, they will. | 0:13:55 | 0:14:00 | |
So when you've got just one bubble, the sphere is the most efficient shape. | 0:14:05 | 0:14:09 | |
But as we add more bubbles, we see the geometry changing. | 0:14:09 | 0:14:13 | |
So, in this case, | 0:14:13 | 0:14:14 | |
we've got four bubbles and you can see them meeting at a point. | 0:14:14 | 0:14:17 | |
But put a shape in the middle, we don't get a spherical bubble, | 0:14:17 | 0:14:21 | |
we get, in fact, a little tetrahedron. | 0:14:21 | 0:14:25 | |
With four faces, they're not exactly flat, they're parts of spheres, | 0:14:25 | 0:14:29 | |
but each time, the bubbles are trying to find | 0:14:29 | 0:14:32 | |
the most efficient shape for the arrangement of bubbles. | 0:14:32 | 0:14:35 | |
So now we've got six bubbles, we've got a little cube appearing in the middle. | 0:14:35 | 0:14:41 | |
This is nature's laws at work. | 0:14:41 | 0:14:43 | |
The universe is always trying to find the most efficient solution it can. | 0:14:43 | 0:14:48 | |
And as we pop them, the bubbles change, | 0:14:48 | 0:14:51 | |
finding the most efficient, until we're left with a sphere again. | 0:14:51 | 0:14:55 | |
It has no choice. | 0:14:55 | 0:14:57 | |
But what's most remarkable is that those solutions | 0:14:59 | 0:15:03 | |
are so often neat, geometric shapes. | 0:15:03 | 0:15:05 | |
Wow! | 0:15:08 | 0:15:10 | |
That's a dodecahedron. That's fantastic. | 0:15:10 | 0:15:12 | |
And they're almost perfect pentagons. That's really surprising. | 0:15:12 | 0:15:16 | |
-They're not bulging really very much at all. -That's right. | 0:15:16 | 0:15:19 | |
So, 12 bubbles around make 12 faces | 0:15:19 | 0:15:21 | |
and the most economical shape that they can make, | 0:15:21 | 0:15:24 | |
-the lowest energy, is the dodecahedron. -Yeah. | 0:15:24 | 0:15:27 | |
The soap bubble reveals something fundamental about nature. It's lazy. | 0:15:30 | 0:15:34 | |
It tries to find the most efficient shape, | 0:15:34 | 0:15:37 | |
the one using the least energy, the least amount of space. | 0:15:37 | 0:15:40 | |
And it appears there ARE fixed rules about how it finds | 0:15:44 | 0:15:48 | |
these economic solutions. | 0:15:48 | 0:15:50 | |
The bubbles are incredibly dynamic, but each time one pops, | 0:15:58 | 0:16:03 | |
they're always trying to assume the most efficient shape, | 0:16:03 | 0:16:07 | |
the one that uses the least energy. | 0:16:07 | 0:16:09 | |
And what they're doing is trying to minimise the surface area | 0:16:09 | 0:16:13 | |
across the whole bubble structure. | 0:16:13 | 0:16:15 | |
This beautifully illustrates one of the fundamental rules of bubbles, | 0:16:15 | 0:16:20 | |
which is, three walls of a bubble will meet always at 120 degree angle. | 0:16:20 | 0:16:27 | |
Wherever you are in the foam, it's the same law. | 0:16:27 | 0:16:32 | |
But if we, in fact, made each of the bubbles the same size, | 0:16:34 | 0:16:38 | |
a rather magical shape starts to appear. | 0:16:38 | 0:16:40 | |
The hexagon. | 0:16:51 | 0:16:53 | |
'And when you pack lots of hexagons together, | 0:16:54 | 0:16:58 | |
'the pattern that spontaneously emerges is the familiar sight | 0:16:58 | 0:17:02 | |
'of a tightly ordered honeycomb.' | 0:17:02 | 0:17:04 | |
So when we see that pattern at the heart of the beehive, | 0:17:04 | 0:17:10 | |
it's echoing some of the fundamental geometrical rules of the universe. | 0:17:10 | 0:17:15 | |
It's the principles we see in bubbles that help explain where all structure comes from. | 0:17:18 | 0:17:24 | |
And it's those same fundamental laws of shape that played out | 0:17:24 | 0:17:28 | |
on the Giant's Causeway in the distant geological past. | 0:17:28 | 0:17:32 | |
50 million years ago, before there was any thought of warring giants, | 0:17:33 | 0:17:37 | |
this area was very unstable. | 0:17:37 | 0:17:39 | |
There was a huge amount of volcanic activity. | 0:17:39 | 0:17:42 | |
The molten rock forces its way through the chalk bed beneath my feet | 0:17:42 | 0:17:46 | |
and then spread out, forming a huge lava lake. | 0:17:46 | 0:17:49 | |
As it cooled, the lake contracted, and as it shrunk, it cracked. | 0:17:54 | 0:17:58 | |
And as the cracks spread, they sought out the most efficient path | 0:18:01 | 0:18:05 | |
through the lava, | 0:18:05 | 0:18:07 | |
which turned out to be this neat hexagonal pattern... | 0:18:07 | 0:18:11 | |
..leaving this monument to the order and economy of nature. | 0:18:13 | 0:18:17 | |
'It's an engineering wonder, for sure.' | 0:18:31 | 0:18:35 | |
The Code reveals itself where you would least expect it. | 0:18:39 | 0:18:43 | |
It defines the shape of honeycomb. | 0:18:45 | 0:18:47 | |
'They've just done it for thousands of years. They were born to do it.' | 0:18:47 | 0:18:51 | |
And it forms Ulster's epic coastline. | 0:18:53 | 0:18:55 | |
'..they just don't seem to fit in to this rugged natural environment.' | 0:18:55 | 0:18:59 | |
'Fionn mac Cumhaill.' | 0:18:59 | 0:19:01 | |
And it appears in the lazy efficiency of a soap film. | 0:19:04 | 0:19:07 | |
'About 20,000 times thinner than a human hair.' | 0:19:09 | 0:19:12 | |
These natural codes are so fundamental | 0:19:14 | 0:19:17 | |
that they've been appropriated by artists and architects to shape the modern world. | 0:19:17 | 0:19:23 | |
CHEERING | 0:19:23 | 0:19:24 | |
So this is the Olympic stadium that was built in Munich in 1972, | 0:19:26 | 0:19:31 | |
