By Jonathan Milne

William Blake came up with some wonderful, mysterious imagery about life, the Universe and everything. I love this fragment from Auguries of Innocence:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And Heaven In a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the Palm of your hand
And Eternity in an Hour

An augury relates to omens and divination. The Romans were into auguries in a big way. An ‘augur’ was a priest who interpreted the will of the gods in matters of war, religion and just about anything where the future conceals important but murky possibilities.

An augur holding a lituus, the curved wand often used as a symbol of augury on Roman coins.

Blake was using ideas which have become clearer through the evolution of fractal theory. One of the characteristics of a ‘fractal’ is that the parts reflect the whole. Blake was saying, literally, that the world is implied in a grain of sand. It is loosely equivalent to the plot in Jurassic Park, where tiny remnants of old DNA were used to recreate dinosaurs.

Could we recreate the Universe from a grain of sand? Suddenly our language gets into difficulty. If the Universe is everything that exists, how could you create it? Perhaps our language is wrong. Perhaps everything exists simultaneously and is disguised by ‘time’.

The cosmic microwave background spectrum measured by the FIRAS instrument on the COBE satellite.

Aside from speculation, scientists have come up with a picture of the Universe. The scale is so huge that our own little solar system wouldn’t even make it as a pixel. The beautiful mottled egg image is derived from ‘cosmic microwave background radiation’ which, according to theory, was started by the ‘Big Bang’, 13.7 billion years ago.

The expression ‘Big Bang’ is a metaphor rather than science. Nevertheless the residual ‘noise’ is amazing. After 13.7 billion years it is still lumpy and it has the ‘self similarity’ quality of fractals. It is William Blake in reverse. The entire cosmos, when photographed and reduced to a small scale, looks like a gorgeous grain of sand.