Heroes Not Zombies

I noticed this on a wall recently. First, I find this beautiful. I find it very appealing. Second, it expresses one of the commonest, most fundamental patterns in the universe – let’s refer to it as branching.

Because I’m doctor, I often start by thinking about the human body, and in the body there are many, many examples of this branching structure. Perhaps the most obvious in the respiratory system. We breathe in air and it travels down the trachea (some people call the trachea “the windpipe”). After a short distance it branches into two tubes, one heading to the left lung and one to the right. From there on there, the pattern repeats, branching into smaller and smaller passageways, until, the smallest ones end in little bunches of grapes, called “alveoli” (OK, I know, they aren’t actually grapes! They just look a bit like that!) Similarly, the vessels which distribute the blood around the body, start from a big one right out of the heart, which branches into smaller and smaller vessels, the further away it gets from the heart, till in the tips of our toes and fingers, in the skin, the vessels become hair like (“capillaries”). The blood then gets back to the heart following a similarly patterned set of vessels (“veins”) coursing along the tiny ones, which join together to make bigger and bigger ones, till one big one channels all the blood back to the heart.

Does that pattern remind you of anything? The journey from mountain springs to river estuaries perhaps? Or trees!

Sometimes I wonder if that’s one of the reasons we find trees so appealing? That they echo one of our most fundamental internal structures.