The Rosslyn Code (Part 3)

Unearthing a hidden melody

The Rosslyn Chapel's 213 stone cubes were carved when Leonardo da Vinci and Christopher Columbus were schoolboys. Construction on the chapel began in 1456, about 50 years before the printing press arrived in Scotland. The Stewart kings ruled the country at the time, and most historians credit James IV—who took the throne in 1488—for ushering in an era of scholarship and scientific inquiry. By that time, the chapel's founder, William St. Clair, had died, and construction on what was meant to be a much larger structure had come to a halt.

Given the era in which Rosslyn Chapel was built, then, it would be surprising to learn that someone encoded scientifically inspired symbols on the walls. But that's exactly what Tommy and Stuart Mitchell came to believe. The chapel's stone cubes, they were convinced, looked like Chladni patterns, the images that form when musical frequencies vibrate along a two-dimensional surface. Now, they just had to confront the inconvenient fact that Ernst Chladni was not born until 1756.

Chladni's date of birth didn't rule out the possibility the Mitchells had a match. Chladni patterns are a natural phenomenon, and it's entirely possible that someone else discovered them hundreds or even thousands of years before the German scientist documented them. All you need to produce these patterns is sand or salt, a flat surface, and some way to make the surface vibrate. You didn't need to be an 18th-century European to make that happen.

http://www.slate.com/id/2294489/

Is this chapel a physical manifestation of the musica universalis concept?