From: Glenn Morton (glennmorton@entouch.net)
Date: Wed Aug 06 2003 - 21:46:42 EDT
-----Original Message-----
From: RDehaan237@aol.com [mailto:RDehaan237@aol.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2003 5:20 PM
To: gmurphy@raex.com; glennmorton@entouch.net
Cc: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: FIBONACCI REFERENNCE
Glenn -
> I'm not just out for pedantry either -- though I've been known to do that -- & was going >to try to turn to a similar question.
> There are natural processes that generate some of well-defined sequences which can be
>generated by the type of formula that I've spoken of. E.g., a source of waves can be thought
>of as "generating" a sequence related to the zeroes of appropriate oscillatory functions
>(sines & cosines &c). For the primes, however, I just can't think of any plausible natural
>process that would carry out the sieve procedure. (I realize that this isn't a proof!)
> The Fibonacci numbers do show up in patterns of leaves, seashells, &c. Does anyone know
>why they do -- i.e., the natural processes that produce those patterns? IF we knew that &
>IF part of a Fibonacci sequence could be considered a specifiable message then we would have
>a clear counterexample to the claim that such messages can be produced only by intelligent
>design (in the ID sense). But those are significant IFs.
Hi Bob
I don't know of any natural process which creates primes either. But one must always be careful when finding a new pattern and ascribing it to intelligent design. One recalls the discovery of the pulsar.
"The group at Cambridge had great difficulty convincing themselves that the strange, spradic, signals they were observing had been emitted by naturally occurring astronomical objects. Clearly distinguishable pulses showing periodicity were first recorded on November 28, 1967. During the next eight weeks Hewish and his colleagues systematically eliminated all of the more plausible explanations for the strange signals. Man-made signals transmitted from space probes or reflected from the moon or planets were ruled out because the absence of any parallax greater than about two arc minutes showed that the source lay far outside the solar system. When it was realized that the time duration of the emitted pulses was of the order of 20 ms, and hence (on the basis of light travel-time arguments) that the source could not be larger than the earth, the possibility that the signals might have been transmitted by an extraterrestrial civilization was briefly entertained. However, no reco!
gnizable code could be discerned in the signals, and the absence of any Doppler variation in the pulse repetition rate (beyond that ascribable to the earth's orbital motion) made it unlikely that the source of emission was located on a planet. When three more similar pulsating sources were detected, it became clear that the sources had to be natural phenomena." Richard N. Manchester and Joseph H. Taylor, Pulsars, (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1977), p. 2-3
One of the ideas for extraterrestrial intelligent design for the pulsars was that it was a space lighthouse. Look at the emission from a lighthouse along a shore. The light pulses are regular, there is no variation of phase or amplitude which would indicate it was encoded. But it is still a designed signal.
I outline that because if we find primes, it doesn't necessarily mean intelligent design. It might mean, like with pulsars, we found a new natural process. And I would point you to http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cond-mat/0303110 and
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030317/030317-13.html for some strange regularities to the primes.
And primes in nature can be found in cicadas:
http://www.sciencenews.org/20030621/mathtrek.asp . Yeah, its only two, but why primes?
see also:
Goles, E., O. Schulz, and M. Markus. 2001. Prime number selection of cycles in a predator-prey model. Complexity 6(No. 4):33-38. Abstract available at http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/84502365/START.
And while I can't find any other examples of actual primes being generated, it is widely believed that primes are deeply connected with chaotic fluid flows and randomness itself:
http://arxiv.org/html/chao-dyn/9810011
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/5833/prime3/Prime3.html
So someday, if we find a message from the stars with primes, I will think of these cases before I think of little green men.
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