From the detailed design of the universe,
can we deduce the preferences of its Creator?
If the universe truly has a designer,
can we appreciate it like an architect's portfolio,
using the design details
to work backward to their aesthetic preferences?
I'm not asking if they exist,
but rather,
if they do exist,
what is their taste?
Hello,
everyone.
I'm Wang Lijie.
Today, I want to conduct a thought experiment.
Let's assume a Creator actually exists,
and then, like a detective,
extract clues from the blueprints of the universe.
When you look at an architect's work collectively,
you can definitely see their stylistic preferences.
What about the designer of the universe?
In this 13.8-billion-year portfolio,
what design languages are used repeatedly?
I've found at least five.
The first preference:
Self-similarity.
When you break off a piece of broccoli,
that small piece
looks almost exactly like the entire head.
If you break off an even smaller piece,
it still has the same shape.
This phenomenon is called a fractal,
where the parts and the whole are structurally similar.
But broccoli is just the beginning.
Zoom out further:
the way a tree's branches fork
is almost identical to how the main trunk forks.
The shape of a river's tributaries
is nearly the same as the shape of the entire river.
The bronchi inside your lungs
branch out twenty-three times,
each time following the same rules for angles and ratios.
It's the same with your vascular system.
From the aorta down to the capillaries,
the entire structure repeats the same branching pattern.
Now, let's zoom out to a cosmic scale.
Astronomers have discovered
that galaxies are not distributed uniformly,
but instead form massive filaments and voids,
known as the cosmic web.
The structure of this cosmic web
and the structure of the neural networks in your brain
are strikingly similar in their statistical characteristics.
In 2020, Italian astrophysicist Franco Vazza
and neuroscientist Alberto Feletti
conducted a study.
They compared simulated images of the cosmic web
with microscopic photos of neural networks in the brain.
They found that in terms of power spectrum density, node distribution,
and connectivity density, they almost overlap.
The scale of the universe is tens of billions of light-years;
the scale of a brain is about a dozen centimeters—
a difference of 28 orders of magnitude.
Yet, their network structures are almost identical.
If you put a photo of the cosmic web next to a brain slice,
without labels,
many people couldn't tell which is which.
If you think about this carefully,
it is truly incredible.
The brain is a biological organ evolved over billions of years;
the cosmic web is a large-scale structure sculpted by gravity
and dark matter over billions of years.
There is no causal relationship between the two;
neither one is imitating the other.
Yet, they look the same.
This implies a deeper organizational principle
that independently produces the same network topology
across completely different physical processes.
What does this show?
It shows the Creator has a strong preference:
Scaling the same template over and over again.
He doesn't design a separate solution for every scale.
He uses a simple rule
and lets it unfold automatically across all scales.
You could call this laziness,
or you could call it ultimate elegance—
generating maximum structure with minimum rules.
The second preference:
The spiral.
If you ask me
what the universe's favorite shape is,
my answer isn't the sphere;
it's the spiral.
Look at the Milky Way,
it's a spiral galaxy.
Look at a typhoon,
viewed from space,
it's a spiral.
Look at the arrangement of sunflower seeds:
34 spirals clockwise,
55 spirals counter-clockwise.
34 and 55 are adjacent Fibonacci numbers.
Look at a nautilus shell,
it's a logarithmic spiral.
Look at DNA,
it's a double helix.
The vortex of water going down a drain?
Also a spiral.
In 2025,
a very interesting study
was published in a physics journal.
Researchers proposed that spirals are ubiquitous
because they are the optimal path for energy dissipation during entropy increase.
In plain English:
When energy flows from high to low density,
the spiral is the most efficient path.
Like water flowing downhill,
if terrain permits,
it won't go in a straight line;
it will spiral.
Because spirals distribute energy through the widest space in the shortest time.
Think about what this means.
From the fingerprints on your hand
to the whorl on your head,
the typhoon beneath your feet,
to the galaxy above your head—
they are all spirals.
The spiral isn't a specific phenomenon of one field;
it's the fundamental geometric language the universe repeats at all scales.
This means the spiral isn't a stylistic choice by the Creator,
but an inevitable product of the laws of physics.
But look at it another way:
If the Creator is the author of those physical laws,
then designing them to produce spirals
is itself a preference.
Even more intriguing is the Fibonacci sequence.
