Theorems in Wheat Fields: Science News

[Ivan Seeking]

I am just posting FYI. I will say it one more time: Crop circles are real. They were studied by meteorologists as early as the 1940s. There clearly is a some kind of genuine phenomenon involved, but I think it is limited to simple circles, and it is purely terrestrial. I think the rest -the complicated ones and some simple ones - are fakes.

http://www.sciencenews.org/20030628/mathtrek.asp

Edit: Of course the modern UFO era also began in the 1940s.

Also, it is widely claimed that no one has ever been caught making a crop circle. I know that this is not true, but it is mostly true. Considering how aggravating this stuff is for farmers, one would have expected to find an ET [=college student and the like] with some buckshot in his butt by now.

Next, someone recently noticed that in a 13th century [I think] painting, one that some argue includes a UFO in the scene, and which does look very suspicious IMO, something that could easily be interpreted as a crop circle is seen just below the supposed UFO.

Finally, I have seen one woman interviewed who I found to be very believable. She was about mid 50s in age at the time of the interview. The alleged sighting took place when she was very young...I think about ten to twelve years of age. She claimed to have been sitting in a field of tall grass when she heard a distinct humming sound. Right in front of her, she saw a simple circle flatten out in the grass all at once "like a giant invisible plate had been set down". Without drawing any conclusions otherwise, I [and Arthur Clark] found her to be very convincing. I am not usually quite so compelled by one story. To my knowledge, this is the only person who has ever claimed to see crop circle form. Even if all crop circles are hoaxes, I find this a little surprising.

I'm not selling the point...just passing on some observations.

 

[Guybrush Threepwood]

ok, I'm not a fan of crop circles but I don't think that article proves something. I learned a few tenths of theorems in my days of geometry and nobody said there was no more theorems to be discovered. I'm sure that from any complicated geometrical figure there can be extracted some theorem. And I can bet those theorems 2, 3, 4 were some problems at the end of my geometry book.

from the article:

To show how difficult such a task can be, Hawkins often playfully refused to divulge his fifth theorem, inviting anyone interested to come up with the theorem itself before trying to prove it. In an article published in The Mathematics Teacher, he challenged readers to come up with his unpublished theorem, given only the four variations. No one reported success.

this sound a bit like guess what I'm thinking right now (and I can give you 4 clues if you want...)

 

[username]

I think maybe there is a very small percentage of crop circles that are not hoaxes but I have not heard much about real evidence like soil samples etc if there is any evidence you don't know if its real or made up by some mystic or are just rumors. A bit like a lot of these types of things it's got out of totally out of control. People thought 'fairy rings' caused by fungus were created from tiny mystical flying beings for ages until serious research was carried out on them. Still maybe the great stories surrounding them are better than the real truth :)

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Originally posted by username
I think maybe there is a very small percentage of crop circles that are not hoaxes but I have not heard much about real evidence like soil samples etc if there is any evidence you don't know if its real or made up by some mystic or are just rumors. A bit like a lot of these types of things it's got out of totally out of control. People thought 'fairy rings' caused by fungus were created from tiny mystical flying beings for ages until serious research was carried out on them. Still maybe the great stories surrounding them are better than the real truth :)

It was believed [in the 40s] that crop circles were due to an unusual type of whirlwind. I know that physical changes to wheat stalks and such that defy simple hoaxes are genuine. Mainly the observed heating of nodes causing cellular damage. This has been well documented by a physicist at the Univ of Michigan [I think]. He is well known in the crop circle circles.

One group of physics grads were challenged to recreate some of the more convincing bits of physical evidence through a well planned hoax. Though not very successful, they did manage to rig a portable microwave generator that produced results similar to those observed in "real" circles.