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2010-01-07

Golden ratio discovered in a quantum world

From PhysOrg.com:

Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie (HZB, Germany), in cooperation with colleagues from Oxford and Bristol Universities, as well as the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK, have for the first time observed a nanoscale symmetry hidden in solid state matter. They have measured the signatures of a symmetry showing the same attributes as the golden ratio famous from art and architecture.
Full article


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A few days ago I was accosted by an article entitled A multiverse of probabilities published in Physics World by the author Ben Freivogel (see p.40). I claim that the basic idea of the multiverse proposal is fractal. More precisely the idea is implicit in the work of Laurent Nottale and Garnet Ord and explicit in the work of M.S. El Naschie. If the readers could bear with me I would like to make this assertion plausible. A fractal implies infinity. In its simplest form it is the infinite ability of magnifying and zooming exactly as explained in the excellent World Scientific book of Nottale. A four dimensional fractal implies infinite numbers of concentric four dimensional spaces. Whether you think of the resulting structure as one Cantorian spacetime as presented by El Naschie or alternatively think of the structure as an infinite amount of four spacetimes connected together, it is only a matter of semantics. The way El Naschie adds probabilities together in an infinite series implies an infinite number of universes constituting a multiverse albeit an infinite one. The mathematics is very clear here. The simplest way to think of it is to put a four dimensional cube insider another four dimensional cube and so on ad infinitum. When you do the sums correctly which resembles a continued fracture, then you find that the final dimension is four plus the golden mean to the power three. E-infinity implies multiverse. The correctly weighted multiverse is a fractal spacetime with an expectation value for the topological dimension exactly equal four and an expectation value for the Hausdorff dimension exactly equal to four plus the golden mean to the power three. Some have suggested a connection to a Hilbert cube for instance Prof. Ji-Huan He from Shanghai. It is interesting to realize that there is now real experimental verification for the preceding theory. Finding the golden mean in quantum mechanics in the Helmholtz Centre in Berlin is a major discovery with incalculable consequences for the further development of fundamental physics. Nottale and Garnet Ord exactly as Richard Feynmann had the right haunch. Fractal spacetime is the answer. This is also obvious from the work of Tim Palmer which was published in the Royal Society a few months ago. Of course the establishment is not amused. Never the less science is not about being amused or not. Science is about being right. The New Scientist seems to have sensed the change of tide. Its newest edition carries the title Touching the multiverse, first hint that it really exists, Vol. 205, No. 2750. To be candid the idea is not that brand new. Feynmann’s path integral is the first version of this fast breaking idea. Everet’s multiuniverses theory which was championed by Murray Gellman is another version. However the discovery of the golden mean in the laboratory as a basis for quantum mechanics puts the whole thing in a completely new perspective. We are not philosophizing or theoretizing. The golden mean and thus El Naschie’s E-infinity theory is not a mere theory any more. You could say Nottale, Ord and El Naschie following Feynman discovered the real building blocks of quantum spacetime. These building blocks for which Gerard ‘tHooft searched for a long time are elementary random Cantor sets with a golden mean as a Hausdorff dimension. Similar qualitative ideas not using the quantitative golden mean approach is due to Fay Dowker and are called partially ordered sets. To go deeper than that in this theory will take us too far. I just wanted to give the unbiased reader a taste of the deep meaning of Nottale’s theory of fractal spacetime and what it really implies.