also scene of a rather famous victory for England. | 0:19:31 | 0:19:36 | |
A rare one, 5-1 to us against Germany. | 0:19:36 | 0:19:39 | |
It's really stunning | 0:19:40 | 0:19:42 | |
but I'm quite surprised at how insubstantial it feels. | 0:19:42 | 0:19:45 | |
It feels as though it could blow away in the wind. | 0:19:45 | 0:19:49 | |
It's got those features you expect in nature, | 0:19:50 | 0:19:54 | |
very elegant, but rather delicate feel to it. | 0:19:54 | 0:19:58 | |
So it's almost more like a cobweb than a man-made structure. | 0:19:58 | 0:20:02 | |
In 1972, which you have to remember is pre the computer age, | 0:20:09 | 0:20:13 | |
it was very difficult to build structures like this. | 0:20:13 | 0:20:16 | |
The distribution of forces that's going on inside this roof | 0:20:16 | 0:20:19 | |
are incredibly complicated. | 0:20:19 | 0:20:22 | |
It would be almost impossible to calculate by hand a shape like this | 0:20:22 | 0:20:25 | |
that would be both stable and affordable. | 0:20:25 | 0:20:28 | |
But the revolutionary engineer Frei Otto realised | 0:20:28 | 0:20:32 | |
that you don't have to do these calculations by hand. | 0:20:32 | 0:20:35 | |
Otto was desperate to find new shapes and forms to build, | 0:20:38 | 0:20:42 | |
so he looked to nature, | 0:20:42 | 0:20:43 | |
and the fundamental principles of the Code, for inspiration. | 0:20:43 | 0:20:48 | |
What Otto did was to make models like this one here. | 0:20:49 | 0:20:52 | |
It's constructed out of string, wires and these poles. | 0:20:52 | 0:20:55 | |
It doesn't look like much | 0:20:55 | 0:20:57 | |
but when I dip the string inside the soap solution and pull it up, | 0:20:57 | 0:21:01 | |
something rather surprising happens. | 0:21:01 | 0:21:04 | |
You start to see these beautiful shapes beginning to emerge | 0:21:07 | 0:21:12 | |
inside a soap film. | 0:21:12 | 0:21:13 | |
And you can see that they're not just exact triangles, | 0:21:14 | 0:21:18 | |
you get wonderful curves and arcs | 0:21:18 | 0:21:21 | |
that Otto knew were inherently stable. | 0:21:21 | 0:21:24 | |
Oh, that's lovely, that one there. | 0:21:26 | 0:21:29 | |
The surface tension pulls the strings | 0:21:31 | 0:21:34 | |
into the most sparing shape for each arrangement. | 0:21:34 | 0:21:37 | |
What results is a shape that's not only stable | 0:21:38 | 0:21:41 | |
but remarkably striking too. | 0:21:41 | 0:21:43 | |
So he could make copies of these shapes, | 0:21:44 | 0:21:47 | |
make small little models, which would then be used to construct | 0:21:47 | 0:21:50 | |
the groundbreaking structures you see behind me. | 0:21:50 | 0:21:54 | |
Frei Otto started something of a revolution in architecture. | 0:22:03 | 0:22:08 | |
The sweeping curves of the Munich Stadium | 0:22:08 | 0:22:10 | |
are echoed in countless modern structures. | 0:22:10 | 0:22:13 | |
And although Otto discovered | 0:22:26 | 0:22:28 | |
the mathematical and aesthetic beauty of the Code in the 20th century, | 0:22:28 | 0:22:31 | |
there's evidence that this obsession with form | 0:22:31 | 0:22:35 | |
stretches back thousands of years. | 0:22:35 | 0:22:38 | |
These stone balls were found in Scotland and they date back | 0:22:48 | 0:22:51 | |
to the Neolithic period, which is over 4,000 years ago. | 0:22:51 | 0:22:55 | |
They sit very beautifully in the hands. | 0:22:55 | 0:22:57 | |
They found hundreds of these balls. | 0:22:57 | 0:23:00 | |
But it's not really clear what they were used for. | 0:23:00 | 0:23:03 | |
It's a bit of a mystery. | 0:23:03 | 0:23:04 | |
But imagine the amount of work that's gone into making these shapes. | 0:23:04 | 0:23:10 | |
For example this one here has got four different faces | 0:23:10 | 0:23:14 | |
arranged in a beautifully symmetrical manner. | 0:23:14 | 0:23:17 | |
This one here has six faces, a bit like a cube. | 0:23:17 | 0:23:22 | |
And you can see some of them are really intricate. | 0:23:22 | 0:23:25 | |
This ones got... I don't know how many nodules on there. | 0:23:25 | 0:23:29 | |
Some of them have got up to 160 different nodules. | 0:23:29 | 0:23:33 | |
But these stones really show an obsession with symmetry | 0:23:33 | 0:23:36 | |
and regularity, already, thousands of years ago. | 0:23:36 | 0:23:41 | |
This obsession with shape isn't unique to the ancient Scots. | 0:23:44 | 0:23:49 | |
We find it in other cultures all over the world. | 0:23:49 | 0:23:52 | |
The Egyptians had their pyramids, of course. | 0:23:53 | 0:23:56 | |
But it was the Greeks who first took this innate fascination with shape | 0:23:56 | 0:24:01 | |
and turned it into a subject of its own. | 0:24:01 | 0:24:04 | |
They believed that by understanding its principles, | 0:24:04 | 0:24:06 | |
they could describe the whole world. | 0:24:06 | 0:24:10 | |
And they gave a name to this new idea. | 0:24:12 | 0:24:14 | |
One which meant measuring the Earth. | 0:24:14 | 0:24:17 | |
They called it geometry. | 0:24:17 | 0:24:19 | |
The mainstay of Greek geometry was a discovery of five perfect shapes, | 0:24:22 | 0:24:27 | |
now called the Platonic Solids, after the Greek philosopher Plato, | 0:24:27 | 0:24:30 | |
who believed these were the building blocks of nature. | 0:24:30 | 0:24:33 | |
So we've got the tetrahedron with its four faces, | 0:24:33 | 0:24:36 | |
the cube with its six faces, | 0:24:36 | 0:24:38 | |
the octahedron with its eight faces, the dodecahedron, 12 faces, | 0:24:38 | 0:24:43 | |