Why don't sunflowers arrange their seeds randomly,
instead of strictly following the Fibonacci spiral?
Because this allows the most seeds to be packed into the smallest area.
The angle between each new seed
is approximately 137.5 degrees.
This is called the Golden Angle,
the golden ratio of a circle.
This angle has a magical property:
It is the angle least approachable by any rational number.
What does that mean?
It means seeds arranged at this angle
will never line up in a straight path;
they fill the space most densely and uniformly.
It seems
the Creator dislikes gaps;
he likes to pack space full.
The third preference:
Nesting.
Planets orbit stars;
moons orbit planets;
stars orbit the galactic center;
galaxies move around even larger galaxy clusters.
This orbital structure is layered,
like Russian nesting dolls.
What about the microscopic view?
In the Bohr model,
electrons orbit the atomic nucleus.
This image is strikingly similar to planets orbiting the sun.
Of course,
I must immediately mention a crucial difference.
Quantum mechanics tells us
that electrons don't actually orbit in circles like planets do.
An electron's movement is described by a probability cloud.
The Bohr model has been replaced by more precise quantum mechanics.
But one thing remains true:
Both gravity and electromagnetism follow the inverse-square law.
Meaning, the force is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
Because this mathematical structure is identical,
from the macroscopic to the microscopic,
a structure emerges where small things are bound by large ones to specific regions.
Gravity binds planets;
electromagnetism binds electrons.
The nature of the forces is completely different,
but the mathematical skeleton is the same,
resulting in the same geometric structure.
The Moon orbits the Earth;
the Earth orbits the Sun;
the Sun orbits the galactic center.
This is no coincidence.
It is a geometric necessity of the inverse-square law.
But think about it:
Why are the two most important forces in the universe—
gravity and electromagnetism—both inverse-square forces?
It's not logically inevitable.
You could design a universe where force intensity
is inversely proportional to the cube of the distance.
But in that universe,
stable orbits would not exist.
The inverse-square law is the only decay form known to produce stable, closed orbits.
That is a mathematical theorem,
not a conjecture.
The Creator chose the inverse-square law,
and the direct consequence of this choice
is a universe full of things orbiting other things.
From subatomic particles to superclusters,
the entire universe consists of layers of orbits,
layers upon layers of nesting.
He seems to really love this structure.
You could even say
the entire universe is a symphony written with orbits and nesting,
where different movements use different forces.
The fourth preference:
Near-symmetry,
but not perfect symmetry.
A very interesting feature of the universe is
that it is nearly symmetrical at all scales,
yet never perfectly so.
Your face is almost symmetrical,
but if you mirrored the left half
to create a perfectly symmetrical face,
it would look very strange to you.
Perfect symmetry feels unnatural.
The same is true in particle physics.
During the Big Bang,
matter and antimatter should have been produced in equal amounts.
Perfectly symmetrical.
If it were truly perfectly symmetrical,
they would have all annihilated each other,
leaving an empty universe of only photons.
But at that moment,
a tiny break in symmetry occurred.
For every billion antimatter particles,
there was one extra matter particle.
This one-in-a-billion asymmetry
constitutes all the galaxies in the universe today,
all the stars, and all of life.
If perfect symmetry equals death,
then a tiny asymmetry equals everything.
The Creator doesn't like absolute symmetry;
He likes being 'just slightly off.'
This 'offness' is not a flaw;
it is the ultimate secret.
Like syncopation in music,
it is that rhythm shifted by half a beat
that gives the melody its soul.
This pattern repeats in many more places.
Snowflakes have hexagonal symmetry,
but no two points on a single flake are identical.
Leaves are bilaterally symmetrical,
yet the two halves never perfectly overlap.
Galaxies exhibit rotational symmetry,
but their spiral arms vary in length.
The DNA double helix is symmetrical,
but the base sequences of the two strands are completely different.
Think about your own body.
Your heart is on the left;
your liver is on the right.
Your left hemisphere excels at language and logic;
your right hemisphere excels at space and intuition.
If your brain were perfectly symmetrical,
with each hemisphere doing the exact same thing,
that wouldn't be an upgrade.
It would be redundancy;
it would be a waste.
It is precisely because the halves are different
that a division of labor occurs.
Division of labor leads to integration,
which creates a whole more powerful than the sum of its parts.
