Nature’s Hidden Order Reveals Itself in a Bird’s Eye

[Beggar for the Spirit]

This article was just recently on "Wired.com" which was reprinted from the scientific magazine "Quanta".

This article was long and of course there were parts that spoke about evolution, but I cut and pasted here the parts of the article that we would find very interesting and encouraging as we know that there is a Great "Designer" or "Engineer" behind nature.  

I will also post the link to the entire article as there are some pictures and graphs. 

So the title of this article was "Nature’s Hidden Order Reveals Itself in a Bird’s Eye"

But I would like to give it a new title:

 

"The Grand Designer’s Hidden Order Revealed in a Bird’s Eye"  
 

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"SEVEN YEARS AGO, Joe Corbo stared into the eye of a chicken and saw something astonishing. The color-sensitive cone cells that carpeted the retina (detached from the fowl, and mounted under a microscope) appeared as polka dots of five different colors and sizes. But Corbo observed that, unlike the randomly dispersed cones in human eyes, or the neat rows of cones in the eyes of many fish, the chicken’s cones had a haphazard and yet remarkably uniform distribution. The dots’ locations followed no discernible rule, and yet dots never appeared too close together or too far apart. Each of the five interspersed sets of cones, and all of them together, exhibited this same arresting mix of randomness and regularity. Corbo, who runs a biology lab at Washington University in St. Louis, was hooked.

 

“It’s extremely beautiful just to look at these patterns,” he said. “We were kind of captured by the beauty, and had, purely out of curiosity, the desire to understand the patterns better.” He and his collaborators also hoped to figure out the patterns’ function, and how they were generated. He didn’t know then that these same questions were being asked in numerous other contexts, or that he had found the first biological manifestation of a type of hidden order that has also turned up all over mathematics and physics.

 

Torquato had been studying this hidden order since the early 2000s, when he dubbed it “hyperuniformity.” (This term has largely won out over “superhomogeneity,” coined around the same time by Joel Lebowitz of Rutgers University.) Since then, it has turned up in a rapidly expanding family of systems. Beyond bird eyes, hyperuniformity is found in materials called quasicrystals, as well as in mathematical matrices full of random numbers, the large-scale structure of the universe, quantum ensembles, and soft-matter systems like emulsions and colloids.

Scientists are nearly always taken by surprise when it pops up in new places, as if playing whack-a-mole with the universe. They are still searching for a unifying concept underlying these occurrences. In the process, they’ve uncovered novel properties of hyperuniform materials that could prove technologically useful.

From a mathematical standpoint, “the more you study it, the more elegant and conceptually compelling it seems,” said Henry Cohn, a mathematician and packing expert at Microsoft Research New England, referring to hyperuniformity. “On the other hand, what surprises me about it is the potential breadth of its applications.”

 

Article Link - Nature’s Hidden Order Reveals Itself in a Bird’s Eye

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*** w04 9/15 p. 9  ***
"Jehovah is glorified as the Grand Designer" 

 

Edited July 17, 2016 by Beggar for the Spirit

[hatcheckgirl]

Scientists are surprised because the pattern is found reoccurring in diverse places. It shows us how surprised and delighted we will be too when we can make discoveries too in the new world. That article was heavy but very interesting.