Did the Universe Come with a Blueprint?

Have you ever looked at a snowflake or a nautilus shell and wondered who designed such beauty, and who did the math to bring about such perfection?

My husband, Al, and I recently had a very stimulating conversation that began with a classic “chicken and egg” question. Did the Geometry of the universe come first, meaning the shapes, the structures and the physical blueprints, or did the Mathematical Rules (the computation) exist first to tell matter where to go?

The more we talked about it, the more we realized that asking which came first might be the wrong question. We began to see Geometry (the form) and Computation (the math) as a Complementary Pair, two partners that emerged together rather than one after the other. As we went deeper, a bigger question came forward: who, or what, is directing the show?

The “How” and the “What”

When we look at the universe, we often try to separate the “how” from the “what,” and we have come to suspect that the two are inseparable. This question sits on the bridge between the “hard” sciences of thermodynamics and quantum physics and the “soft” sciences of psychology and consciousness. The more that science discovers, the more these fields appear to be describing one reality from different sides. If the universe is a symphony, then we need to talk about the Composer, the Sheet Music, and why it takes so much work to learn to play a new song.

The Quantum “Waltz”

In physics, we talk about Complementarity. The physicist Niels Bohr considered Complementarity an essential feature of quantum theory, and he saw it as a principle that reaches well beyond physics. It says that objects have certain pairs of complementary properties that cannot all be observed or measured at the same time.

For example, quantum physicists describe position and momentum as a complementary pair. You need both to describe a particle fully, and yet the more precisely you measure one, the less precisely you can know the other. They are like two sides of the same coin, and when the coin lands, you only see one side with certainty.

Where the Math Becomes the Shape

Modern physics is starting to point in this direction. Consider, for example, the Amplituhedron, a geometric object described in 2013 by the physicists Nima Arkani-Hamed and Jaroslav Trnka. In a simplified model of particle physics, they found that the outcomes of particle interactions, which normally take many pages of equations to calculate, can be read from the volume of a single geometric shape in an abstract mathematical space. In that case, at least, the math and the shape turn out to be one and the same.

This post is the first of three drawn from a series Al and I call the Architect and the Algorithm. In the next post, we go back to the very beginning, to the moment when vibration began to shape the first structures of matter, and we look at a 2025 study in which sound and electric charge arranged particles in midair.

What shapes in Nature stop you in your tracks? I would love to hear about them in the comments.

With curiosity and love,

Dr. Theresa and Al