A Mysterious Design That Appears Across Millennia (2)

So now we've heard about this amazing pattern from the point of view of mathematics and from physics and now art and archaeology.

So that leads us to the question what was there about this pattern that this ancient culture found so important that they put it on their most important building?

So for that, we look to the world of anthropology and ask the question, What was the worldview of the culture that made this?

And this is what we learn.

This pattern is life.

And as you can see, life's complicated.

It's complicated.

But not only is life complicated,

life is also aperiodic in the sense that every event, every happening, every decision will make the future unfold differently, often in ways that are impossible to predict.

Yet, in spite of the complexity and in spite of a future that's impossible to predict, there remains an underlying unity that holds everything together and gives rise to everything.

Let's see how that works in a design much like the one Peter Lu found in Uzbekistan.

This is that design.

Now, it turns out this is actually based on this set of Penrose tiles, which are reducible to these shapes.

And in order to draw these shapes, the medieval craftsmen who did this would have done them by using these construction lines.

And I add here that the construction lines don't appear in the final work.

But if we add them back, we have this.

And now if we weave them together, we will have this.

And now if we hide the tiles and just look at the construction lines, we see this.