Possibly as soon as in the next few months, the large hadron collider nearing completion at CERN outside of Geneva will be smashing little tiny particles at obscene speeds into one another in the hopes of finding the elusive Higgs bosun, the "god particle" that may provide teleological hope to the Standard model of physics, or might just destroy the universe as we know it. No joke. Admittedly the unleashing of antimatter and the subsequent rendering of all of us into non-existence is highly unlikely, but even the scientists behind this enormous underground atomic racetrack acknowledge that the total obliteration of matter (and maybe even space!) can't be ruled out entirely.
I bring up this hypothetical of impending doom in part because it's emblematic of pattern recognition. While we don't yet know what the physicists will find, that doesn't mean we don't have guesses. In fact, several theories already exist, including multidimensional vibrating strings and branes that form the constituent particles of our universe, even though we only exist in three dimensions, plus time. So while there really isn't any empirical data about multidimensional N-space and our puny brains can't even conceive it, we've got brilliant physicists postulating its existence. Even scientists see patterns everywhere. The human condition makes us see giraffes in the clouds, Jesus burnt into our toast, and buy into malarkey like astrology and numerology. I like to think of myself as scientific, but I don't really know much about physics, so I know better than to postulate about whether the large hadron collider will kill us all. I'm simply not qualified, and a large part of science is an awareness of when to suspend judgment.
Maggie Macnab's Decoding Design applies the science of mathematics to design elements of typography and graphics, so it should totally be up my alley. As an occasionally aesthetically-impaired former mathematician who happens to work in design, I love that the restrictive rules of the grid let me manufacture an appealing layout without exercising any artistic judgement. The grid, that end-all-be-all of layout, is modular arithmetic. Decoding Design addresses shape and form numerically, but it also does a lot more, and that's why, as someone who does know something about number theory (as opposed to numerology), Maggie Macnab's book is both wonderfully fascinating and endlessly frustrating.
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