The Divine Proportion: Does It Have a Materialistic Explaination?

It's funny that there's enough numbers in the universe that, if you look hard enough, you'll "find" the number that you're looking for, over and over again. Like, 42, or the Law of Fives:

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The Law of Fives states simply that: ALL THINGS HAPPEN IN FIVES, OR ARE DIVISIBLE BY OR ARE MULTIPLES OF FIVE, OR ARE SOMEHOW DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY RELATED TO FIVE. THE LAW OF FIVES IS NEVER WRONG. In the Erisian Archives is an old memo from Omar to Mal-2: "I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look."

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Instead of wondering why it is that you find what you are looking for, you should ask the question: "What is it about the human brain and human psychology that leads me to believe this is significant?" It's called "confirmation bias." You've just forgotten or downplayed every time you've looked for phi and failed to find it.

Another reason you might find Phi a lot in plants, etc, is because it's the natural result of the localized way living systems have to organize themselves. From Wikipedia:

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The golden ratio turns up in nature as a result of the dynamics of some systems - for instance, in the angular spacing of trees around a trunk, or sunflower seeds. In both cases, the problem is "wedge this next one into the biggest available space".

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It's a good heuristic for any computational problem of the form "we have an arbitrary number of things and we want to put them down without overlapping". Eg: shell sizes in shell sort, inserting items into hash tables and computation of fibonacci numbers.

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Yeah. I just don't see the significance here. It's a natural result of the way living systems have to organize themselves, where each individual unit has no knowledge of the whole, only what's around itself.

No way, dude. Didn't you read the Law?Everything is related, directly or indirectly, to five. If you find something that doesn't appear to be, then you haven't looked hard enough yet. It's always true, you just have to look harder.

I don't recall saying that.The thing about your human proportion argument is that humans aren't actualy proportioned that way. To the Greeks, that was the perfect ideal of human proportion; the only people proportioned like that are Greek statues.

This card is restricted in Type 1 play, by the way.

Yes, I'm saying that it doesn't, except in possibly a few individuals and in Greek statues.It certainly doesn't in me. My legs are much longer in proportion than other people's.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 10-10-2004 12:09 PM

Again with the argument from authority. Why do you expect that to be compelling?By what means did your "official" sources come to this conclusion?

But you've mistated the claims.No one has claimed, not even the Greeks, that phi was a ratio found in all human beings. They simply asserted that it was the ratio found in ideal humam beings, without asserting that that ideal existed in anything but their statuary.So your "authorities" don't even support your claims. No one but you has claimed that phi is found in all humans; the existence of humans in whom that ratio is not found proves you wrong. (It's called a "counterexample." You might look it up if you're unclear on the term. Counterexamples disprove arguments, even those from authority.)

Your impressions don't count as authorities. Cite your source.