Why did Tesla say that 3, 6, and 9 was the key to the universe? - Quora
If it was a real quote, then let me first try to convince you why anyone could believe this from an evolutionary perspective and then ill speculate more on Tesla.
The number 3 is the most important number after 1 and 2, or perhaps just as important. Because when your born, you normally see two parents. And you see single entities in instants of time.
But you mainly act on impulse until you grow abit older.
You see humans giving you nourishment with symmetric body parts.
Two eyes, two arms, two legs, two breasts.
Once you realise there is such thing as your self, then there are three important people - your self, and your mum and dad (assuming dad hasn’t been killed fighting sabre tooth tigers, even if he has, maybe your uncle is now helping out, or maybe somehow mum was killed and your aunt is helping out, or maybe somehow you end up with two…).
Even before you have invented a calendar or electricity or a counting system that uses the number of fingers on your hand you clearly have an idea of the importance of three.
But for sake of argument, let’s suppose that all the people in your tribe are born of only 4 fingers on each hand and they haven’t invented counting yet and when they do it wont be base 10.
(the designer had a bad day, you cant win them all right?)
Anyway, you also have learnt an idea of circles because they’re found in nature.
Your parents eyes are circular. Flowers are circular. Your mothers tit is circular. The sun is circular. The unborn child in womb is circular. The head is circular.
You also learn a method of basic enclosure to keep safe from the rain and cold.
Its a natural extension of the mothers womb so maybe its a cave, an approximation of what you know enclosures/circles/safety should look like. Innately you know at least has three dimensions thought you dont understand that concept yet. You just understand it encloses you and you and your parents and tribe can fit inside.
Ate some point you discover bashing rocks together or rubbing sticks together can create heat and even fire. Perhaps you conjectured this after seeing lightning strike a tree.
In any event, you’ve just as innately picked up the concept of long thin things, like trees and branches and sticks, of the shape resembling what we call straight lines. Our limbs are approximately straight. Our eyelashes. Diffraction of light rays, we don’t have these words, but we see the idea of line around. You use spears and sticks. Your first drawings are stick figures. You make use of this idea to make weapons like spears. You workout you can even shape other materials to be even sharper and pointier to help with hunting animals and protecting yourself from other tribes.
They kinda look like little mountains.
You also discover to help in cooking you can hold food aloft by making a minimally three dimensional hold-aloft device. And you can make your own little mountain houses.
The point is you know what sharp at top but wide at base shapes are and a few ideas of what they’re good for. We’ve basically succeeded in holding something up using the strong yet efficient concept of three.
The sacred three line constructed mountain and spearhead like enclosure model is easier to build than full round cave like enclosures. But we do settle on the round ones that are more durable in windy conditions and we want durable housing when we’ve more permanently settled on somewhere we like.
Some genius might have put two triangles base to base and invented the square or perhaps just used two perpendicular sets of parallel straight things. But there is no real precedent to do that yet. Squares don’t occur regularly in nature, but parallel lines sort of do, like on trees. But you do find square shaped rocks due to erosion. But it probably didn’t come till the evolution of more lasting housing.
So from the basic idea of a square, projected into a volume with another square at each side, we had developed bricks and the idea of cubes and cuboids.
We used them when we decided to make our own square-triangle mountains as a gift to the gods.
At some point a really smart guy tried to understand all the basic solid things and make sense of it all.
Another smart guy tried to expand on using these solids to study planets.
But physics went on to disband these models, because we can describe spheres with more accurate mathematics (based on revolutions) now. But who knows, maybe there is more to the Pyramids?
Anyway, back to our story.
We can sorta see why 3 and 6 have become important, but not 9.
(3+6=9 but thats not particularly universally interesting).
At some point when we began making basic communities and trading with each other, before the pyramids were built, very smart people developed counting systems. The number of digits on our hands are important in what base we decide on, but in this hypothetical case, because we only have four fingers, we might have chose to use base 4 or 8.
But as it turned out, we did have 10 fingers and so we decided on more appropriate base. And so 9 was important in the first counting systems because they only went to 9 and there was no concept of 10.