and the most complicated shape of all, | 0:24:43 | 0:24:45 | |
the icosahedron, with its 20 faces. | 0:24:45 | 0:24:47 | |
Today these are more commonly known as dice. | 0:24:47 | 0:24:50 | |
We're all used to the familiar six sided dice, | 0:25:00 | 0:25:04 | |
but these four other shapes have also been used as dice for centuries. | 0:25:04 | 0:25:09 | |
What makes them perfect for the job is that they are so regular. | 0:25:13 | 0:25:18 | |
The faces of each are all the same shape. All meet at the same angles. | 0:25:18 | 0:25:23 | |
It means that there's no way of telling one end from another, | 0:25:25 | 0:25:29 | |
and that they are equally likely to land on any face. | 0:25:29 | 0:25:32 | |
But most surprisingly, | 0:25:34 | 0:25:36 | |
these are the only five shapes like this that can possibly exist. | 0:25:36 | 0:25:40 | |
They're the only perfectly symmetrical solids. | 0:25:41 | 0:25:44 | |
It's this almost magical symmetry which made the Greeks believe | 0:25:50 | 0:25:53 | |
that these shapes were so important. | 0:25:53 | 0:25:55 | |
They associated them with the building blocks of nature: | 0:25:55 | 0:25:58 | |
air, fire, earth, the cosmos and water. | 0:25:58 | 0:26:02 | |
These five shapes built the natural world. | 0:26:02 | 0:26:07 | |
It's very easy to dismiss this approach as naive. | 0:26:09 | 0:26:13 | |
After all, it's clear the world around us | 0:26:13 | 0:26:15 | |
isn't made out of just five neat geometric shapes. | 0:26:15 | 0:26:18 | |
But perhaps we should have more faith in this ancient intuition. | 0:26:21 | 0:26:25 | |
Because by laying out the laws of geometry the Greeks had in fact | 0:26:26 | 0:26:29 | |
tapped straight into the Code that shapes all nature. | 0:26:29 | 0:26:33 | |
It turns out that the Greeks were right about their shapes, | 0:26:40 | 0:26:45 | |
but they couldn't have known it, because the world that's governed | 0:26:45 | 0:26:48 | |
by their laws of geometry was completely invisible to them. | 0:26:48 | 0:26:54 | |
We can find traces of it deep underground. | 0:26:54 | 0:26:57 | |
This is the Merkers potash mine, | 0:26:59 | 0:27:01 | |
in the heart of what used to be East Germany. | 0:27:01 | 0:27:05 | |
It has long since stopped production, | 0:27:07 | 0:27:09 | |
but you can still explore its 3,000 miles of tunnels. | 0:27:09 | 0:27:13 | |
That's stunning, my God. I've never seen anything like this. | 0:27:32 | 0:27:36 | |
In fact I think this is the only one like this in the world. | 0:27:36 | 0:27:41 | |
It's absolutely amazing. Just goes on and on down through the cave. | 0:27:41 | 0:27:47 | |
The cave is full of perfectly cubic crystals that mirror | 0:27:50 | 0:27:54 | |
the geometric precision of the Platonic solids. | 0:27:54 | 0:27:57 | |
These cubes are amazing. Look at that. | 0:28:01 | 0:28:03 | |
The surface is perfectly flat | 0:28:03 | 0:28:04 | |
and if you run your finger down the edge here it's so sharp. | 0:28:04 | 0:28:08 | |
Comes down to this precise right angle. | 0:28:08 | 0:28:10 | |
An architect would be happy with that kind of precision. | 0:28:10 | 0:28:14 | |
Doesn't look real. | 0:28:16 | 0:28:18 | |
Even if you look inside you can see | 0:28:22 | 0:28:25 | |
all the cracks are right angles and geometric shapes. | 0:28:25 | 0:28:28 | |
Totally surreal. | 0:28:32 | 0:28:34 | |
Actually, this isn't anything particularly special. | 0:28:36 | 0:28:39 | |
This is just sodium chloride | 0:28:39 | 0:28:41 | |
which we know as salt. | 0:28:41 | 0:28:43 | |
This is what you stick on your chips. | 0:28:43 | 0:28:45 | |
But you don't generally see salt as big a cube as this one here. | 0:28:46 | 0:28:51 | |
How these crystals were able to form with such perfect precision | 0:28:54 | 0:28:59 | |
was a mystery until just over 100 years ago, | 0:28:59 | 0:29:01 | |
when X-rays were discovered. | 0:29:01 | 0:29:04 | |
Our understanding of our biology was transformed | 0:29:09 | 0:29:12 | |
by being able to see inside the human body. | 0:29:12 | 0:29:16 | |
And when X-rays were shone through crystals, | 0:29:17 | 0:29:21 | |
they uncovered another invisible world, | 0:29:21 | 0:29:24 | |
one that was both mysterious and geometric. | 0:29:24 | 0:29:27 | |
This was the world of the atom. | 0:29:29 | 0:29:31 | |
And these neat symmetrical images, | 0:29:31 | 0:29:34 | |
called diffraction patterns, | 0:29:34 | 0:29:36 | |
can reveal how individual atoms were put together | 0:29:36 | 0:29:39 | |
to form the crystals in this cave. | 0:29:39 | 0:29:42 | |
Essentially you've got to think of these a bit like shadows. | 0:29:44 | 0:29:47 | |
Just in the same way as an X-ray of my hand | 0:29:47 | 0:29:50 | |
is a shadow of the bones underneath the skin, | 0:29:50 | 0:29:52 | |
this is a shadow of the billions of atoms contained inside the crystal. | 0:29:52 | 0:29:57 | |
It's a little bit more complicated than that, but essentially, | 0:29:57 | 0:30:00 | |
these are 2D projections of the 3D structure inside this crystal. | 0:30:00 | 0:30:05 | |
So now we can analyse these patterns | 0:30:05 | 0:30:07 | |
and work out exactly how the atoms are arranged inside the salt. | 0:30:07 | 0:30:12 | |
And there is only one possible arrangement of these atoms | 0:30:15 | 0:30:18 | |
that can produce patterns like these. | 0:30:18 | 0:30:21 | |
And it too, unsurprisingly, is a cube. | 0:30:23 | 0:30:26 | |
This is a model of the structure of salt, and these gold balls | 0:30:28 | 0:30:32 | |
