A Little Book of Coincidence in the Solar System by John Martineau

A Little Book of Coincidence in the Solar System Reviews

• 
  Katie

  I am all for books of little anecdotes concerning the wonder of outer space, so I thought this book would be right up my alley. This book is part of the Wooden Books series, a beautifully-put-together collection of volumes covering topics - according to the back jacket - from feng shui and grammar to love, 'the miracle of trees,' dragons, and weaving. Hmmm.
  
  There are some very neat points in this book, but things tend to fall too far towards the New Age numerology side of the spectrum for me to really get on board. It's undoubtedly cool that the solar system is so chock-full of repeating proportions - when you see ice halos around the sun it's an exact replica of the orbits of Mercury and Venus; the Trojan asteroid clusters form an equilateral triangle with Jupiter, and several equilateral triangles inscribed within it gives you the orbit of the earth. But the pseudo-mystical way this was presented was a little off putting to me, and I would much rather the space been dedicated to ideas on why these proportions would occur. The closest we get to that is a rather baffling declaration near the end that all these harmonies "probably constitute evidence for the reality of a conscious quantum holographic universe." Which I dunno, maybe? I know there's a hypothesis that our universe is holographic, and I'll be all for reading about this. But this book pretty much tosses around some pretty illustrations and ambiguous numerology and then drops that idea without ever explaining what it really means or how it fits into anything else.
  
  There's interesting stuff in here, absolutely, but it almost felt condescending at times. It tried too hard to be profound with a subject that's profound without need for embellishment.
• 
  Dan

  Very cool read. You know there's more going on than what meets the eye, but sometimes its hard to find the right source for learning that. Well, this is the right source. I won't spoil any details, but its incredible that musical notes can be found in the cosmos. I wish someone would add an artistic twist to these notes and we could hear the song of Jupiter! It took billions of years for us to evolve, and we're just now beginning to understand what created us.
  
  On a side note, after seeing so many pentagrams drawn in space, it makes me wonder what all those first Americans were doing with their mason symbols...
• 
  Nancy

  This book changed my life. Martineau is a visual artist and an explorer in the finest sense. His ability to illustrate the intricacies of the universe, through prose and pencil drawings, illuminates his readers' understanding of the cosmos. He blends visual aspects into this book, small and large, of planetary rotations set in direct mathematical correspondence to musical octaves and scales.
• 
  jeremy

  i want to like the wooden books series, given their gorgeous illustrations and slim, accessible formats, but find them to be rather flat and unfulfilling.
  
  a little book of coincidence in the solar system presents some intriguing ideas regarding planetary orbits and mathematics - but strays much too far into the realm of pseudo-new age thinking to make it palatable. it reads like intelligent design for the sandal-wearing set.
• 
  João

  does anybody have any acid
• 
  Gabrijela Kovac

  For those hopeful of finding greater purpose within scopes of sacred geometry. This book illuminates harmonious coincidences within the Universe, otherwise overlooked by the modern cosmology.
• 
  Colin McPhillamy

  The music of the spheres has puzzled some of the best minds in history. If you love mystical arithmetic, this is one to read.
  
  You know how the Sun is 400 times larger than the Moon, right? And the Moon is 400 times closer to the Earth than the Sun? And that is what makes an exact total eclipse possible. Ah, but did you know that the relative orbital periods of Venus and the Earth describe the same relationships found in Fibonacci numbers and the Golden Section? These and other fun facts abound in this slim volume. Amaze your friends at dinner parties!
  
  
  
• 
  Bruce

  The coincidences referred to in the title are the arrangements of the planets and sun of our solar system. This book points out many measurement relationships that correspond to platonic solids, musical ratios, and other geometric relationships familiar to students of sacred geometry.
  
  There are lots of pretty spirograph like pictures mapping orbits against eachother, as well as showing other relationships.
  
  Reading this book definitely gave me the sacred geometry flavored buzz of pleasure.
  
  I see in other reviews here that people would like to have had some explanations of why these relationships occur. That's the point of the title-- that our contemporary science has no explanation for these relationships and that they must therefore be coincidences.
  
