The harmony of the universe

Artists and ar­chi­tects have have used the gold­en ra­tio for cen­turies—for ex­am­ple, rectan­gles 1.618 times high­er than they are wide—be­cause it sup­posedly pro­vides es­thet­ic­ally pleas­ing forms. The gold­en ra­tio is irra­t­ional, like pi, mean­ing its dec­i­mals go on for­ev­er.

In the “quan­tum un­cer­tain” state of mat­ter, the ra­tio “re­flects a beau­ti­ful prop­er­ty of the quan­tum sys­tem – a hid­den sym­me­try,” Col­dea said. It is “ac­tually quite a spe­cial one called E8 by math­e­mati­cians, and this is its first ob­serva­t­ion in a ma­te­ri­al.” The find­ings dra­mat­ic­ally il­lus­trate how math­e­mat­i­cal the­o­ries de­vel­oped for par­t­i­cle phys­ics may find ap­plica­t­ion in sci­ence at the nano­scale—the scale of a few at­oms—and ul­ti­mately in fu­ture tech­nol­o­gy, he added.

Read all about it in the article "Golden ratio" hints at hidden atomic symmetry.

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