are the sodium atoms, and the green ones are the chlorine atoms. | 0:30:32 | 0:30:36 | |
And it's this atomic symmetry which explains | 0:30:38 | 0:30:42 | |
why were seeing such symmetry in these huge crystals. | 0:30:42 | 0:30:45 | |
But instead of just three atoms lining themselves up in this model, | 0:30:46 | 0:30:50 | |
we've got billions and billions of sodium and chlorine atoms | 0:30:50 | 0:30:53 | |
arranging themselves rigidly to create these perfect cubes. | 0:30:53 | 0:30:57 | |
What makes this cave so special | 0:31:03 | 0:31:05 | |
is that the perfect geometric arrangement of the atoms has been | 0:31:05 | 0:31:09 | |
maintained in these huge crystals. | 0:31:09 | 0:31:12 | |
They're a window into nature, and how it's governed by the laws of geometry | 0:31:15 | 0:31:19 | |
at the most fundamental atomic level. | 0:31:19 | 0:31:22 | |
But what's surprising is that we can find the same laws, | 0:31:30 | 0:31:34 | |
not just in rocks and minerals, but deep inside ourselves. | 0:31:34 | 0:31:38 | |
I've come to the Department of Chemical and Structural Biology | 0:31:40 | 0:31:45 | |
at Imperial College in London. | 0:31:45 | 0:31:46 | |
Steve Matthews studies how individual atoms | 0:31:46 | 0:31:49 | |
are built up into living systems, like you and me. | 0:31:49 | 0:31:54 | |
X-rays are obviously very powerful, high energy radiation, | 0:31:58 | 0:32:01 | |
so proteins are very delicate. | 0:32:01 | 0:32:04 | |
So we cool it down with a stream of liquid nitrogen gas | 0:32:04 | 0:32:07 | |
blowing over the crystal. | 0:32:07 | 0:32:09 | |
In this tiny wire loop is another crystal, | 0:32:11 | 0:32:14 | |
but this time, it's a crystal of protein, | 0:32:14 | 0:32:17 | |
part of the machinery of living cells. | 0:32:17 | 0:32:20 | |
Just as it's possible to work out | 0:32:22 | 0:32:25 | |
the atomic structure of the salt crystals with X-rays, | 0:32:25 | 0:32:26 | |
we can deduce the shape of the protein molecules in the same way. | 0:32:26 | 0:32:31 | |
Though the results aren't quite so easy to interpret. | 0:32:31 | 0:32:35 | |
I'd be hard pushed to actually give a name to that shape mathematically. | 0:32:36 | 0:32:40 | |
It looks like a blob. | 0:32:40 | 0:32:42 | |
It doesn't have a shape but many of these blobs | 0:32:42 | 0:32:44 | |
come together to form shapes. | 0:32:44 | 0:32:46 | |
There's a huge amount of structure and symmetry in this protein? | 0:32:56 | 0:33:00 | |
-Oh yes, definitely. -That's amazing. | 0:33:00 | 0:33:02 | |
We've got a cylinder now. | 0:33:02 | 0:33:04 | |
This is a real surprise to see geometry at work inside our bodies. | 0:33:04 | 0:33:09 | |
But evolution creates a very efficient process, | 0:33:09 | 0:33:12 | |
so symmetry is a very efficient way | 0:33:12 | 0:33:14 | |
of building these types of structures. | 0:33:14 | 0:33:17 | |
So by a process of evolution biology has discovered that... | 0:33:17 | 0:33:20 | |
Before us, yes. | 0:33:20 | 0:33:22 | |
..that geometry gives us the best shapes? | 0:33:22 | 0:33:24 | |
Right. But if you really want symmetry | 0:33:24 | 0:33:27 | |
we can move over to a virus particle. | 0:33:27 | 0:33:29 | |
-I recognise that. That's a icosahedron. -That's an icosahedron. | 0:33:29 | 0:33:33 | |
This is one of the shapes the Greeks were obsessed with. | 0:33:33 | 0:33:36 | |
-Seems that viruses are too. -That's right. | 0:33:36 | 0:33:38 | |
It's very striking cos the physical world | 0:33:38 | 0:33:41 | |
you somehow expect maybe salt crystals to be symmetric, | 0:33:41 | 0:33:44 | |
but the biological world everyone considers rather a messy one. | 0:33:44 | 0:33:47 | |
But this is not messy at all. This is beautiful. | 0:33:47 | 0:33:50 | |
The geometric shapes which you find at the heart of our cells | 0:33:55 | 0:33:58 | |
are the most efficient that nature can produce. | 0:33:58 | 0:34:00 | |
It seems like the Greeks could have been right after all. | 0:34:02 | 0:34:05 | |
It's their shapes that build the word around us | 0:34:05 | 0:34:08 | |
and produce its inherent beauty. | 0:34:08 | 0:34:10 | |
'An obsession with symmetry and regulatory.' | 0:34:17 | 0:34:20 | |
The Code dictates some shapes through efficiency... | 0:34:21 | 0:34:25 | |
'The building blocks of nature.' | 0:34:25 | 0:34:28 | |
..and others by providing frameworks for the tiniest particles there are. | 0:34:28 | 0:34:33 | |
'This is nature's code at work.' | 0:34:33 | 0:34:36 | |
'It fits beautifully in the hand.' | 0:34:38 | 0:34:40 | |
What the Greeks discovered in mathematical theory | 0:34:41 | 0:34:44 | |
is to be found at the heart of nature, from crystals to viruses. | 0:34:44 | 0:34:50 | |
It all seems very neat. | 0:34:50 | 0:34:53 | |
'Now I recognise that. That's an icosahedron.' | 0:34:53 | 0:34:57 | |
'The only one like it in the world.' | 0:34:57 | 0:35:00 | |
But our world isn't filled with precise geometric shapes. | 0:35:00 | 0:35:03 | |
It seems random, disordered. | 0:35:06 | 0:35:10 | |
To find out why we need to look to the sky | 0:35:15 | 0:35:18 | |
and the crystals that fall from it. | 0:35:18 | 0:35:20 | |
Snowflakes assemble themselves in the heart of frozen clouds | 0:35:24 | 0:35:27 | |
and fall to earth in a dazzling display. | 0:35:27 | 0:35:30 | |
VOICES CHATTER INAUDIBLY | 0:35:30 | 0:35:32 | |
And if there's one thing we know about snowflakes, | 0:35:35 | 0:35:38 | |
it's that they're all perfectly symmetrical. | 0:35:38 | 0:35:41 | |
