Organic shapes in art examples11/21/2023 Everyone can recognize that as a pattern, but no stripe is like any other stripe. I think a very familiar example of that would be the zebra's stripes. We sense that there is something regular or at least not random about them, but that doesn't mean that all the elements are identical. But many patterns that we see in nature aren't quite like that. Traditionally, we think of patterns as something that just repeats again and again throughout space in an identical way, sort of like a wallpaper pattern. I left it slightly ambiguous in the book, on purpose, because it feels like we know it when we see it. The stunning photographs were curated by the designers at Marshall Editions, a publisher at the Quarto Group in London, which licensed the book to the University of Chicago Press.īall spoke to about his book and inspirations. Yet he also offers enough detail to intrigue scientists and artists alike. "The dry layer at the surface tries to shrink relative to the still-moist layer below, and the ground becomes laced with tension throughout," he writes. The explanations Ball offers are simple and graceful, as when he explains how a soaked patch of ground can dry into a cracked landscape. "It's when you see several of them side by side in glorious detail that you start to get a sense of how nature takes a theme and runs with it," he says. The vivid photographs in the book are vital, Ball explains, because some of the patterns can only be fully appreciated through repetition. Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way It Does His first book, published in 1999 ( The Self-Made Tapestry), and a trilogy, published in 2009 ( Nature’s Patterns: Shapes, Flow, Branches), explore the subject of natural patterns, but neither has visuals as rich as his latest. In Patterns in Nature, Ball brings his own background as a physicist and chemist to bear as well as more than 20 years of experience as an editor for the scientific journal Nature. Whereas natural selection might explain the why of a tiger's stripes-a strategy to blend in with shadows in grasslands and forest- the way that chemicals diffuse through developing tissue can explain how pigment ends up in bands of dark and light, as well as why similar patterns can crop up on a sea anemone. Thompson's ideas didn't clash with Darwin's theory, but they did point out that other factors were at play. Scottish zoologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson was pushed to publish his own treatise in 1917 explaining that even nature's creativity is constrained by laws generated by physical and chemical forces. Yet one person saw all this as "runaway enthusiasm," writes English scientist and writer Philip Ball in his new book, Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way it Does. The peacock's plumage, the spots of a shark must all serve some adaptive purpose, they eagerly surmised. When Charles Darwin first proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859, it encouraged science enthusiasts to find reasons for the natural patterns seen in beasts of the land, birds of the air and creatures of the sea. The curl of a chameleon's tail, the spiral of a pinecone's scales and the ripples created by wind moving grains of sand all have the power to catch the eye and intrigue the mind.
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