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The hunt for the perfect number to find the meaning of life - Culture - 12/29/2009 ilGiornale.it of

Re: The hunt for the perfect number to find the meaning of life - Culture - 12/29/2009 ilGiornale.it of

The hunt for the perfect number to find the meaning of life

of Matteo Sacchi

For centuries, mathematicians and philosophers seek the divine proportion that governs the universe. Now science says that it would be 1.618

Milan - harmony, proportion. Something that allows a form to an object or a living being, that performed its task, and why not, get as close as possible to the ideal of beauty. That beauty which the eye perceives and the brain is instinctively so hard to transform concept in rational and replicable.
Here's what the men, as artists, try to forever and that the nature and possibly its great architect, bring hidden inside. And so for centuries, indeed for thousands of years, hunting has been unleashed to the formula, the perfect number to explain the mechanism of creation, his "divine proportion." A number that, once discovered, would have allowed to take on the logic that oversees the creative world as we know it.

So the ancient Pythagoreans began to study the properties of five and the Pentagon. Thus the Kabbalists before, and the alchemists, then began to study the relationship between sacred text and numbers (in Hebrew every letter also equivalent to one digit). Without counting the painter-philosopher of humanism who sought to transform a given ratio known as the "golden section" and corresponding to 1.618 meters in a kind of world. All

simple legends? Rudimentary attempts, quite different from modern experimental science, to find a rule hidden in a chaotic world where there is no rule? No.

and these days the news that an Austrian university has made a very serious study that shows that he lives much longer than those with a ratio of minimum and maximum pressure equal to 1.618 (so to speak in short, is very fond of those who make 74 minimum and maximum of 120 or who is 77 minimum and 125 maximum). As it happens just that which corresponds to numerino Leonardo's proportions of man and the research that, on the Pythagoreans, led up to the doctrine of the Gnostics of the Renaissance. Not only that: the magical 1.618 appears in the relationships that determine the structure of many other living beings. Just to say that the rule that explains the logarithmic growth of the shells of shellfish or snails or even the way in which the plants "choose" to have many petals.

Enough to make one open up, metaphorically, Vittorio Messori's mouth that broke the news of the Corriere della sera, and enough to wonder if that number is not the fingerprint of the Deus absconditus that has always been a bit 'is denied a little 'reveals himself (having fun to leave it there, undecided). The question of God does not solve some here, the presence of a perfect number (or multiple numbers magical and perfect), however, something can be said.

The first fact is simple: there are numerical relationships that really identify "something" important and without whom things do not work. Some are hidden and others not. Some are known from antiquity, perhaps intuitively, others much less time. A fairly recent example. The matter has its "peace" based on the number eight. Chemists call the octet rule: if an atom has eight electrons in the outer sphere ceases to react with other elements (which happens the noble gases). Eight in that context is the only number that goes well, the chemical that regulates the number of equilibrium. If the neon does not burn to the current you owe it to this.

An ancient example: there is a mathematical constant known as Napier's number or Euler (mostly approximated 2.71828182845905) that is essential to perform logarithmic calculations. But long before that the brains of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to "discover" the ancient Greeks used to give pleasant proportions to the temple (the Parthenon are 69.5 meters long and 30.9 wide, the first dividend for the second you get a 2.24 magazine that was the nearest to the ancient Napier's number). As for the famous

1.618 (other parts of the Parthenon respond to its proportion) is the only number known that achieves a ratio of two unequal magnitudes, "such that the average proportion is higher among the youngest and the sum of two, while the same relationship exists between the child and their size difference. " Do not you understand?

Well in a nutshell is a relationship that can generate numerical series with a precise internal order. It is mysterious that the shells decide to grow according to this scheme: the scheme is simply more comfortable. Create groups of numbers called the Fibonacci series (named the mathematician who discovered them) and also very much like the plants. The number of petals of the lily flowers most common chicory is almost always controlled by this pattern: 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 ... (And if you divide 55 to 34 and there was the approximate 1.618 and so on). Nature uses it because it is balanced (a beautiful inflorescence in which the petals or seeds are at the right distance from each other) and men have copied to create harmonious buildings but also music (Bach created series of notes "to" Fibonacci) or objects (your badge office is an approximation of the golden rectangle built on the number 1.618). The ancients were looking at the nature intuition and transformed it into a rule, we continue to find evidence that the rule works even where there is the human hand.

If we ask why a certain number and not some other rule, some reports find the answer becomes more difficult. Following Pythagoras and even the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages (those of the magic square for instance), it can however be noted that "all is number."

Not as pure abstraction but in the sense that they also express the numbers of functional concepts. Another example idiot? The stereoscopic vision works well. The animals see with two eyes except for a few rare exception (the spiders have 2 to 12). No one has opted for a vision based on odd numbers (the odd malfunction also make your legs and walk on it). No way that Pythagoras had preferred them to peers.