  If you are looking for explanations you will have to look outside of mainstream science. Have a look at Michael Schneider: A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe; John Michell: How the World is Made-- the Story of Creation According to Sacred Geometry.
• 
  Sean Luciw

  A friend gifted me this book a long time ago and it 's been very inspiring. Lots of pretty diagrams and numbers.
• 
  Stargazer

  Too small! Too short!
  Loved it from its first sentence (To people who have grown up in a world devoid of a magic cosmology) to its last (Cosmology can seriously improve your health.) And so many bits in between! The words! The diagrams! The sacred numbers and geometry, the wonder of it all...
  'Our planet and we ourselves are made up of reorganised smoky stardust, a fact long taught by ancient cultures. We now know that stardust itself is made simply from fizzballs , highly organised flickering whirlpools of light, long ago squeezed together inside stars.'
  Fizzballs! The word and the connotations have been fizzing through my mind over and over...
  'Watch planets for any length of time and, far from moving in any simple way, they lurch around like drunken bees, waltzing and whirling. As two planets pass, or kiss, each appears to the other to retrogress, or go backwards against the stars for a certain length of time.' Planetary passes within their dance are thereon referred to as kisses. Love this book.
  Too small! Too short! Make A Big Book of Coincidence in the Solar System!
  I read this thanks to a diagram and reference to it in Physics of Astrology vol 4 by Nadia Smirnova-Mierau.
• 
  Emma Nation

  I've owned this book for about 13 years and it is never far from my fingertips. It describes fundamental relationships between the bodies in our solar system and how they can be explained mathematically. Additionally, these relationships have musical correlates, as do the frequencies emitted by the planets themselves and the frequencies of their synods, sometimes producing exquisite two-dimensional patterns over time. The final diagram depicts the earth's orientations as drawn against a celestial sphere of our immediate cosmos -- including the Pleiades and Sirius -- describing a fundamental 60-degree cosmological make-up reflected by our system of seconds, minutes and hours. This is just scraping the surface of the information contained in this tiny volume -- written simple language -- that evokes a sense of wonder in the reader and hunger for more information of this type.
• 
  Lore

  I picked up this book out of curiosity and it is indeed a curious little thing. It starts by talking about the progress done in astronomy from the earliest moments to the present times, broaching the subject of alchemy and what it meant to be an astronomer/astrologer at the beginning of science. But then it turns a bit towards numerology, and it kind of lost me there. The author compares the orbits of planets and satellites, creates beautiful spirograph-like diagrams and tries to draw the conclusion that this is more than a coincidence. It's true that we still don't know everything, but I think the conclusions drawn were a bit of a stretch.
• 
  Mark Blane

  If you want a quick read on some of the universe's astronomical "coincidences," then this is the little book for you. It is a well designed book (front, back and inner covers). My big take away was the days of the week being named after the quickest planetary body to the slowest, and how it forms a heptagram. It briefly touches on the moon and sun being the same size from the perspective from earth. You will learn much about these coincidences, but very little as to "why" they are here which still remains to this day a mystery.
• 
  Sarah

  A delightful and intriguing read for me.
• 
  ✨Arielle✨

  Both exhilarating and confusing af at times due to the gatekeeping style language used in some sections. Listening to the sounds of Jupiter also makes this even more of a magical read.
• 
  Lee Barry

  Paul McCartney referenced this book in his Lyrics book (re "The Kiss of Venus"), so it's also coincidental (or just an algorithm) that Goodreads suggested the Lyrics book.
• 
  Kyle Grindberg

  Fantastic, I listened to a computer voice read it, I have the hard copy arriving on Thursday, and I will read it through again!
• 
  Chris Marchan

  This is a one of a kind book. If you fondly remember the illustration from one of your high school science books of Kepler's depiction of the platonic solids - one inside the other, then you have a feel for the many layered wonders revealed in this book.
  
  Author John Martineau has assembled a lot of evidence here for at least a divine plan of unspecified origin. He show us the mathematical perfection seen in the layout of the solar system and the proportional relationships that cannot be accidental. It shook me to realize that this undoubtedly reflects all the way down through the sub-atomic dimensions as well. As above, so below.
  
  The further implications extrapolated when one starts seeing "the world" in this way causes one to question such things as human behavior, causality and the nature of the physical universe as a projection or concept rather than as the permanent, tactile reality which is commonly presumed. The harmony and simplicity depicted in this book exposes the mysterious fabric of the experiential world in a way that will cause a profound change of perspective.
  
  This is one of a very cool series of books published by Wooden Books, most on esoteric subjects. Each is a small, concise and well-written introduction and overview into a fascinating topic by knowledgeable authors. I don't hesitate to invite you to check out their titles:
  http://www.woodenbooks.com/
• 
  Tameca

  I loved this book, and plan to check out other books from the Wooden Books publisher. The only thing I wanted more of was some more of the math and physics behind the images. Martineau touches on this information but does not go too far in depth. Sure, that information would have been over my head, and it would have taken tons more pages to explain, but I craved that, nonetheless.
• 
  Brian Jones

  Highly annoying book. Modern numerology at its worst, where we are to be shocked at the ratios of various parameters of the Solar System. However, it completely overlooks the fact that you'll always find some ratio if you compare enough things in enough different ways. When 6:11 is a meaningful ratio, you know you have the wrong book.
• 
  Sally

  getting ILL