A follow-up on the previous post–
The 20th century artist Giacometti has done some drawings that show our world as mostly empty space with thin lines holding it together; they remind me of the particle traces that commonly illustrate physics experiments.
Here’s one of his drawings:
And here’s a lovely montage of a physics particle-trace image with a photo of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá superimposed over it:
(linked from another post of Vahid Ranjbar’s, on ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Tablet of the Universe)
This is leading me to visualize the world as a very complex series of mathematical operations (for lack of a better word) which in turn generate matter (probably space too). Unfortunately I can only make vague noises about math, I lost track at calculus, so maybe my admiration is misplaced. But we do know our physical world, and the atoms comprising it, are mostly empty space, and that’s the feeling Giacometti’s drawing evokes.
On a similar topic, Mandelbrot sets and fractals were popular in the 80’s and 90’s; there was even a ms-dos program called fractint for generating them, which I had a lot of fun playing with. A good book on some of the research is James Gleick’s “Chaos: making a new science” originally published 1988.