Der goldene Schnitt und das Mysterium der Schönheit
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Abstract:
The golden section and the mystery of beauty
What is beauty? It is not difficult for us to name things which we perceive as beautiful, harmonic or pleasant. But at the same time this property seems to evade all objective and scientific descriptions. A general law has not yet been found behind the mystery of beauty.
On the path towards understanding beauty, modern natural sciences have reencountered and again focused interest on the golden section, a special mathematical ratio whose proportions were first recognised thousands of years ago. Many striking examples show that the golden section is not only related to beauty and good proportions in very different cultures but also - as recent research in natural sciences shows - plays a key role in the development of life. It seems strange that the special role of the golden section - recently acknowledged by biologists, mathematicians and cultural scientists - had already been described several centuries ago in the proportio divina, the holy ratio. Religious descriptions of this sort take on a completely new level of significance through recognition by modern science.
The facts and parallels presented by modern research on the golden section are impressivc but not satisfying. For it seems that hiding behind all phenomena there is a universal pattern which is more than only a ratio of numbers. What then is the golden section’s principle that is preferred by nature during evolution and which we as human beings experience as beautiful or divine? Knowledge of the golden section reveals a character that forms the basis of beauty and the evolution of life: the manifestation of the indissoluble relationship between the whole and its intrinsic contrasts.
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