Five minutes
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Five things from this site, in plain words, no math
This site is a reading room for one question: is the universe ordered, and are we inside the order. That sounds like homework. It is not. Here are five things from the shelf that you can see for yourself in a minute each. Nothing on this page needs any math. Each one links to the page where it lives, with the full story and something you can play with.
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1 of 5
The Moon fits the Sun
Hold a pea at arm's length and it covers the Sun. Hold it up at night and it covers the Moon. The Sun is four hundred times bigger than the Moon and four hundred times farther away, so from here they look the same size. There is no reason for this. It is why we get total eclipses, why helium was found in the sky before it was found on Earth, and it will stop being true in a few hundred million years, because the Moon is drifting away an inch and a half a year.
Read the coincidences -
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Sand that draws the note
Sprinkle sand on a metal plate and run a violin bow down the edge. The sand jumps off the parts that shake and settles on the parts that hold still, and what is left is a picture of the note. Play a higher note and you get a different picture. A sound has a shape, and you can watch it arrive.
Bow the plate -
3 of 5
The angle a sunflower knows
Every seed in a sunflower is placed one turn of 137.5 degrees after the last. That one angle is the only one that never lines the seeds up in rows and never leaves a gap. Pinecones and pineapples use it too. On the sunflower page there is a dial; set it to 137.5 and the head locks into a sunflower, nudge it to 137.3 and the whole thing falls apart into spokes.
Turn the dial -
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The beetle at the window
A psychiatrist named Carl Jung was listening to a patient describe a dream about a golden beetle when something tapped the window. He opened it and caught a beetle, the nearest thing to the one in her dream that flies in Switzerland, and handed it to her. He spent twenty years and a Nobel physicist's help trying to say what a coincidence like that is. His page is for anyone who keeps seeing 11:11 on the clock.
Read about Jung -
5 of 5
The sky over your head right now
The sky page draws everything that is up there this minute, where it actually is, with the Sun and Moon lit the way they are lit and the stars behind them even in daylight. Drag it to look around. Press the full screen button and sit with it for a while.
Open the sky
When you want more
The lineage on the home page walks the question from Pythagoras to Einstein in eight stops, and the open questions are the four things physics still cannot settle. The lexicon explains every word the site uses in a sentence or two. And the instrument next door will cast your chart from where the planets were the minute you were born, and play it.