The most beautiful number in the universe

1.618 - phi
Fibonacci sequence - a progression in which each term is equal to the sum of the two preceding terms 1-1-2-3-5-8-13-21

Phi also was derived from the Fibonacci sequence - a progression famous not only because the sum of adjacent terms equalled the next term but because the quotients of adjacent terms possessed the astonishing property of approaching the number 1.618

Phi has the role of fundamental building block in nature. Plants, animals and human beings all possessed dimensional properties that adhered with eerie exactitude to the ratio of phi to 1.
The ancients assumed the number phi must have been preordained by the Creator of the universe. Early scientists heralded 1.618 as the Divine Proportion.

Female bees always outnumbered male bees and if you divide the number of female bees by the number of male bees in any beehive in the world, you always get the same number - phi.
Nautilus - a cephalopod mollusc that pumps gas into its chambered shell to adjust its bouyancy. The ratio of each spiral’s diameter to the next is phi.

Leonardo da Vinci’s famous male nude - The Vitruvian Man - named after Marcus Vitruvius, the brilliant Roman architect who praised the Divine Proportion in his text De Architectura.
Da Vinci was the first to show that the human body is literally made of building blocks whose proportional ratios always equal phi.

Measure the distance from the tip of your head to the floor. Then divide that by the distance from your belly button to the floor. Guess the number you get ?
Measure the distance from your shoulder to your fingertips. Then divide it by the distance from your elbow to your fingertips.Hip to floor divided by knee to floor. Each of us is a walking tribute to the Divine Proportion.

Chaos of the world has an underlying order. When the ancients discovered PHI, they were certain they had stumbled across God’s building block for the world and they worshipped Nature because of that. And one can understand why. God’s hand is evident in Nature, and even to this day there exist pagan, Mother Earth-revering religions. Many of us celebrate Nature the way pagans did and don’t even know it. May Day is a perfect example, the celebration of spring...the earth coming back to life to produce her bounty. The mysterious magic inherent in the Divine Proportion was written at the beginning of time. Man is simply playing by Nature’s rules and because art is man’s attempt to imitate the beauty of the Creator’s hand, there are a lot of instances of the Divine Proportion.

Greek Parthenon, the pyramids of Egypt, the United Nations Building in New York, organizational structures of Mozart’s sonatas, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, works of Bartók, Debussy and Schubert. Stradivarius used it to calculate the exact placement of the f-holes in the construction of his famous violins.

Formally known as pentagram or pentacle, as the ancients called it - this symbol is a five intersecting lines that formed a five-pointed star. It is considered both divine and and magical by many cultures. Because when you draw a pentagram, the lines automatically divide themselves into segments according to the Divine Proportion.
The ratios of line segments in a pentacle all equal phi making this symbol the ultimate expression of the Divine Proportion. As a result, the five-pointed star has always been the symbol for beauty and perfection associated with goddess and the sacred feminine.

I felt bored staying in Penang thus The Da Vinci Code entertained me. I have to play helpful daughter-in-law, at the same time dodge myself from mean remarks ranging from ‘bila nak balik bertiga?’ to ‘ooo...duduk kat damansara rupanya, tak pandai makan sambal belacan la ni...’ Grrrr !!! I can take chili many times pedas than you capable of, buster !

Either Penangites are a bunch of mean people or they have dark sense of humour...