Asymmetry is not a failure of symmetry;
it is the evolution of symmetry.
The Creator's taste seems to be:
use symmetry to establish order,
and asymmetry to inject vitality.
The fifth preference:
Emergence.
We've discussed emergence many times on this channel.
Here, I'll mention it only in terms of the Creator's preference.
A single ant knows nothing;
its brain has only 250,000 neurons.
Yet, a colony can build sophisticated temperature-controlled nests,
wage wars,
and maintain fungal farms.
No individual ant possesses the blueprint for the nest,
yet the nest gets built.
A single bee knows no geometry,
but the hexagonal honeycombs they build are one of nature's
most efficient space-filling structures.
A starling's brain cannot perform complex calculations,
but thousands of them flying in a murmuration
create breathtakingly beautiful patterns—
like a giant, living, constantly morphing sculpture.
Emergence means that
if you put enough simple individuals together,
and let them interact according to simple rules,
complex order will appear automatically.
No blueprint needed.
No commander needed.
No design drawings needed.
If you were an omniscient and omnipotent creator,
you could design the universe in two ways.
The first is to draw blueprints for everything in advance:
how every river flows, the shape of every tree,
how many arms each galaxy has—
all preset in advance.
This is top-down design.
The second is to write just a few fundamental rules,
then press the start button,
and let everything grow on its own.
The universe chose the second way.
This is the Creator's deepest preference,
and perhaps his most awe-inspiring taste.
He doesn't design the results;
he designs the rules.
Then he lets the rules generate endless possibilities.
He doesn't draw snowflakes;
he writes the bond angles of water molecules.
He doesn't draw the Milky Way;
he writes the gravitational constant.
He doesn't draw you;
he writes the coding rules for DNA.
This design philosophy has a chilling characteristic:
when you only set rules and not outcomes,
the results are unpredictable.
Even if you know all the rules,
you cannot calculate all the outcomes in advance.
It's not due to a lack of computing power,
but because some emergent phenomena are fundamentally unpredictable.
Anderson's 1972 paper title is the answer:
"More Is Different."
If even the Creator cannot foresee emergent outcomes,
then the existence of you and me
is also a surprise to the Creator.
He wrote a few rules about quarks and electrons;
13.8 billion years later,
these rules emerged into beings that can question the rules themselves.
He sowed the laws of physics,
but consciousness grew.
This might be the most unexpected piece in his portfolio.
Alright.
Let's look at these five preferences together.
Self-similarity:
The same pattern repeating across all scales.
Spirals:
The optimal geometry for energy flow.
Nesting:
Small systems bound within larger ones,
layer upon layer.
Broken symmetry:
Creating everything through tiny imperfections.
Emergence:
Defining only rules,
not results.
Have you noticed?
These five preferences point to a deeper design philosophy:
Using the least amount of things
to generate the most.
Economists would call it maximizing efficiency.
Information theorists would call it optimal compression.
Physicists would call it the Principle of Least Action.
Mathematicians would call it elegance.
And Buddhism has a term for it too:
Dependent Origination.
Things aren't manufactured individually;
they arise naturally through a web of causes and conditions.
The Creator doesn't create things;
He creates conditions for all things to emerge.
If you accept this premise,
you reach an awe-inspiring yet unsettling conclusion:
The Creator's preference is not control.
Quite the opposite.
His preference is letting go.
He wrote the rules,
and then stepped away.
He let the universe generate and evolve on its own,
letting things emerge that even he didn't foresee.
So, the question is:
If the Creator's preference is letting go,
rather than control,
why do you still expect an external force to arrange your life?
Perhaps the Creator's greatest message is hidden in his design style.
He has given you the rules;
as for the rest,
he trusts you to grow on your own.
But there's one thing I'm unsure of.
Did he choose to let go,
or is letting go the only possible choice?
If emergence is the universe's underlying logic,
then control might never have been an option.
Maybe it's not that the Creator prefers letting go,
but that the mathematical structure of the universe dictates
that letting go is the only way to produce complexity.
This question...
I've thought about it for a long time.
There's no answer.
I'll leave it to you.
Do you think the design style of the universe
is more like an artist,
or more like a mathematician?
Does he have taste,
or is he taste itself?
If you have thoughts,
I'll see you in the comments.
I'm Wang Lijie.
See you next time.