Like other symbols on Epstein Island, the Nautilus Symbol found on the north peninsula might also be a reference to astronomical constellations.
The nautilus is often regarded as a representation of the The Golden Ratio. The Golden Ratio, usually denoted by the Greek letter ϕ (phi), is equal to the never-repeating, never-ending number 1.6180339887…
Where does such an irrational number show up in astronomy? First, it appears in an astronomical symbol. Most people use the pentagram — the five-pointed star (Figure 1) — as a symbol for a star (this reflects the twinkling of stars due to the Earth’s atmosphere). In the pentagram, in each one of the five side triangles, the ratio of the side to the base is precisely equal to ϕ. Second, when Plato wanted to discuss the cosmos as a whole in his celebrated Timaeus, he chose the dodecahedron (Figure 2) as the shape “which the god used for embroidering the constellations on the whole heaven.” The dodecahedron has the Golden Ratio written all over it. If you take a dodecahedron with an edge length of 1 unit, its volume is equal to 5ϕ3/(6 - 2ϕ) units. In a surprising turn of events, in 2003 a few cosmologists proposed that some observations of the “afterglow of creation” — the cosmic microwave background — could be explained if the universe is in fact finite, and shaped like a dodecahedron.