

The Fibonacci Spiral and the Nautilus - bdfh42
http://www.shallowsky.com/blog/science/fibonautilus.html

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kurtosis
Wow, good work! but there are still plenty of examples in nature where the
fibonacci sequence does occur in the leaf patterns on plants. Very recently,
there has been some beautiful theory explaining the appearance of the
fibonacci sequence as a consequence of the balance of mechanical forces during
the growth and development of plants

Here's a great talk on this at the Kavli institute
<http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/pattern_c03/shipman/>

See also this pop article in Physical Review Focus
<http://focus.aps.org/story/v13/st18>

And I also recall this Science paper from 2005 -- this is a truly amazing
experimental test of these ideas - this group created micron sized silver
particles enclosed in a glass shell and observed the emergence of fibonacci
patterns as the particles were cooled. Warning! hardcore mechanics knowledge
needed:
[http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/309/5736/909?...](http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/309/5736/909?ck=nck)

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benbeltran
Interesting. I never questioned this but I also never tried to prove it. I
wonder how this all started, and how it became commonly accepted as a truth.

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silentbicycle
When something works as an approachable example for a (potentially) difficult
concept, it tends to get spread around, regardless of whether it's actually
true or not.

Similarly, the Inuit don't actually have several words for snow.
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow>)

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extension
and light doesn't travel in a straight line (it radiates in all directions)

I only found about that one recently

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hhm
Photons radiate in all directions, but doesn't every photon go in a straight
line?

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extension
As I understand it, photons can meander in any direction at any time but due
to the way probabilities cancel each other out, they tend to move in a
straight line when not in the vicinity of other particles.

However, because EM diffraction is observable at macroscopic scales, the
"straight line" thing really is confusing. Growing up, I always wondered how
radio waves transmitted through walls and assumed they just went through them
when in fact they go around.

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hhm
Oh, that's really interesting... I didn't know that (I know very little about
physics, I'm more of the mathematician kind).

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ptn
My Science Fair project when I was 11 was about the Fibonacci sequence. That
kinda stuff is all over the place due to the golden number.

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pavelludiq
i am interested in spirals and generating them with recursion, i got some new
ideas thanks to this.

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silentbicycle
Er, did you read the article?