-Wow. -Here we are. It's the snow lab. | 0:35:46 | 0:35:48 | |
Physicist Kenneth Libbrecht has created a lab | 0:35:48 | 0:35:51 | |
for growing and photographing these perfect crystals. | 0:35:51 | 0:35:54 | |
It's a cold chamber. Its actually cold on the bottom, very cold, | 0:36:02 | 0:36:05 | |
about minus 40 on the bottom and about plus 40 on top. | 0:36:05 | 0:36:09 | |
In a sense this machine is trying | 0:36:09 | 0:36:10 | |
to replicate what happens inside a snow cloud. | 0:36:10 | 0:36:13 | |
In a sense, that's right. It's not hard to grow ice crystals. | 0:36:13 | 0:36:16 | |
All you need is cold and water. | 0:36:16 | 0:36:18 | |
In the freezing conditions of the chamber, | 0:36:21 | 0:36:23 | |
we should be able to see the inherent geometry of the world | 0:36:23 | 0:36:27 | |
emerging in front of our eyes, as the crystals start to form. | 0:36:27 | 0:36:31 | |
Now, with any luck, we'll see some stars growing | 0:36:33 | 0:36:37 | |
on the ends of those needles. | 0:36:37 | 0:36:39 | |
As the temperature drops, | 0:36:41 | 0:36:42 | |
billions of water molecules coalesce out of the vapour, | 0:36:42 | 0:36:46 | |
spontaneously arranging themselves into these six pointed patterns. | 0:36:46 | 0:36:51 | |
At least, that's the theory. | 0:36:53 | 0:36:55 | |
But the reality turns out to be very different. | 0:36:56 | 0:36:59 | |
As Ken found out, even in laboratory conditions, | 0:37:02 | 0:37:05 | |
it's almost impossible to grow perfect snowflakes. | 0:37:05 | 0:37:09 | |
I don't think any of these are symmetrical. Not a single one. | 0:37:09 | 0:37:15 | |
What's the chance of getting | 0:37:15 | 0:37:17 | |
a perfectly symmetrical snowflake in here? | 0:37:17 | 0:37:19 | |
PROFESSOR SIGHS | 0:37:19 | 0:37:20 | |
The really beautiful snowflakes are about one in a million. | 0:37:20 | 0:37:26 | |
-Really? Wow. -Sometimes they've got five sides or three sides. | 0:37:26 | 0:37:32 | |
Five sides? Oh no! | 0:37:32 | 0:37:33 | |
Or three, or sometimes you get a blob. | 0:37:34 | 0:37:38 | |
It's a little hard to see | 0:37:38 | 0:37:40 | |
but this mess here is one funny looking snowflake. | 0:37:40 | 0:37:44 | |
We do tend to think of the snowflake as something | 0:37:44 | 0:37:46 | |
beautifully symmetrical, but actually that's just some | 0:37:46 | 0:37:50 | |
idealised notion and the reality is that they're actually | 0:37:50 | 0:37:53 | |
much more complex and irregular than we think they are. | 0:37:53 | 0:37:58 | |
If the molecular scale it's perfect, but as the crystal gets bigger, | 0:37:58 | 0:38:02 | |
the atoms don't hook on in always exactly the right way, | 0:38:02 | 0:38:05 | |
so when it grows, or how it grows depends on the environment, | 0:38:05 | 0:38:10 | |
the temperature and the humidity, so it starts growing one way, | 0:38:10 | 0:38:13 | |
then moves to a different spot in the cloud and grows a different way | 0:38:13 | 0:38:17 | |
and then a different way, so by the time the crystal hits the ground, | 0:38:17 | 0:38:21 | |
it's had a complex growth history, so it ends up as a complex crystal. | 0:38:21 | 0:38:27 | |
Ah, there it goes. | 0:38:27 | 0:38:29 | |
It seems you can only come so far | 0:38:38 | 0:38:40 | |
in trying to describe the world with simple geometry. | 0:38:40 | 0:38:43 | |
You can see it at work in the salt crystals in the crystal cave. | 0:38:43 | 0:38:47 | |
But in truth, that's one of the very few places in the world | 0:38:47 | 0:38:50 | |
where you'll find such crystals. | 0:38:50 | 0:38:52 | |
The bees use simple geometry to make their honeycomb, | 0:38:52 | 0:38:55 | |
but they've evolved to perform that task over many thousands of years. | 0:38:55 | 0:38:59 | |
And it's only occasionally that you'll ever find a purely symmetrical snowflake. | 0:38:59 | 0:39:05 | |
Because although everything is formed from tidy geometry at the atomic level, | 0:39:07 | 0:39:12 | |
that underlying order falls apart amid all the competing forces of our chaotic world. | 0:39:12 | 0:39:19 | |
Even the Giant's Causeway isn't really a neat hexagonal array. | 0:39:19 | 0:39:24 | |
It's almost there, but amongst the hexagons | 0:39:25 | 0:39:28 | |
there are pentagons, seven-sided columns, even a few with eight sides. | 0:39:28 | 0:39:32 | |
That network of perfectly interlocking hexagons just doesn't exist. | 0:39:32 | 0:39:37 | |
The world clearly isn't just built from simple geometric shapes. | 0:39:41 | 0:39:45 | |
The movement of the sea and the flow of the waves | 0:39:47 | 0:39:51 | |
are far too complicated to explain in these terms. | 0:39:51 | 0:39:54 | |
It's difficult to imagine how we could ever find a code to explain all this complexity. | 0:39:57 | 0:40:03 | |
But what if there are patterns in the chaos of nature? | 0:40:09 | 0:40:11 | |
Patterns that we're not aware of, but that we're attuned to on a subconscious level. | 0:40:11 | 0:40:16 | |
This barn was home to one of the artistic revolutions of the 20th century. | 0:40:56 | 0:41:00 | |
The painter who worked here had become disillusioned with conventional painting techniques. | 0:41:00 | 0:41:05 | |
In fact he stopped painting altogether and started splattering. | 0:41:05 | 0:41:08 | |
He was as controversial as the art he produced. | 0:41:12 | 0:41:17 | |
An arrogant, self-destructive drunk. | 0:41:17 | 0:41:19 | |
And perhaps a visionary. | 0:41:19 | 0:41:23 | |
