Boxes are great. When I was a bit younger, nothing excited me more than a brand new box. Boxes opened new worlds to my brothers and me. We could use them as pieces of forts, or crafts, or terrain for Lego towns. Or, we could put things in them.

We should never take the fantastic capacity and efficiency of a box for granted. They utilize space unbelievably well. Attempting to come up with another tool for effectively storing things is actually an astoundingly difficult thought exercise. Sometimes I’ll idly examine the problem during particularly boring mathematics lectures. I’ve covered dozens of pages in dozens of notebooks in doodles, shapes, Euclidean and not, that I think might use space better than the box. Next to these shapes, calculations followed by “NO!” written in bright red suggest that I have yet to find one. I think there might be a higher-dimensional shape that uses space better than a box, but these would be fairly difficult to manufacture.

Some philosophers argue that mathematics is embedded in the structure of the universe. The argument goes: imagine an empty space. Complete nothingness. What’s there? Well, nothing. But, for there to be nothing, we need, at least, the concept of nothingness. Mathematically, there are zero things in this space. Having the concept, however, presupposes that we have a thing, a concept in this space. We have, consequently, one thing. Now, we have two things. The concept of nothing, and the concept of the concept of nothing. We have a zero and a one, and we have a two. But then we have a three. Extrapolate.

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I challenge you to go outside and look around. Look at all the things that we as a species have built. It is pretty damned phenomenal. How many of them are glorified boxes? Wandering around Dartmouth, I find that almost every building on campus is just a box. They may have slanted roofs and little bits of ornamentation, but if we come down to it they are all boxes. Look inside your room or your backpack. How many of the things there are boxes? I’d say damned near everything.

It didn’t used to be this way. The historical record is filled with urns and baskets, fascinating organic shapes. Why, then, does the twenty-first century fit in a box?

Boxes are unnatural shapes. Smooth curves dominate nature. The shape of a hand or a tree or a hill is marvelous because it is continuous. At every point the contours are defined wonderfully. There are of course exceptions. The cliffs of Dover come to mind. I think, however, we can say that nature flows in a way that the harsh corners of a box do not.

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Some people believe in God. I’m sure of this because I am one of them. I’m not entirely sure what shape or flavor of God I believe in, but I’m settled on the idea that she is there. Atheists tend to argue that there is no Christian God, or there is no Jewish God, or there is no Muslim God, or something to that effect. That’s fine. I have yet to be convinced that there is no God. Like most philosophical battles, it boils down to a semantic argument. If I define God broadly enough, then of course she exists. It’s elementary. If, however, I define God narrowly, then maybe she doesn’t exist. But, then, how the hell do magnets work?  

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The box is one of the purest expressions of applied mathematics. We use them everywhere because they just work. There is an inherent perfection to a box. When I imagine an empty space, I imagine a big, empty box. Infinity is a tad too big for humans, but a big box is a nice approximation. Boxes are part of how I conceptualize the world. They influence my cognition, they determine the ways I interact with the world, and they may be a manifestation of the deep structure of the universe. When I was born, I was placed in a box. And, when I die, I’ll be put in another box.

In one of my earliest memories, I’m crawling around the living room floor. There is a large cardboard box in front of me and I crawl in. My parents place my brother and our dog, Zack, into the box with me. “Smile,” Dad says. There’s a flash, and Dad says, “That was a good one.”

Photo by Roy