Science and Faith

I wanted to explore the relationship between science and religion, in particular transcendental numbers and scientific constants. Each photo explores this in a different way and hopefully allows the viewer to draw a unique conclusion about the concept. I think each of these numbers reminds us how small our knowledge of the universe really is.

$The wave nature of light.$

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The wave nature of light.

$The wave nature of light.$
$The transcendental nature of prayer. The votive candle is used in many religions as a focus for a prayer. Pi is one of the most widely used transcendental numbers which occurs in nearly every branch of mathematics. None of the 5 trillion digits calculated to date repeat.<br /> <br /> Can we represent prayer exactly?$
$The Feigenbaum constant. Every chaotic system that corresponds to this description will bifurcate at the same rate. Feigenbaum's constant can be used to predict when chaos will arise in such systems before it ever occurs.$
$Cactus Calculus. I met a biologist once who told me that plants often use the golden ratio to optimize patterns of leaf growth. In the cactus you can see the golden spiral spinning outward.$
$Vorticity Streamfunction solution for two opposite charge Gaussians (How a waterskipper moves). I did a matlab project to solve the partial differential equation and make a video of the vortex flow shown above. Movie link: <a href="http://www.heatherdillon.com/Science/Math/2008-12-AMATH581/6795384_xetLy#434825075_PyDYQ">http://www.heatherdillon.com/Science/Math/2008-12-AMATH581/6795384_xetLy#434825075_PyDYQ</a>$
$Sensing Spirals$
$Butterfly Filter. Graphical description of the Fast Fourier Transform process which systematically continues to factor the problem in two. This process allows the FFT routine to drop to O(N log N ) operations.$

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