His name was Jackson Pollock. | 0:41:23 | 0:41:26 | |
The floor you can still see is covered in paint. | 0:41:27 | 0:41:30 | |
What Pollock would do is to lay a canvas out on the floor. | 0:41:30 | 0:41:33 | |
And then - often intoxicated - he would drip and flick the paint all over the surface. | 0:41:35 | 0:41:40 | |
He'd come back week after week, adding more and more layers, more and more colours. | 0:41:40 | 0:41:45 | |
The result was extraordinary. | 0:41:52 | 0:41:54 | |
They're a huge outburst of abstract expressionism. | 0:41:54 | 0:41:58 | |
Just covered in paint, scattered all over the place. | 0:41:58 | 0:42:01 | |
Pollock's paintings sent shockwaves through the art world. | 0:42:05 | 0:42:09 | |
No-one had ever seen anything like this before. | 0:42:09 | 0:42:12 | |
Life Magazine declared him, artist of the century. Others derided his | 0:42:14 | 0:42:20 | |
efforts as the substandard dross of a drunken lunatic. | 0:42:20 | 0:42:25 | |
But though Pollock's paintings courted controversy, they were incredibly influential. | 0:42:26 | 0:42:32 | |
Not least because the apparent random squiggles are strangely compelling. | 0:42:34 | 0:42:40 | |
Many people have tried to copy Pollock's techniques. | 0:42:42 | 0:42:45 | |
Some in homage, others in attempted forgeries. | 0:42:45 | 0:42:48 | |
But nobody seems to be able to reproduce that magic that Pollock brought to the originals. | 0:42:48 | 0:42:53 | |
Pollock's paintings seem to have captured something of the wildness of the natural world. | 0:42:55 | 0:43:01 | |
But for a long time no-one could define exactly what it was that made his work so appealing. | 0:43:01 | 0:43:08 | |
Until it came to the attention of artist and physicist, Richard Taylor. | 0:43:08 | 0:43:14 | |
His unique approach was to invent a machine that can mimic Pollock's eccentric painting style. | 0:43:15 | 0:43:22 | |
It's all based on this apparatus called the Pollockiser. | 0:43:30 | 0:43:33 | |
The Pollockiser? That's lovely. | 0:43:33 | 0:43:36 | |
No, what it is essentially though is what's called a kicked pendulum and as you know a basic pendulum | 0:43:36 | 0:43:42 | |
is very, very regular like a clock, but at the top here what you've got | 0:43:42 | 0:43:46 | |
is a little device that can actually knock the | 0:43:46 | 0:43:47 | |
string as it's swinging around and that induces a very different type of motion called "chaotic motion." | 0:43:47 | 0:43:54 | |
So this would be like Pollock's hand, this would | 0:43:54 | 0:43:57 | |
be what he'd be trying to achieve with that sort of off balance, um, | 0:43:57 | 0:44:01 | |
-painting that we do? -Absolutely, so they're very similar processes. -It's very effective. | 0:44:01 | 0:44:06 | |
By recreating his technique, the Pollockiser is able to mimic | 0:44:08 | 0:44:13 | |
one particular aspect of the artist's work. | 0:44:13 | 0:44:17 | |
And that is that it appears more or less the same, no matter how closely you look. | 0:44:17 | 0:44:22 | |
You keep on seeing these patterns unfolding in front of you. | 0:44:22 | 0:44:27 | |
And with a Pollock painting, all of those patterns of different size scales look the same. | 0:44:27 | 0:44:32 | |
This is a property known as fractor. | 0:44:33 | 0:44:38 | |
So if I took pictures at these different scales and showed them to somebody, in some sense they wouldn't | 0:44:38 | 0:44:41 | |
be able to tell which one was the close and which one was far away? | 0:44:41 | 0:44:46 | |
Absolutely. So as long as you can't see that canvas edge, then you have no idea whether you're standing | 0:44:46 | 0:44:51 | |
30 feet away or 2 feet away, they'll both have exactly the same level of complexity. | 0:44:51 | 0:44:57 | |
More than any other painter, Jackson Pollock was able to consistently repeat the same | 0:44:58 | 0:45:04 | |
level of complexity at different scales throughout his paintings. | 0:45:04 | 0:45:08 | |
The fractor quality of his work appeals to us. | 0:45:10 | 0:45:14 | |
Because, despite seeming abstract, it actually mirrors the reality of the world around us. | 0:45:14 | 0:45:21 | |
When we started to actually analyse the buried patterns in there, this amazing thing emerged. | 0:45:21 | 0:45:27 | |
Deep down hidden in there is this level of mathematical structure. | 0:45:27 | 0:45:31 | |
So it's this really delicate interplay between something that looks messy and chaotic, but actually | 0:45:31 | 0:45:38 | |
it has structure and some underlying code hidden inside it? | 0:45:38 | 0:45:42 | |
Absolutely, and you can see it not only in his paintings, but you see it everywhere. | 0:45:42 | 0:45:46 | |
You know like a tree outside. | 0:45:46 | 0:45:48 | |
You look at the tree from far away you see this big trunk with a few branches going off. | 0:45:48 | 0:45:53 | |
Superficially they look cluttered and they look incredibly complex, | 0:45:53 | 0:45:57 | |
but your eye can sense that there's a sort of underlying mathematical structure to all it. | 0:45:57 | 0:46:02 | |
Pollock was the first person to actually | 0:46:02 | 0:46:06 | |
put it on canvas in a direct fashion that no other artist has ever done. | 0:46:06 | 0:46:10 | |
It really is the basic fingerprint of nature. | 0:46:10 | 0:46:15 | |
And that's what's most fascinating about Pollock's art. | 0:46:17 | 0:46:20 | |
In creating work devoid of conventional meaning, | 0:46:20 | 0:46:24 | |
