Why Everything Settles into Hexagons
Hexagons show up everywhere — in beehives, on Saturn, in graphene, and in the mind of a fictional mathematician falling in love.
Aldo, one of the protagonists in Olivie Blake’s book “Alone With You In The Ether” is a theoretical mathematician, harboring a very detached obsession with hexagons. He talks about time travel, the hexagonal key that needs to be turned to make it comprehensible and the possibility of multiverses that we nonetheless cannot jump across. The lattice of these naturally significant six-sided polygons underlies the entire book. They are the first point of curiosity between our leads- what draws Raegan towards Aldo as well as the resolution to their emotionally tumultuous partnership.
They are also the reason I went on to a search engine immediately after completing the book. I wanted to test the book, which is obviously categorized as literary fiction, for scientific facts. And I found interesting things. The thing closest to what Aldo kept alluding to in the book was time crystals- strange quantum systems where particles enter a repeating loop of motion through time without consuming energy. They are a phase of matter- a unique way particles arrange themselves and behave over time. While not hexagonal in structure, their stability and energy efficiency conceptually echo the logic of hexagons.
All across nature, architecture and fiction, hexagons are associated with stability and efficiency. Whenever things settle, they seem to settle hexagonally- arrangements of least energy, highest stability. Honeycombs are the simplest, most popular examples. Hexagons save energy and space and thus, are bees’ favorite choice. Followed closely by graphene- carbon atoms arranged in hexagonal patterns, forming an insanely strong and light material. There are hexagon shaped storms on Saturn and lava cooled into hexagonal patterns at Giant’s Causeway in Ireland.
Architects, taking inspiration from nature, use hexagonal patterns to minimize material usage, to make efficient use of space while creating designs that are aesthetically pleasing. They are efficient- a lot packed in a little space. All in all, ‘hexagons are the bestagons’, as famously put forth by a CGP Grey video on YouTube which will be highly insightful if you want to understand this visually.
Coming back to Aldo’s character in the book, it is interesting to note that he himself uses the idea of hexagons to bring stability back into his life after a near overdose. He seems indifferent to death every time he talks about the incident, and on the surface, it comes across as an easy decision for him. He is living because his father asked him to, and he is using hexagons as the means to bring stability into his life.
The hexagons are more than just a recurring theme keeping Aldo interesting to Raegan. For Aldo, they are a survival mechanism, an escape which he admits to, something he is hanging on to. And even though it is not their hexagonal structure that is lending Aldo’s life stability, it is still the concept. This metaphor of balance and settlement, of stability and ease reflects throughout the book. When Raegan, in her first original artwork, expresses the way she feels about Aldo in the form of these shapes, it means that he is her hexagon. He is the object of stability in her life, something she can ease into at the end of her days. Raegan comes back to Aldo as nature comes back to the shape of hexagons, seeking out stability and low energy, efficient environments where survival does not take energy. A direct connection to the idea of time crystals- perpetual motion with no energy input.
This way the concept ties to both their emotional and mental states while also holding true to its own physical and real-life meaning. Reaching out for something in honeycombs, or in the structures of graphene or even in time crystals- something that seems straight out of a science fiction novel, is then the reader’s prerogative.