These Wooden Fibonacci Spiral Shavings Are Simply Perfect

Having a stressful day? You came to the right place as we have a very short wood shaving video that could bring some zen to your chaotic day. Before sharing this video with you, curious people, I found myself watching it seven times – hitting the replay button right after the 52 seconds of meditation. Simply watching the video is already soul-satisfying, however, since this is Interesting Engineering, we will provide a good balance between soul and intellectual satisfaction. So, open up that sleeping pineal gland and prepare yourself for the Fibonacci’s number talk.

Fibonacci’s simplicity and perfection

If you sometimes ask yourself how it is possible for nature to be so raw yet extremely precise and perfect then we will give you one answer. Fibonacci’s number. Many things in nature are physically deemed beautiful because they naturally follow a numerical sequence which produces a perfect geometrical proportion. Some examples are the spiral of the nautilus shell, the carefully arranged center of a sunflower, the formation of the African continent, even the spiraling shape of galaxies. And most importantly, for this article, the spiraling pattern that wood gives off when it is shaved off. All of these natural perfections can be explained using Fibonacci’s number.

The sequence initially starts with two numbers, 1 and 1, and the following numbers are always the sum of the preceding two.

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144…

If you plot these numbers in square tiles and draw a curve from the two diagonal corners, you will see a spiral shape infinitely unfolding until the sequence is stopped. This is the sequence that you see in the shavings as Paul Sellers glides the sharp wood plane across the piece of wood. The most mind blowing question about all of this is how did nature know that the Fibonacci sequence is the perfect trend to follow in order to display elegance and beauty? How did the process of natural selection predict this perfect sequence and cleverly adapted to it? These are just some of my rhetorical questions. If you have any questions of your own or perhaps you’d like to enlighten us with your thoughts then feel free to write them in the comment box below.

If you prefer to just relax and not think about anything then, by all means, loop the video as much as you like.

Via Paul Sellers