There’s one kind of semi-mathematical crackpottery that people frequently send to me, but which i generally don’t write about. Given my background, I call it gematria – but it covers a much wider range than what’s really technically meant by that term. Another good name for it would be numeric pareidolia. It’s been a long time since I’ve written about this kind of stuff, and someone just sent me a pretty typical example, so what the hell. It revolves around a mess that he put together as an image, which is pretty much a classic example of obsessive silliness.
The general idea of this kind of silliness is finding some kind of numeric
pattern, and convincing yourself that there’s some deep, profound truth behind that pattern. There are a couple of typical kinds of this: number/letter correspondence (classical gematria, which uses the fact that the hebrew characters are used both as letters and numbers, so a word can be interepreted as a number, and vice versa), distance coding (like the infamous “torah codes”,
where you find words “hidden” in a text by picking out characters according
to some pattern and using them to form words), and simple numeric patterning (where you take numbers – generally some sort of constant – and find
some sort of pattern supposedly hidden in its digits). Todays crackpottery
is the third kind – it’s written by a guy who believes that there are mystic secrets encoded into π and the square root of two that were put there by God, and that the existence of those patterns are proof of the existence of God.
This little bundle of rubbish – like all of the kinds of things I described
above – are examples of pareidolia involving numbers. As
I’ve written about before, we humans are amazingly good at finding patterns. We’ve
got a strong natural talent for looking at things, and finding structures and
patterns. That ability serves us well in many of our ordinary endeavors. The
problem with it is that there are apparent patterns in lots of things. In fact, if
you look at things mathematically, the odds of any text or constant not
containing interesting patterns is effectively nil. If you’re willing to consider
all sorts of patterns, then you can find patterns in absolutely everything. The question that you need to ask is whether or not the pattern is simple the result of our ability to find patterns in noise, or whether it’s something deliberate.