I read in a recent article in the New Scientist about a new theory about the shape of the Universe:
According to Weeks, the WMAP results point to a very specific illusion - that our Universe seems like an endlessly repeating set of dodecahedrons, football-like shapes with a surface of 12 identical pentagons. If you exit the football through one pentagon, you re-enter the same region through the opposite face and you keep meeting the same galaxies over and over again...
Which is really interesting to me, since the Chair of the painting department of the college I go to uses the dodecahedron and friends in his artwork quite extensively, to issue connections between all sorts of things, the periodic table, the color wheel, time, space and yes, probably even the shape of the universe.
I saw him on campus and told him about the article. he gave me a big grin and started telling me a small tale that started with, "I I really shouldn't tell you this, but I had a hallucination [my note: during the 60's, at Drop City, the first "hippy commune" - hmmm?],that the universe was shaped like a four dimensional dodecahedron." I don't know what a hyper-dodecahedron would look like, but he then went on to tell me that the idea of the Universe being shaped as a dedecahedron wasn't a new idea at all, but is a very old idea indeed.
Like, really old. We're talking Plato old, who paired off the platonic solids with the four elements. There wasn't a fifth element, but "Heaven" was associated with the dodecahedron. Heaven, as in, Everything, The Universe.
What makes this still interesting is that I painted a ball-shaped object made up of pentagons one semester before I ever even saw a painting by my Chair. Mine had Bettie Pages all over it. I was trying to paint a tesselation in four point perspective.
I don't know what to make of this, it may be just a bunch of interesting related facts. But isn't it funny that thousands of years have spanned, and the same conclusion has been made about one very specific thing?
Like, really old. We're talking Plato old, who paired off the platonic solids with the four elements. There wasn't a fifth element, but "Heaven" was associated with the dodecahedron. Heaven, as in, Everything, The Universe.
