u/TheMrCurious

I teach kids how to build and launch fiberglass high-power rockets! I created the camp to inspire them, and nothing says inspiration like launching a rocket over 5,000 feet using the same fuel as NASA’s rockets! I also make it completely free to eliminate the high cost barrier to entry. One of my favorite parts is that the rockets are taller than some of the kids. That’s been one of my goals from the start.

I’m aiming to train 1,000 kids and have them build 1,000 rockets! This past Sunday we launched in Muncie at the AMA field, and it was an incredible experience. I set up about 27 rockets from my cohorts at the Indiana State Museum and the Fishers Parks Maker Playground, where I ran my build sessions.

I can’t wait to see what these kids do later in life. Indiana will have the highest rockets per capita in the world! 🚀

A few weeks back, after many iterations of the fractal torus model, I created an algorithmic artwork called Tortoise, made in tandem with AI. As part of the Nameless framework, I had landed on the Hopf fibration as an important structure for defining physical reality. I took an artistic leap after this... overlaying two oppositely rotated Hopf fibre bundles, then repeating the whole structure again and again at the interstices formed by their intersections, to form a fractal torus. This differs from other torus visualisations I've seen, not only in its use of Hopf fibres, but in the fractal arrangement, which produces that "many, many eyes" quality or the "wheels within wheels" quality.

Studying it from different angles, I realised, to my shock, that this structure had many many connections to scientific concepts, myths and symbols across the world and across history:

Science: the black hole and white hole paradigm, wormholes

Sacred geometry: Flower of Life, Lotus of Life, Triskelion, Yin Yang

Religious symbols: Sri Yantra on Kurma, Shatkona, Swastika, Tree of Life, Thousand Petalled Lotus, Reclining Vishnu, Samudra Manthan, Shivlingam, Avalokiteshvara, Ezekiel's Wheel, the Celtic Cross

Sacred architecture: Muqarnas and Islamic geometric patterns, Rose windows

Visionary art made in altered states, such as Alex Grey's

Contemporary design: even the OpenAI logo

To show how all these might derive from one source, I built a system that varies the parameters of the same root Tortoise artwork until it matches each symbol. Then I made a visualiser where you can click any symbol, read about the connection, and study the match visually.

I'm not claiming these are all derived from this single structure. Each connection is pattern-matched at this stage, and the scientific ones especially are speculative. I claim only the visual match, not an actual connection. But there are too many to ignore. Perhaps what the ancients meditated upon is the same structure science is reaching towards, and the same structure seen in altered states of consciousness. If the universe is sound based, perhaps the wave-structure formed by the primordial sound corresponds to a similar fractal torus structure?

Many of these connections already exist in literature and in esoteric theory. Some were abstract, some pointed directly to a torus, though not, as far as I know, to this particular variation. This is therefore a synthesis of many people's work over millennia, seen through the lens of my own. I'm assembling it with humility and respect, hoping we notice that we are all telling the same story through different lenses.

I have made 26 connections so far, and I hope to add more. I'm giving equal weight to each tradition, so if you spot flaws or biases in the text or visual, they aren't intentional, and I hope to improve these over time.

Artwork “Tortoise” and the visualiser at: https://nurecas.com/tortoise?o

Video by francofabioh on Instagram

I wasn't sure what to do with the necklace because the one on the left has been great for HS + ColdPenShot. I think I have the gear and bow to switch to RainOfArrows (or I could switch to PoisonPenShot...).