A lecture to be presented in Costa Rica, August 2004
previous patterns class here
Patterns of Nature
These are activities to accompany the book
Patterns in Nature by Pat Murphy.
I was a science adviser for this book, Paul Doherty.
Images from My collection, from Amy and explo site.
Copies of articles from Exploring (to Ale for translation?)
Perception
Straight Lines
Crepuscular Rays, rays of sunlight made by distant towering
clouds.
Looking down from an airplane at the rays of sunlight.
All mountain shadows are triangular.
Spirals and Helices
Images of plant spirals, shell spirals snails and seashells
Demo
Overhead
Making an archimedean spiral of rope.
Coil a rope in a flat spiral. Each turn is one rope width further
from the center.
Coil rope on a boat.
Making a logarithmic spiral with rope. This makes a shape like a nautilus shell.
Fibonacci, many plants have Fibonacci numbers of spirals.Fibonacci Bees, count the ancestors of a male bee and find the Fibonacci series. Illustration.
A mathematician builds a plant, place the leaves to minimize shading.
Counting Plant Fibonacci 1 Count the spirals in pine cones, pineapples,and sunflowers
Modeling Plant Fibonacci 2 Model these spirals
Helices, spirals in 3-D
Water going down the drain makes a vortex with spiral ridges along
its sides.
This vortex was made by a leak in the May Lake dam in Yosemite
National Park.
Demo Fill a 2 liter bottle with water. Swirl it around, invert the bottle, watch the spiral vortex develop as the water swirls out of the bottle.
Meanders
Images of river meanders.
Demo Overhead Bend metal or plastic straps to make the sine-generated curve of river meanders.
Ice balloons Fill a balloon with water. Place it in a freezer overnight to make an ice balloon. Sprinkle salt on the top of the ice balloon. Salt melts the ice and the resulting water carves meandering channels as it flows down the surface.
Salt water carves meanders as it flows down the surface of the ice
balloon.
Ripples
Images ripple marks, waves
Demo Wave activities, on a phonecord or slinky, waves in water, ripple marks. Ripple marks on Mars.
Symmetry
Spheres
Water Drops
Water drops on leaves. The leaves are coated with hydrophobic, "water
fearing" waxy hairs.
Water drop lenses. These are not spheres they have flat
bottoms.
Soap Bubbles
Soap bubbles are also spheres when they are small. The gas inside is separated from the surrounding air by a thin spherical layer of soapy water. Recently astronauts on the space shuttle managed to make bubbles from pure water, water without soap.
Circles made by spheres
Fossil raindrop prints show that it rained millions of years ago.
A fogbow is colorless white due to the spreading of the colors of light by diffraction.
Non-circular ice crystals can still make circles in the sky.
Hexagonal prisms and plates of ice refract sunlight into a circular halo about the sun. It is the random distribution of the orientations of the prisms around all possible orientations within a circle that creates the circle..
When the hexagonal prisms are oriented, the resulting pattern in the sky becomes non-cicular. Known a sundog.
Lichens form concentric circular arcs on rock.
Plant dissection, cut apart plants and search for patterns, Activity from The Science Explorer.
Strolling Among Flowers, Exploring Article by Maurice Bazin
Demo Right-left, explore a mirror and find out what it reverses.
Demo Right-Left beginning, explore the nature of right and left using rubber gloves.
Demo Mirrors Right-Left advanced test your understanding of right and left using a flat mirror, a curved mirror and a parabolic mirror.
Branching
Images branching of trees, roots, blood, lung, streams
Find the shortest network joining points.
Count the order of the branches of a stream.
See You're Retina, An amazing branching pattern you've been looking through and not seeing all your life.
Packing
Demo Overhead Packing identical balls, place spherical balls all the same size in a shallow bowl and observe how they pack together.
Beehive cell packing.
Demo Overhead Floating Aluminum Coin packing, float aluminum coins in a tray of water and observe how they pack together.
Ice crystal shapes
Cracking
Demo Overhead CD in a microwave, place a CD in a microwave, turn on the power for 2 seconds or so and observe the pattern etched into the metal by electrical discharges.
Mud in a tray on a warm plate. Heat a thin layer of muddy clay in a shallow pan over a warm plate. Watch it dry out and crack.
Image Columnar Basalt, mud cracks
Bubbles in a bottle, fill a bottle with bubble solution, pour it out and the bottle fills with bubbles. Notice the bubble patterns.
Bubbles in a CD jewel box
Bubbles in 3-D, Snackbook
Bubbles on a tray, make 2,3,4 which define a plane, line and point at their intersection. Amy Images. Also large bubble versus small.
Bubble prints : The Science Explorer Bubble Prints Activity, Use dye colored soap bubbles to print bubble patterns onto paper.
Fractals
Demo Overhead Paint fractals Make a fractal pattern on plastic using enamel paint.
Fractals in Nature, Exploring Article, The Practical Fractal, Mary Miller
Demo Bifurcation, drip food coloring into water.
Scientific Explorations with Paul Doherty |
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27 May 2004 |