Day 13: The Egg As Scale Model Of God's Engineering Plan

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n 2019, I came across a seemingly trivial social media news about the simple picture of an egg dubbed as "world_record_egg" becoming the most liked Instagram picture with 30 million likes beating Kylie Jenner's picture that gained 18 million likes.

This is not the only time though that this amazing egg has been catapulted into the limelight. The egg has always been there early on in human civilization. Eggs are amazingly strong despite their reputation for being so fragile. I first learned in school that an egg can withstand nearly your entire strength as you try to put pressure on both ends right at the apex of the arch using your thumb and fingers. Try it! Do you know its secret? The unique shape of the egg is the secret to its being uncrushable.

During the Stone Age, buildings were constructed using the post-and-lintel system in which a large horizontal piece is supported by two vertical pillars. The Stonehenge in Britain is a classic example. This engineering technique further evolved into a 3-dimensional shape (eg dome or egg-shaped structure) that the Romans developed to suit their more practical needs like amphitheaters, temples, vaults, aqueducts, etc., which are not only built to last but also more functional as it can cover large spaces. The best-preserved of all ancient Roman buildings to date is the iconic Pantheon—meaning "church of every god."

In 608 the emperor Phocas gave the Pantheon to Pope Boniface IV. It has been in continuous use nowadays as a church dedicated to St Mary and the Martyrs. After almost two thousand years when it was first built for Emperor Trajan in 113-125 CE, it has maintained its record as world’s oldest and largest unreinforced concrete dome with no reinforcing structure in or around the concrete. Imagine you are inside a gigantic egg that spans 43 meters (142 feet) both in diameter of the circle and the height all the way up to the central opening to the sky called the oculus. The dome has a volume of 46,000 cubic meters (or about 676 million chicken eggs) making the Pantheon the biggest domed room to this day.

Michelangelo out of respect for the Pantheon deliberately designed his dome for St Peter’s Basilica just a little smaller – about 50 centimetres. What was the key to the survival of this Roman architectural genius across two millennia? Again it is found in the egg's organic structure. There are two forces that are operative. First there is tension, which is the pulling force, and compression, which is the pushing or crushing force. The egg model has been popularly applied to arch bridges and buildings because it is the strongest model that goes with gravity and friction. Like any arch, the curve distributes pressure evenly all around the eggshell rather than concentrating it at any single weak point. Nature has given the egg its proper shape to withstand the body weight of the mother bird when it sits on it during incubation.

But it must have a vulnerable point to allow the little chick to be able to break free from the eggshell using the pressure of its body size and its tiny beak. The weakness of the egg is when there is an imbalance in the two forces. If you were to place a heavy weight at the apex of the arch, the egg would not bend or cave in easily. The top side would naturally buckle or bend in if there is too much compression, and the bottom side would snap or bend out under the force of tension. The chick's growing body eventually becomes a living inner tension that could overcome the force of compression from the outside of the eggshell. With the thrashing push from the young bird's beak the fortress shell is crushed.

Aside from the Pantheon, Barcelona's La Sagrada Familia cathedral, which has been under construction for more than a hundred years since 19 March 1882, was designed by Antoni Gaudí to uniquely reflect God's engineering plan. "There are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature," Antonio Gaudí used to say, "Therefore, buildings must have no straight lines or sharp corners." 8thWorker.us