Picture the Hungarian countryside in high summer: the air shimmering with heat, and somewhere in the distance a psytrance beat that hardly ever stops. This is O.Z.O.R.A. Festival, one of the biggest psytrance festivals in the world, where tens of thousands of people gather near the village of Ozora. In the summer of 2023, Dr. Be was invited to speak there. On one of the festival’s talk stages, in front of about a hundred people, she gave a talk on Atomic Geometry.
The festival itself was born under a rare sky. On 11 August 1999, a total solar eclipse crossed Europe, and a gathering called Solipse was held at Ozora to celebrate it. Five years later, in 2004, the first O.Z.O.R.A. Festival followed.
The atom, drawn in geometry
Dr. Be showed how the atom can be visualised through geometry, and how sacred geometry can be approached in a truly scientific way. Festival stages are full of alternative talks, and this audience did not simply nod along. The questions kept coming, and most of them came down to one: how is this possible? Many people arrive thinking of sacred geometry as a spiritual teaching. Here they were surprised to find how scientific it can be, and how far it reaches, all the way into quantum physics.
Science has always needed pictures to think about the atom. In 1913, Niels Bohr drew the electrons on neat circular orbits around the nucleus, like tiny planets. Quantum mechanics later replaced those orbits with orbitals: three-dimensional regions around the nucleus where an electron is likely to be found. The simplest are spheres; the next have two lobes that meet at the nucleus. They are not solid objects but shapes of probability, a way of drawing what the mathematics describes.
A universe you can build with your hands
She also presented our new book, The Geometric Universe, which Dr. Be wrote together with Colin Power. It sets out a new, geometric theory of the universe: fractal from the atom to the galaxy, and following a very specific blueprint that you can build yourself. To make that tangible, we passed some of the shapes around in 3D, from hand to hand. Outside, the festival pulsed on. Inside, it became a quiet, mind-blowing afternoon.
The patterns all around
Besides the talk, we had a little stall at the festival, where people could come by to talk with Dr. Be and take home books and geometric gifts. Many wanted to know more. They found it mesmerising how well the geometry matched the artwork displayed all around the festival. The designs they had been walking past, it turned out, carry a deeper meaning.
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