This BBC News story from last week - reporting the Nature paper at dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature13697 - has to be the perfect science story (and you can tell your colleague who wrote it as much, Jonathan). For one thing, the story involves our nearest celestial body - an endless source of fascination and the furthest our kith and kin have ever travelled in person (albeit the last time one of us made that journey, covering the best part of half a million kilometres, was more than four decades ago). For another thing, the story cant help but bring to mind my favourite film of all time, and reinforce the abiding view that the clever bastard who made it knew something that the rest of us didnt. Note, however, that the fictional monolith was discovered in the Clavius crater near the Moons south pole, which falls outside the boundaries of the feature reported here (as the large image of the Moon included in the article illustrates). Finally, the story involves spherical geometry on a massive scale. When regular shapes arise naturally - for example, when bubbles are structured regularly in the foam on a pint of beer - this tends to represent the most mathematically efficient arrangement under two (or more) natural constraints. The eerie and beautiful thing in this instance is that natural constraints that would tend to result in hexagonal formations on a planar surface actually result in a rectangular formation when occupying a significant proportion of a spherical surface. Either that, or something out there is trying to tell us something...
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 08:11:32 +0000
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