he had in fact stumbled across something fundamental. | 0:46:24 | 0:46:28 | |
Because fractors are how nature builds the world. | 0:46:28 | 0:46:32 | |
Clouds are fractal, because they display the same quality. | 0:46:35 | 0:46:40 | |
Giant clouds are identical to tiny ones. | 0:46:40 | 0:46:43 | |
And it's the same with rocks. | 0:46:46 | 0:46:48 | |
From appearances you can't tell if you're looking at an enormous mountain, or a humble bolder. | 0:46:48 | 0:46:55 | |
And then there are living fractors like this tree. | 0:46:57 | 0:47:00 | |
It's quite easy to see how fractal it is, because if you take one of the branches it looks remarkably like | 0:47:03 | 0:47:08 | |
a small version of the tree itself. If you look at the twigs coming off the branch, they have the same shape. | 0:47:08 | 0:47:15 | |
So you see the same pattern appearing again and again at smaller and smaller scales. | 0:47:15 | 0:47:20 | |
And trees also demonstrate the great powers of fractal systems. | 0:47:22 | 0:47:27 | |
Their great complexity stems from very simple rules. | 0:47:27 | 0:47:32 | |
Now the reason the tree makes this shape is because it wants to maximise the amount of sunlight it gets. | 0:47:34 | 0:47:39 | |
Very clever. But also very simple, because you just need one rule to create this shape. | 0:47:39 | 0:47:44 | |
What the tree does is to grow, then divide. Grow then divide. | 0:47:44 | 0:47:49 | |
And by using this one rule, we get this incredibly complex shape we call a tree. | 0:47:49 | 0:47:54 | |
This is the same pattern repeating itself at a smaller and smaller scale. | 0:47:59 | 0:48:04 | |
It's a rule that's easy to test. | 0:48:08 | 0:48:11 | |
Grow a bit, then branch. | 0:48:11 | 0:48:13 | |
Grow a bit then branch. | 0:48:13 | 0:48:16 | |
And before our eyes a mathematically perfect tree appears. | 0:48:16 | 0:48:20 | |
But just as you never get a perfect snowflake, you never get a perfect tree either. | 0:48:22 | 0:48:28 | |
But allow for some natural variability, | 0:48:28 | 0:48:30 | |
different growing seasons, the wind, an occasional accident and the result is a very real looking tree. | 0:48:30 | 0:48:39 | |
And we find the same fractal branching system time and again throughout nature. | 0:48:39 | 0:48:45 | |
Deep down in there is this level of mathematical structure. | 0:48:47 | 0:48:52 | |
This idea that the patterns | 0:48:56 | 0:48:59 | |
of nature may be inherently fractal was pioneered in the 1970s by French mathematician, Benoit Mandelbrot. | 0:48:59 | 0:49:06 | |
This is his most famous creation. | 0:49:08 | 0:49:10 | |
The Mandelbrot Set. | 0:49:10 | 0:49:11 | |
Its systems of circles and swirls repeats itself at smaller and smaller scales forever. | 0:49:13 | 0:49:20 | |
And this infinite complexity was created from just one very simple mathematical function. | 0:49:24 | 0:49:31 | |
Mandelbrot's quantum leap was to suggest that similar simple mathematical codes | 0:49:35 | 0:49:41 | |
could describe not just trees, but many of the seemingly random shapes of much of the natural world. | 0:49:41 | 0:49:49 | |
INDISTINCT VOICES | 0:49:49 | 0:49:52 | |
And the most powerful demonstration of that belief comes, not from maths or nature, but from make believe. | 0:49:52 | 0:49:58 | |
INDISTINCT VOICES | 0:50:00 | 0:50:02 | |
A smart pencil... | 0:50:02 | 0:50:05 | |
In the 1980s, a computer scientist working for the aircraft manufacturer Boeing | 0:50:05 | 0:50:09 | |
was struggling to create computer-generated pictures of planes. | 0:50:09 | 0:50:16 | |
At Boeing, we discovered a method of making curved surfaces, | 0:50:16 | 0:50:18 | |
very nice curved surfaces, so I was applying it to airplanes. | 0:50:18 | 0:50:22 | |
And Boeing publicity photos have mountains behind their planes | 0:50:22 | 0:50:25 | |
and so I wanted to be able to | 0:50:25 | 0:50:28 | |
put a mountain behind my airplane, but I had no idea of the mathematics or how to do that, not a clue. | 0:50:28 | 0:50:32 | |
So you wanted something that however far or near away you were, it would look like something natural? | 0:50:32 | 0:50:39 | |
Yes, exactly, to show that these mountains were | 0:50:39 | 0:50:41 | |
real and live, in the sense that you can move around them with a camera. | 0:50:41 | 0:50:45 | |
So the algorithm needed to be invented | 0:50:45 | 0:50:48 | |
and so that's what I set my mind to doing was invent the algorithm that would produce the mountain pictures. | 0:50:48 | 0:50:52 | |
At the time, even creating a virtual cylinder was hard. | 0:50:54 | 0:50:57 | |
So generating the apparently random jaggedness of a realistic mountain range seemed impossible. | 0:50:57 | 0:51:03 | |
Then Loren found inspiration. | 0:51:03 | 0:51:07 | |
Coincidentally at that time, Mandelbrot's book came out. | 0:51:07 | 0:51:10 | |
He had pictures that showed what fractal mathematics could produce | 0:51:10 | 0:51:14 | |
and so wow, all I have to do is find a way to implement this mathematics | 0:51:14 | 0:51:19 | |
on my computer and I can make pictures of mountains. | 0:51:19 | 0:51:22 | |
Loren set to work to investigate how Mandelbrot's theories about | 0:51:24 | 0:51:28 | |
the real world could be used to make virtual ones. | 0:51:28 | 0:51:32 | |
This is a little film I made in 1980. | 0:51:33 | 0:51:36 | |
-And the landscape is constructed by me, by hand, of about 100 big triangles. -Yeah. | 0:51:36 | 0:51:42 | |
So that doesn't look very natural. | 0:51:42 | 0:51:44 | |
