Shells in the sea give way; thier form is their yielding. Nautilus grows adding a growth line a day and closing the chamber every month with septa. 400,000,000 years old shells show 9 growth-lines between septa. Moon then loomed large encircling the Earth once every 9 days of 21 hours each. Days and months are getting longer. Time stretches, as shells synchronise with the drifting moon.
Geodesic lines on a sphere are like airlines great-circle pathways in the sky, the framework of Fuller's Domes; the edges of the impenetrable virus shell (common cold remains incurable because Geodesic Domes do not collapse). Uniformly curved shells are easy to calculate. Crab shells we cannot. Their complexity eludes us. Crab is the shell conversing with surroundings, trial and error. Between the virus and the crab is the history of shells.
You cannot imagine a turtle without its shell. Simulating a soap bubble cluster, films between bubbles strive to reduce their area. As do lines between plates on a turtles back. Cells don't make the turtle. Turtle is. Turtle makes the cells. Pattern exists before it is made. All turtles to be already are. Shells make the laws that make the shells.
The limit of a soap bubble is the disappearing sphere. Molecules slide as the skin stretches until the film is one molecule thick; invisible. Embracing all universe it can, achieving perfection, the bubble bursts.
We see the Universe through a pair of spheres. Image falls on the concave retina. We would, if we could, see four-dimensional hyperspheres as mere spheres. A sphere passing through a two-dimensional world would be a point becoming a circle receding to a point. A child blowing a balloon is decoding a passing hypersphere.
You can see the Sphinx but the Sphinx cannot see you. Your life is as transient as a Sphinx's blink. You gaze at its face. Behind every face lies the skull. More than the Sphinx is the skull a code.
The skull is a shell. Inscribed inside are blood-vessels' grooves, like fossil impressions of an ancient tree. The skull is the message of the shell. A 3-D graph of its growth. After a week in the womb, from five centers ripples reached out to other ripples. Ossifying as they went along; concentric growth of sea-shells. The vault fabricated with expansion joints, to take the pressures of birth. Poisson's skull too elongated when it was laterally compressed. Poisson's Ratio repeats at each birth. Then the joints begin to fuse. Sutures appear convoluted like the Nile. They continue to disappear past middle-age. The skull is an unending process.
Vaults of bone. Each half of the vault approximates a doubly-curved square. Euclid's skull had squares sum of whose angles exceeded 360 degrees. Euclid's skull was not Eucliedean.
It was Einsteinean, whose space is curved. Universe is enclosed in a shell of light. Grazing its circumstances, a ray of light returns to the source. The limit of your vision is the back of your head. You have to go afar to know where you are. For at the end is where you began. Old age is a second childhood. This child has the wisdom of the shell.