But in others there was (base 60, of which 3, 6 and 9 come up as important).
But these base choices are quite arbitrary.
We need to introduce the concept of multiplication for 9 to become un-arbitrarily (universally) important, which is a very important operation in the development of counting and later more complex mathematics and physics.
We were lucky that we actually did have 5 fingers on each hand and 10 in total resulting in us choosing to use base 10 counting. Because as it turns out counting in 3’s in base 4 or base 8 is pretty difficult. Base 10 is a lot easier in small multiples.But if we had’ve chosen base 3 we would’ve been even better off if it were important to count in 3’s. But it wasn’t particularly so.
But at least now we can count:
one three = 3
two three = 6
three three = 9
If it were important to trade in 3’s and we still chose base 10 because of our fingers,
3,6,9 would still all fit on our two hands. So for small counts it still would’ve been alright.
Also, the base 60 number system shown above may’ve influenced our choice of a perfect calendar based on 30 natural days each 12 lunar cycle solar year, which is where the degrees in a revolution comes from (12x30=360).
As others have pointed out, 9 perhaps could be seen as mathematically relevant to this amount of degrees, but it actually turned out to be the wrong amount of days in a solar year (now 365.25). So the importance of 9 is just coincidence (and not naturally emergent to reality).
However, some have speculated that before some natural event, the 360 day perfect calendar may have actually been correct. ( 360 days Ancient Calendar ).
In which case it could be seen to been as an efficient calendar that naturally emerged for an efficiently evolved human being with an efficient number of fingers to choose a particular base to use for counting.
And so there is perhaps a relation between the natural efficiency of “3” and the importance of 6 and 9 in the calendar system as well, which is actually describing the revolution system, which also links up to the idea of AC electricity which can be described in terms of revolutions that define waveforms.
So, starting off with 1 and then 2 and then 3 and then a good counting system for 3’s, perhaps governed by our fingers which evolved in a system with a naturalness of maths from with sacred constants of growth (phi, e, pi), we get an emergent description of waveform electricity, and energy waveform in general.
Of course there are some loose ends in describing the whole universe in terms of wave energy, but hopefully it’s just a matter of time before they’re worked out.
This is why Tesla said the secrets of the universe are in energy, frequency and vibration. (Its "Not A Dream" ).
It’s been abit of a stretch, but perhaps this argument has sufficiently convinced you that 3, 6, 9 are important naturally emergent numbers because they contain:
- a basic family: mom, dad and child
- sharpness, strong base and efficient enclosure
- the concepts of counting, multiplication, and perfect squares.
- perhaps the emergence of a perfect calendar (which is at least a decent approximation of current reality)
- from the emergence of the near accurate revolutionary perfect calendar an emergence of the waveform description of electricity and energy which governs all matter in the universe and perhaps the fabric of spacetime itself
Are these the secrets of the universe?
At least they’ve been quite important to the three dimensional humanity and math and electricity.
Not really an answer as exciting as free energy, and many unanswered questions, but perhaps those answers are still emerging?
Speculating more specifically on Teslas life, his invention of 3 phase AC electricity is most notable. But perhaps another reason why 3,6,9 was important to Tesla is just that they are simply factors of 3.
Tesla was known for being very religious for Christianity.
There is the trinity theme in Christianity.
The father, the son, and the holy ghost.
He was also known to be basically OCD.
The top of the crucifix is also representative of 3.
However Christians also traditionally like the 10 commandments and the 12 apostles too, so maybe not.
Contrastingly, the Christian mythology doesn’t place much importance on the mother, which might say volumes about feminism, atheism and that capitalism that is blind to it’s environment, mother earth .
OR perhaps if he lived to see computers he might’ve said 0, 1 and 2 are the three most important numbers.
Feel free to correct me if any of this is more pseudo history/physics than actual history/physics, its been a long day, and actually history is not my strong suit and i haven’t done physical maths for a while, I spend my time in front of ones and zeros these days.