Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Luck Be A Lady

While walking downtown recently I overheard a conversation of cosmic significance between two otherwise ordinary-looking men walking behind me. One of them brought up sacred geometry, noting: "If you know about numbers, you know everything -- even the code of the universe." His friend agreed, adding, "Yeah, you can use that for betting."

It never occurred to me that what worked for Solomon's Temple might work at OTB, but hey, you never know.

4 comments:

Mark D. said...

Ha!

I did have a mathematics professor who once told me that math was the original language of the universe -- the one that God used when constructing the cosmos. Everything, at its core, is numbers, he said. An interesting fellow.

Pentimento said...

Hmmm, that is interesting. But does that mean that when God spoke the world into existence, he spoke in advanced math?

You may have heard of gematria, an ancient esoteric practice that assigns numerical values to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and uses it to determine other values and meanings in things like Bible verses.

Unknown said...

Pentimento, a pretty fascinating book that touches on this is called Ubiquity by Mark Buchanan, in which he posits a mathematical underpinning to all manner of events, from forest fires to magnitudes of earthquakes to stock market behavior. Cool stuff if you ever feel like checking it out.

This sort of stuff gladdens my heart, and I suspect it would gladden the heart of the Favorite Lutheran Composer (J.S. Bach).

Pentimento said...

You are surely right about the Favorite Lutheran Composer! Did you know that Schoenberg spent some time as a Lutheran too? He was born a Catholic, had a transitional Lutheran period, and later embraced the Judaism of his forebears. He probably saw himself as the heir of Bach's musical gematria.