No, it's very pyramid-like. | 0:51:44 | 0:51:45 | |
So what we're going to do is take each of these big triangles and break it up into little triangles | 0:51:45 | 0:51:50 | |
and break those little triangles up into littler triangles, until | 0:51:50 | 0:51:52 | |
it gets down to the point where you can't see triangles any more. | 0:51:52 | 0:51:55 | |
What Loren had realised was that he could use the maths of fractors | 0:52:11 | 0:52:15 | |
to turn just a handful of triangles into realistic virtual worlds. | 0:52:15 | 0:52:20 | |
We turn the fractal process loose and instantly it looks natural. | 0:52:23 | 0:52:26 | |
We went from about 100 triangles to about 5 million. | 0:52:28 | 0:52:32 | |
And there it is. | 0:52:34 | 0:52:36 | |
And then we jump off the cliff. | 0:52:44 | 0:52:46 | |
You feel that it's a real three-dimensional world. | 0:52:46 | 0:52:49 | |
And we're swooping over the landscape. | 0:52:49 | 0:52:51 | |
Yeah, we're going from ten miles away to ten feet away | 0:52:51 | 0:52:56 | |
and all that detail was generated on the fly as we came in. | 0:52:56 | 0:53:00 | |
-In a few seconds. -And here's that fractal quality, this infinite complexity at work. | 0:53:02 | 0:53:07 | |
-It's exactly what I wanted. -Yeah. | 0:53:07 | 0:53:09 | |
By today's standards, this animation does not look like much. | 0:53:12 | 0:53:16 | |
But in the 1980s, no-one had ever seen anything like it. | 0:53:18 | 0:53:22 | |
If you did that by hand, to do that frame by frame, it would take you? | 0:53:26 | 0:53:30 | |
-100 years. -100 years and this took to generate? | 0:53:30 | 0:53:34 | |
It took about 15 minutes per frame on a computer that's about 100 times slower than my phone. | 0:53:34 | 0:53:39 | |
That one short film changed the face of animation and revolutionised Hollywood. | 0:53:42 | 0:53:49 | |
Loren went on to co-found Pixar, | 0:53:50 | 0:53:52 | |
one of the most successful film studios in the world. | 0:53:54 | 0:53:59 | |
Cars, monsters and, of course, toys owe their existence to the Code. | 0:53:59 | 0:54:06 | |
An empire built on the power of fractors. | 0:54:06 | 0:54:09 | |
Did you realise at the time the potential of the discovery you'd made? | 0:54:14 | 0:54:19 | |
Well, I knew that, | 0:54:19 | 0:54:21 | |
that within a half a second that it was a major discovery. | 0:54:21 | 0:54:25 | |
I've seen, you know, all the special effects, all the movies you can imagine, nothing was like that. | 0:54:25 | 0:54:30 | |
And my heart skipped. | 0:54:30 | 0:54:32 | |
And the power of fractors is still to be hidden in the fabric of Pixar movies. | 0:54:35 | 0:54:41 | |
They use the rule of repetition and self-similarity to create the rocks, clouds and forests. | 0:54:45 | 0:54:52 | |
In fact, the realism and complexity of these virtual worlds is only possible using mathematics. | 0:54:52 | 0:54:59 | |
Fractals are everywhere in these movies. | 0:55:08 | 0:55:11 | |
They generate the texture of the rocks. | 0:55:11 | 0:55:15 | |
And they bring the jungle alive. | 0:55:17 | 0:55:19 | |
That these pretend worlds are so realistic, | 0:55:23 | 0:55:26 | |
demonstrates the power of maths to describe the complexity of nature. | 0:55:26 | 0:55:33 | |
They're evidence that we have glimpsed the Code that governs the shape of the world. | 0:55:33 | 0:55:38 | |
But that Code is a complicated one. | 0:55:42 | 0:55:45 | |
If we want to understand the shape of the world, then we need to recognise | 0:55:45 | 0:55:48 | |
the simple geometry of form at work at the most basic level. | 0:55:48 | 0:55:52 | |
INDISTINCT VOICES | 0:55:52 | 0:55:55 | |
We need to understand that the universe is lazy. | 0:55:55 | 0:55:59 | |
And that it will always seek out the most efficient solution. | 0:56:01 | 0:56:05 | |
INDISTINCT VOICES | 0:56:05 | 0:56:09 | |
That at the atomic level, the world is structured around strict geometric laws... | 0:56:09 | 0:56:14 | |
INDISTINCT VOICES | 0:56:14 | 0:56:17 | |
..that were first recognised by the Greeks thousands of years ago. | 0:56:17 | 0:56:21 | |
We also need to appreciate the complexity of that geometry | 0:56:27 | 0:56:31 | |
playing out against the competing forces of the natural world. | 0:56:31 | 0:56:35 | |
And that means grasping how even the apparent randomness we see around us | 0:56:38 | 0:56:43 | |
is underwritten by mathematical rules like fractors. | 0:56:43 | 0:56:48 | |
Rules that can explain the patterns in everything. | 0:56:50 | 0:56:53 | |
From the chaos of Jackson Pollock's paintings, | 0:56:53 | 0:56:57 | |
to the structure of trees and the realism of virtual worlds. | 0:56:57 | 0:57:03 | |
And that's the beauty of the Code. | 0:57:04 | 0:57:06 | |
However complex we find our world, it provides a reason, | 0:57:08 | 0:57:12 | |
an underlying explanation for why things look and behave as they do. | 0:57:12 | 0:57:17 | |
INDISTINCT VOICES | 0:57:20 | 0:57:24 | |
This is nature's code of law. | 0:57:24 | 0:57:26 | |
Go to bbc.co.uk/code to find clues | 0:57:31 | 0:57:36 | |
to help you solve the Code's treasure hunt. | 0:57:36 | 0:57:38 | |
Plus, get a free set of mathematical puzzles and a treasure hunt clue | 0:57:38 | 0:57:42 | |
when you follow the links to the Open University. | 0:57:42 | 0:57:45 | |
Or call: | 0:57:45 | 0:57:52 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:57:55 | 0:57:58 | |
E-mail [email protected] | 0:57:58 | 0:58:02 |