Pssst! You! Yeah, you... are a passenger on a planet... on a blue-green planet that's orbiting a golden star. And right now we're traveling through a place in our yearly orbit where something is happening in the ocean around Maui - something that baffles scientists, even though it's been happening annually for millennia. We are orbiting through the place that we call April and May. Brain coral, however, call this "the time for sex." Eggs and sperms are released into the water, and so many are released that within an hour the water is cloudy with them. How billions of eggs and billions of sperms know to enter the ocean and have sex simultaneously is a mystery. But, we do know that brain coral sex happens at just the right point in our planet's relationship with the sun and with the moon. This guarantees minimal tides, so it increases the chance for sperms and eggs to meet.

The date: four centuries before Christ. The place: Greece. The man, Euclid, invents a geometry that becomes the bedrock of Western science. No book sells more copies than Euclid's geometry text (except for the Bible) until the 20th century.

The date: mid-1800's. The place: Europe, where mathematicians are still struggling, after more than 2,000 years, to prove one of Euclid's axioms. So... they take a fresh approach: they set out to prove that IF Euclid were wrong about this, then absurd and contradictory consequences would result. However... they are flabbergasted: even though the great Euclid is wrong, NO contradictions appear. Instead, what appears is a whole OTHER geometry with its own shapes, its own measurements, its own rules. It is completely consistent. No matter how hard mathematicians try to prove it wrong, they can't. So... they give it a name: hyperbolic geometry. Hyperbolic geometry is so radical it ends up forming the basis of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Hyperbolic geometry is so outrageous that it's impossible to represent it with equations.

The date: 1954. The place: Latvia. A girl named Daina Taimina is born. She grows up knitting, sewing and crocheting. As an adult, teaching mathematics at Cornell University, she rocks the world of science. She proves that even though the shapes of hyperbolic geometry cannot be represented with equations, they can be represented with crochet.

Now mathematicians are crocheting. And they're finding that Mother Nature has been using hyperbolic geometry all along. Its ruffled, convoluted shapes appear in parsley, lettuce, kale, kelp - and in brain coral. These shapes also appear YOUR BRAIN and mine.

Now, as our planet is transporting us through the place in our orbit where the brain coral are having sex in the ocean around us, I'm wondering about OUR brains. Our brains are not shaped like boxes. Our brains have the convoluted, hyperbolic shapes that challenge almost 25 centuries of Western thinking. Does this mean that if I want to think outside the box, all I have to do is USE MY BRAIN?

This is Harriet Witt, your guide for this little ride on our passenger planet.


If you have any questions, drop Harriet an email: harriet@passengerplanet.com


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