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Strange Stars Pulse To the Golden Mean
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from an article at Quanta Magazine:
What struck John Learned about the blinking of KIC 5520878, a bluish-white star 16,000 light-years away, was how artificial it seemed. Learned, a neutrino physicist at the University of Hawaii, Mnoa, has a pet theory that super-advanced alien civilizations might send messages by tickling stars with neutrino beams, eliciting Morse code-like pulses. "It's the sort of thing tenured senior professors can get away with," he said. The pulsations of KIC 5520878, recorded recently by NASA's Kepler telescope, suggested that the star might be so employed.
A "variable" star, KIC 5520878 brightens and dims in a six-hour cycle, seesawing between cool-and-clear and hot-and-opaque. Overlaying this rhythm is a second, subtler variation of unknown origin; this frequency interplays with the first to make some of the star's pulses brighter than others. In the fluctuations, Learned had identified interesting and, he thought, possibly intelligent sequences, such as prime numbers (which have been floated as a conceivable basis of extraterrestrial communication). He then found hints that the star's pulses were chaotic. But when Learned mentioned his investigations to a colleague, William Ditto, last summer, Ditto was struck by the ratio of the two frequencies driving the star's pulsations. "I said, 'Wait a minute, that's the golden mean.'"
A "variable" star, KIC 5520878 brightens and dims in a six-hour cycle, seesawing between cool-and-clear and hot-and-opaque. Overlaying this rhythm is a second, subtler variation of unknown origin; this frequency interplays with the first to make some of the star's pulses brighter than others. In the fluctuations, Learned had identified interesting and, he thought, possibly intelligent sequences, such as prime numbers (which have been floated as a conceivable basis of extraterrestrial communication). He then found hints that the star's pulses were chaotic. But when Learned mentioned his investigations to a colleague, William Ditto, last summer, Ditto was struck by the ratio of the two frequencies driving the star's pulsations. "I said, 'Wait a minute, that's the golden mean.'"
Pi (film), 1998
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Yeah, I'm a fan of Darren Aronofsky
Life is not for the lazy.
The difference between Pi and the golden ratio is that the golden ratio isn't transcendental, it's just irrational. In fact, you can state Phi perfectly as (1 + sqrt(5)) / 2.
He should pay his PAs better.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Golden ratios emerge wherever you have a relationship of T(n)=T(n-1) + T(n-2). Where the first two terms are 0 and 1, you have fibonacci numbers: but no matter what your starting numbers are, the ratio between T(n) and T(n-1) will approach phi (as demonstrated with 'brady numbers').
So it is not at all surprising that phi might crop up in seemingly strange places.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
As the next paragraph from the article would have explained, had it not been arbitrarily excluded from the copy-paste summary.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
An already seen movie
Besides that, I just noticed that it's a 6+ years old article.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.