MinxterBLOOM

In news of the exuberant and exultant, a surfer-dude of a free-lance physicist may have scribbled the equations linking classical and quantum physics. In other words, Garrett Lisi may know the math for the theory of everything.  This set of equations relies on patterns of eight.  See the UK Telegraph article for details of Garrett Lisi and what physicists say. Look at the image posted in several articles; rather spirographic, isn't it?

A.B., Achenblog friend from near Boston, commented today that the pattern looks like the backside of a blossom of Queen Anne's Lace, Daucus carota. The backside of the flower
E8 pattern from McMullen and Stembridge!  I love that she cares about the underneath of flowers.  See this series of photos and text about Queen Anne's Lace from the Microscopy website (UK).

A.B. also notes that Katherine Hepburn once said that you could not but believe in God when you saw a  Queen Anne's Lace flower.  I recall this poem:

Queen Anne's Lace

Queen Anne, Queen Anne, has washed her lace
(She chose a summer's day)
And hung it in a grassy place To whiten, if it may.

Queen Anne, Queen Anne, has left it there,
And slept the dewy night;
                                   Then waked, to find the sunshine fair, And all the meadows white.

                                   Queen Anne, Queen Anne, is dead and gone
(She died a summer's day),
                                    But left her lace to whiten in each weed-entangled way!

--- And this from William Carlos Williams.

QUEEN ANNE'S LACE 

Her body is not so white as anemone
petals nor so smooth-- so remote a thing.
It is a field of wild carrot* taking the
field by force; the grass does not raise above it.
Here is no question of whiteness, white as can be,
with a purple mole at the center of each flower.
Each flower is a hand's span of her whiteness.
Wherever his hand has lain there is a tiny purple blemish.
Each part is a blossom under his touch to which the
fibres of her being stem one by one, each to its end, until the
whole field is a white desire, empty, a single stem, a cluster,
flower by flower, a pious wish to whiteness gone over-- or nothing.

Fibonacci, anyone?  God's fingerprints are very likely such number patterns.

The umbel image of Queen Anne's Lace  taken by D. Eagan for WI Dept. of Naural Resources