Barcodes in Nature

I have used the barcode as a symbol of precise analysis, in all its beauty. Mixed light is sorted into its rainbow of component colours and everybody sees beauty. That is a first analysis. Closer detail reveals fine lines and a new elegance, the elegance of detection, of the bringing of order and understanding. Fraunhofer barcodes speak to us of the exact elemental nature of distant stars. A precisely measured pattern of stripes is a coded message from across the parsecs. There is grace in the sheer economy of unweaving intimate details about a star which, one had thought, could be found only through the costly undertaking of a journey lasting 3,000 human lifetimes. On another scale, we find a similar story when we look at the formant stripes in speech, the harmonic barcodes of music. There is elegance, too, in the barcodes of dendrochronology: the stripes across ancient Sequoia wood which tell us precisely in which year BC the tree was seeded, and what the weather was like in every one of the intervening years (for weather conditions are what give tree rings their characteristic widths). Like Fraunhofer's lines transmitted across space, tree rings transmit messages to us across time, and again there is a supple economy. It is the power - the fact that we can learn so much by precise analysis of what seems so little information - that gives these unweavings their beauty. The same is true, perhaps even more dramatically, of sound waves in speech and music - barcodes on the air.