Prism of Everything
The original mythos of the Prism of Everything stems from the construction of a wooden puzzle where all the pieces are identical, but when oriented in the right way it creates a bound object with its own character, identity and inner tensegrity. What is present in the whole that is not present in the parts alone? It is not energy, or mass, or anything traditionally measurable. Rather, it is the organization of the parts into a whole that imbues it with its unique signature of life.
This lead to the question: What is present in the whole that is not present in its parts alone? What is this phantom-like identity that has no independent physical existence, but which defines everything useful about its constitution?
My friend said in that moment "I imagine in some future enlightened definition of organism, this would somehow be the simplest kind".
That this small wooden puzzle lead to the realization that everything important about biology and organism has to do with organization and not pieces spawned the mythology that this simple puzzle is in a sense the "prism of everything": the simplest example of the universal significance of the whole in relation to its parts.