The release date for my new science fiction novel has finally arrived—an excellent opportunity to spotlight its title, The Golden Ellipse.
They said there wouldn’t be any math …
For starters, in a work of literary fiction, the assumption of little or no math proficiency to enjoy a rich and rewarding reading experience goes without saying. This adage holds for my book as well. The eponymous golden ellipse featured within the rich mythology of my novel is a 24K gold oval disk with dimensions that meet the golden ratio of 1.61803398875 [1] (or the Greek letter Phi) with a sublime exactitude. In the context of my novel, the timeless enigma’s dark energy powers a beacon built 90,000 years ago by an alien race to shelter Earth’s dominant species from a hostile universe. (I’ll have more to say on Fermi’s Paradox and Drake’s equation.)
That is as far as I want to go on the classical definition of the golden ellipse. I am not a mathematician, so I will not regurgitate formulas here. Nor will I bore the pants off anyone with a long-winded treatise on Fibonacci’s sequence. Suffice to say that our universe is replete with illustrative examples of the golden ratio—its aesthetics and symmetry found throughout nature, art, architecture, corporate brands, even advertising. An abundance of videos, books, and articles exist on this fascinating subject well worth your time. I will highlight one here that I found to be a valuable resource and included in the bibliography of my book.
The Golden Ratio: The Divine Beauty of Mathematics by Gary B. Meisner and illustrations by Rafael Araujo. The word beauty in the title can also describe the intricate illustrations throughout its pages. Truly an excellent resource on the subject.
What is the golden ellipse within the context of my novel?
Like the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey [2], the roughly 9-inch wide golden ellipse occupies the heart of the story while defying a logical explanation. Even the quintessential pure-energy race with the intellect to use its timeless energy to power their Earthly beacon acknowledges its function remains shrouded in mystery. Moreover, the binary choice inherent in its application manifests in a glorious energization or cataclysmic destruction on a planetary scale. Akin to a coin flip, a successful connection using the golden ellipse hinges on another unquantifiable universal truth, random luck.
