For those of you that don’t check out the comments section of my blog, I got an interesting one last night. The author claims to be Stuart Mitchell. There is no way to tell because it was posted on a newly activated Blogger account under the name Stuart. The profile has no info at this time.
However, I don’t doubt the validity of the post. The comment states:
Stuart said...
hi there,
I was very interested by your observations and felt I should clear up a couple of your queries.
There are today exactly 213 surviving cubes/rectangles/stone blocks protruding from the arches in the Lady Chapel at Rosslyn. 2 have been lost to antiquity due to theft or accident. It is known that Oliver Cromwell once used Rosslyn Chapel as a stable for his horses and the theory abounds that they were broken off then. But whatever the case is, 2 are missing. We have mapped out the entire ceiling and pattern sequence in a topological diagram and finding the identity of the missing cubes was fiarly easy. For example, one of the missing cubes is in the middle a line of cubes that are repeated 9 times, interestingly belonging to the percussion line of a medieval drum that emits one particular note/cube throughout its part. That one was straight forward. The other was not quite so easy but is part of a recurring phrase that repeats 3 times in the work. By the time we arrived at this missing moment, we already had an understanding of the way the piece was developing and instinctively applied a note that worked with the melodic development of the Motet.
Regarding some of the media discrepancies and inaccurate comments that have occurred over the past few months in the press, the subject of Rosslyn's music and its relationship with Cymatics/Chladni patterns is complexed enough for most news articles to want to shape the story for their readers in an understandable way, however, at the sacrifice of the scientific and aesthetic knowledge one has to absorb in order to arrive at the musical conclusion. Everything is 'boiled down' to suit the reader. It is beyond our control and subject to the viewpoint of the publication(s).
I have heard of Matsushita’s project but do not know what results have developed for him in this area.
I hope this has shed some light for you on some of the inconsistencies you have experienced in the past months regarding our project.
Best regards
Stuart Mitchell
So it would seem that I have been another victim of the mass media mediocrity on a few of the points I brought up. So it goes…
BK
1 comment:
Hi, The idea of the Rosslyn cubes representing a piece of music is way off the mark. After four years work on the cubes I have solved the puzzle. It is based on the medieval idea of squaring the circle, which meant dividing the circle into quarters (not turning a circle into a square).
A one dimensional view of the ceiling cubes (on paper) clearly shows four right angles turned in upon themselves under four arcs (a circle). Each of these right angles is in turn part of a right angled triangle. You simply count the number of cubes on each side of the triangles as if they were cm. measurements in a geometry sum. By applying basic trigonometry to these four right angled triangles (sines, cosines, tangents, Pythagoras' theorem etc on the right angled triangles) you generate three sets of figures that when plotted on a 9X9 grid reveal the solution.
As the puzzle occurs in a medieval church the solution is as one would expect religious. Medieval man was obsessed with 3's and the Trinity in particular. On the 9X9 grid the plotted figures form four spokes of a wheel which spell out (revolving) words, GOD, HOLY GOST and MUN (the medieval spelling for MAN). Thus the Trinity or three (the circle) becomes four (a square).
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