Legacy Matters

Ship of Pearl, Coils of Time

I love beautiful images.  They give me great pleasure and, well-chosen, represent a truth that can't be expressed in words.  For some time, I've been looking for an image of a human life.  I wanted the image to show different stages of life spiraling into increasing states of consciousness.  I wanted it to represent entelechy  - that vital force that directs an organism toward full realization of its potential, a force that drives us all.  I wanted both the acorn and the oak.

I think I've found it.  It's a  neutron radiograph by W. Fecych of a chambered nautilus that I found at the MIT Nuclear Reactor Laboratory.  Unlike x-rays which see mostly the differences in density, neutron radiographs are used to see materials where hydrogen is present.  The neutron radiograph is more ghostly, more spirit-like, than a regular photograph of the living carnivorous nautilus living in the dark with its lensless eyes, waving hungry tentacles, "the great white sharks of its day."

It's the beautiful shell that's inspired scientists, poets and philosophers from the times of the ancient Greeks - the great legacy of a primeval creature.    Since finding the radiograph I've learned so many wonderful things that  I am convinced that this is just the image I want.

The Nautilus is a cephalopod, a mollusk.  Its spirally coiled shell consists of a series of chambers; as the nautilus grows it secretes larger chambers, sealing off the old ones with thin septa. The animal lives in the largest and newest chamber. The shell wraps around itself as it grows with the earliest stages always in the middle.

Nautiloids, once one of the dominant groups found in the oceans of the world, are living fossils. Living on the deep ocean floor in the Pacific, it is near immortal, surviving the cosmic collision that doomed the dinosaurs, sixty five million years ago.  The chambered nautilus has been been around for 100, 200, 500 million years in different estimates, maybe the oldest living creature still around.

To the ancient Greeks, the shell of the chambered nautilus was a symbol of perfection.  Mathematically, it can be described as a logarithmic spiral though not  the same logarithmic spiral the Greeks called The Golden Ratio.  It is a Fibonacci sequence with each chamber or vault exactly 6.3% larger than the last.  It grows outward from old to new in a growth pattern similar to that of the human embryo.  The chambered nautilus is the symbol of the John Templeton Foundation

It embraces Sir John's ideas and vision for discovery, for rigorous scientific inquiry, and for innovation, and is emblematic as a window on visible and invisible worlds.

Last fall, NPR's Morning Edition had a series to explore the intersection of art and science.  An interview with Manjul Bhargava reveals him to be an artist of music and math, a 28 year old full professor of number theory at Princeton University and a master of the "tabla a small Indian hand drum used to create music with rhythmic, precise patterns"

Number theory is the type of math that describes the swirl in the head of a sunflower and the curve of a chambered nautilus.  Bhargava says it's also hidden in the rhythms of classical Indian music, which is both mathematical and improvisational. He sees close links between his two loves -- both create beauty and elegance by weaving together seemingly unconnected ideas.

Courtesy of The MIT Press Journals, I read Joseph Lim's piece about  Structural Prototypes from Seashells and  learned that the chambered nautilus "as a study in two opposite kinds of spaces: the successive diminution of tiny chambers and the open-ended space that an infinite coil implies."

The chambered nautilus is a cephalopod, a free-swimming shellfish, both mobile and carnivorous.  The chambers, also called  vaults, act as submarine ballast tanks for the creature to vary its bouyancy in water. "With the aid of a siphuncle (a central tube connecting all chambers), the nautilus is able to pass varying amounts of nitrogenous gas and fluid to rise or submerge at will."

The father of the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr,  also named Oliver Wendell Holmes, was a physcian, esssayist, novelist who invented the stethoscope and coined the word anesthesia.  A friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also a transcendentalist and poet.    His poem, The Chambered Nautilus is justly famous and one of the favorite poems of the 19th century.  (editor's note: I once lived in the Oliver Holmes apartments on Wendell St. in Cambridge.  I admire the transcendentalists and revere Emerson.)

Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year's dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap, forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathèd horn!
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:  --

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!

Our human life is a journey from the acorn to the oak, from birth to death, expanding ever outward into larger understandings of the world and our place in it, until we no longer need our shells as our spirit unwinds from the body into the unchambered ocean of reality.