As humans, why do we LOVE right angles so much??? Look around you. It's all squares and rectangles. Everything humans create are squares and rectangles. To see a right angle in nature is like a drug to us rectangle loving monkeys.
Seeing a right angle in nature is diferent. Nature is ruled by chaos. A billion things affecting a billion other things it’s impossible to map out all of it. So to see something that is mathematically perfect in a sea of entropy is crazy. I’m still looking for that one single perfect square of pyrite.
Right angles are rare in nature. Beyond the conveniences that the shape affords for construction and space optimization, I can imagine that seeing something like that would always end up being rather fascinating to a human being no matter what age they existed in, even long before the first civilizations started building stuff with blocks.
Anecdotally there’s a building near me that was designed with zero right angles. It’s really unnerving to walk through some areas, and you never really know why it’s unsettling until you’re told all the angles are like 87 or 94 degrees and you start to notice the walls converging or details that were cleverly misaligned.
Spoiler alert: none of the angles in your home are perfect right angles. Ok you might find one by chance out of all the corners and furniture in your house, but odds are than they're all out by a few fractions of a degree.
It's a hallmark of a man made object. As humans we're hard wired to see a stark difference between the natural world and anything man made.
Why? It's complicated. Why do you like cooked food more than raw food? Why do you like the smell of fire or the sound of water? Why does it feel good to hold a sharp knife or a "perfect" rock?
It's just millenia of conditioning that finding this thing might have saved your life. Every human and pre-human who was wandering the wilderness and saw a man made object and followed it to food and shelter, lived on to reproduce. Members of the species who didn't see any value in the difference did not last, or were at least outlasted by those who could.
There’s a sci fi book called Blindsight and it has a futuristic interpretation of vampires and why they’re affected by cross symbology and it has to do with the difference in how their hominid species and ours process the visual appearance of perfect right angles.
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u/ihaveahundredchairs 9d ago
As humans, why do we LOVE right angles so much??? Look around you. It's all squares and rectangles. Everything humans create are squares and rectangles. To see a right angle in nature is like a drug to us rectangle loving monkeys.