On 1/24/10 9:15 AM, "Mary" <[email protected]> wrote: > Dave, why do you think it is that everyone, everywhere feels correctness or > satisfaction in the Golden Ratio?
My take is "Man is the measure" and the measurer. All life evolved within the physical and biological constraints of nature. Man is a product of and integral part of life, nature. As we evolved over millions on years our eyes habituated to the natural world. Because of that the nature that is also just "looks right." As we first start to build and just accommodate our own physical proportions, ie enough height and width of a doorway to accommodate our passage, we are building in the proportions of nature. Later as we formalize this process measuring nature, intellectualize these measurement into theory we come up with the Golden Ratio. If we move forward to the last 10,000 years, our big build period, all kinds of other human motives influence our building practices but our eyes have changed very little. So everything else being equal, built objects that follow this proportion are still more visually pleasing than those that don't. This is just one of these ratios we find in nature. My recent reading of Dawkins The Ancestor's Tale introduced me Klielber's Law which holds generally true over 20 magnitude of size from the smallest organism to largest. It says that brain size to body size ratio on a log scale is a proportion of 3 to 4. Metabolic rate also follows this proportion. Wikepedia "Adolf Zeising, whose main interests were mathematics and philosophy, found the golden ratio expressed in the arrangement of branches along the stems of plants and of veins in leaves. He extended his research to the skeletons of animals and the branchings of their veins and nerves, to the proportions of chemical compounds and the geometry of crystals, even to the use of proportion in artistic endeavors. In these phenomena he saw the golden ratio operating as a universal law.[42] In connection with his scheme for golden-ratio-based human body proportions, Zeising wrote in 1854 of a universal law "in which is contained the ground-principle of all formative striving for beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art, and which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical; which finds its fullest realization, however, in the human form." Dave Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
