Where did the universe come from? Atheistic origin science has no answer.

[Jenny A]

Before we too sidetracked by whether Fibonacci numbers describe a curve or a spiral (silly as all spirals are curves) lets look how well the numbers really apply to nature shall we?

I reccomend this clever article by Donald E. Simanek: Fibonacci Flim-Flam

Here are some highlights:

1) The nautilus shell does not actually correspond to the Fibonacci spiral very well. It is a spiral, just not a Fibonacci spiral. This is true of virtually all shells.

2) There are many, many flowers with petals that don't correspond to the Fibonacci numbers.

3) If you lay washers, or buttons or other round or roundish shapes on a flat surface and compact them in a single layer, you will get a spiral pattern often one that is close to the Fibonacci spiral. It has to do with using space efficiently, not the mathematical hand of god.

4) The patterns of seed heads of sunflowers very rarely come close to Fibonacci spirals, but when they do, Fibonacci nuts get out the camera.

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Pi has been mentioned as a sequence found in nature, and indeed there are many circles in nature. But why stop there? Pythagoras found a "divinity in numbers." The sequence that is supposed to have convinced him of this is found in the western music.

In Pythagoras's day the western music used seven tones still in use today: A, B, C, D, E, F, and G, i.e. the white keys on the piano. These notes can be generated using a simple formula often referred to as stacking fifths (a confusing nomenclature since the fraction one fifth is not involved) a process involving endless repetition of the ratio 3 to 2.

It works like this. If you take a guitar string and and pluck it, you get a tone. Play two strings of equal length together and use just get the same sound twice. Cut it in half, and you get the same tone an octave higher. Without simply playing the exact same pitch twice, a pitch and the same pitch in an different octave is the least dissonant combination of sounds possible to the human ear. Play two C's at different octaves together and you hear them as one.

So a 1 to 2 ratio produces the most consonant sound that is not a simple unison. Pythagoras then cut the string by a third and discovered that the 3 to 2 ratio is the next most consonant sound. Will it surprise you that the more complex the ratio between the lengths of the two strings, the more dissonant the sound?

Now if you start with a tone on the western scale and cut the length of string necessary produce it by a third you will get another tone on the western scale. In fact you can generate all the notes on the western scale, abet in ever higher octaves, in this way. And Pythagoras demonstrated this for A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. The ancient Greeks didn't use flats and sharps so Pythagoras didn't go on cutting string to produce the half steps as well, but that is indeed how those tones are generated.

Perfect! The hand of god in numbers, right? Not so fast, if you keep cutting string until you wrap around to the original note on which you began, you come out one eight of a half tone off which will create enough dissonance to make your ears want to fall off. This problem is dealt with by spreading that eighth of a half tone out making all of the tones just a little off. The hand of god apparently needs human correction. But it's still, like pi and the Fibonacci sequence, really cool.

{By the way, the process of cutting the string by a third is called staking fifths because in any key in the chromatic scale, if you play the first note of the scale and the fifth note together, you will get that magical ratio of 3 to 2. Thus the perfect fifth.}