Mistery Crop Circles
For over twenty years the southern English countryside has been the site of a strange phenomenon that has baffled observers and spawned countless news stories and not a few books. In the middle of the night, flattened circular depressions have appeared in fields of wheat, rye and other cereal crops. They range in diameter from ten feet to almost a hundred feet wide and vary from simple circles to complex spirals with rings and spurs. All have sharply defined edges. The most striking feature of the circles is the frequency with which they occur. In 1990 over 700 crop-circles appeared in Britain. People who attempt to study these circles have coined a name for themselves: cereologists. The word comes from the name of the Roman goddess of vegetation, Ceres. There are two favorite theories held by cereologists that think crop circles are the result of some not well understood physical phenomena. The first is that the depressions are the result of an unusual weather effect. George Tenence Meaden, a former professor of physics, calls this a "plasma vortex phenomenon" which he defines as "a spinning mass of air which has accumulated a significant fraction of electrically charged matter." According to Meaden the effect is similar to that of ball lightning, but larger and longer lasting. The second theory is that somehow crop-circles are created by UFOs. Proponents of this theory note that occasionally crop circles seem to appear in conjunction with a UFO sighting. Some of the early, simple crop circles certainly do suggest fields that might have been flattened by the weight of a grounded flying saucer. As the circles have become more complex in shape, though, proponents of the UFO theory have had to modify their ideas suggesting that the marks left are due to a strange effect of the craft's drive force on the plants. Others even argue that the shapes are messages purposefully left by the saucer's crew.
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For over twenty years the southern English countryside has been the site of a strange phenomenon that has baffled observers and spawned countless news stories and not a few books. In the middle of the night, flattened circular depressions have appeared in fields of wheat, rye and other cereal crops. They range in diameter from ten feet to almost a hundred feet wide and vary from simple circles to complex spirals with rings and spurs. All have sharply defined edges. The most striking feature of the circles is the frequency with which they occur. In 1990 over 700 crop-circles appeared in Britain. People who attempt to study these circles have coined a name for themselves: cereologists. The word comes from the name of the Roman goddess of vegetation, Ceres. There are two favorite theories held by cereologists that think crop circles are the result of some not well understood physical phenomena. The first is that the depressions are the result of an unusual weather effect. George Tenence Meaden, a former professor of physics, calls this a "plasma vortex phenomenon" which he defines as "a spinning mass of air which has accumulated a significant fraction of electrically charged matter." According to Meaden the effect is similar to that of ball lightning, but larger and longer lasting. The second theory is that somehow crop-circles are created by UFOs. Proponents of this theory note that occasionally crop circles seem to appear in conjunction with a UFO sighting. Some of the early, simple crop circles certainly do suggest fields that might have been flattened by the weight of a grounded flying saucer. As the circles have become more complex in shape, though, proponents of the UFO theory have had to modify their ideas suggesting that the marks left are due to a strange effect of the craft's drive force on the plants. Others even argue that the shapes are messages purposefully left by the saucer's crew. Imagem que apareceu misteriosamente em Arecibo, num campo de plantação, só vista de cima.Mensagem enviada na Voyager pela NASA.A animação é a diferença entre as 2 mensagens. Crop circles: Theorems in wheat fieldsSince the late 1970s, farmers in southern England looking out on their wheat fields in the morning have sometimes been startled to find large circles and other geometric patterns neatly flattened into the crops. How these crop circles were created in the dead of night at the height of the summer growing season remains a puzzle, though hoaxers have claimed responsibility for some of them.Several years ago, astronomer Gerald S. Hawkins, now retired from Boston University, noticed that some of the most visually striking of these crop-circle patterns embodied geometric theorems that express specific numerical relationships among the areas of various circles, triangles, and other shapes making up the patterns (SN: 2/1/92, p. 76). In one case, for example, an equilateral triangle fitted snugly between an outer and an inner circle. It turns out that the area of the outer circle is precisely four times that of the inner circle. Three other patterns also displayed exact numerical relationships, all of them involving diatonic ratios, the simple whole-number ratios that determine a scale of musical notes.
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