"magic numbers"

[Jones Beene]

In the spirit of light-hearted indivisibility, this meandering post is brought to you by the number "Seven"....   Nowhere is the merger of art and science more 'integrated' ....than in numerology, the study of numbers. For instance, the subject of "alpha," the fine structure constant is endlessly fascinating. The "vesica pisces" (and the square root of three) has been the subject of numerous vortex postings. "Seven" is a number that is entrenched in mysticism at many levels - but why?    Unlike alpha, the number seven is more a function of human mentality than a universal truth.  There are seven wonders of the world, the seven seas, seven deadly sins, seven daughters in the Pleiades (or the seven sisters ruling the Petrocracy), the seven ages of man, the seven year itch, the seven circles of hell, the seven primary colors, the seven notes of the musical scale, and of course, the seven days of the week - to mention only a few of the human-based-connections? Is there an objective, scientific 'seven' in there somewhere ? Some of the human 7-connection is based on the seven categories for absolute judgment, the seven objects in the span of attention, and the seven digits in the span of immediate memory - if you subscribe to Psycho-Today or its cousins. Perhaps there is something deeper and more scientific behind all these sevens, something just calling out for us to discover it, but I suspect that it is only a pernicious, Pythagorean coincidence - just as George Miller surmises. As for the seven days in the week thing - and the warped idea 'religious right' that it is a "truth" and a biblical thing, see the footnote below. In 1956 George Miller wrote an interesting article for the Psychological Review (not P.T.) called "The magical number seven, plus or minus two, some limits on our capacity to process information" http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html In the article Miller cites many different studies that demonstrate the human mind's capacity to hold and deal effectively with only seven objects in short-term memory simultaneously. Is that one factor why ancient man chose a week of seven days (that and the approximate lunar-quarter-cycle-connection)   This sevenfold limitation of the human mind is amplified (ameliorated) by technology - and that could be one of the powers of the internet and personal computing. The magic number 200 seems to figure in as the "aided" ability to process information (using technology). Dave McComb has written that somewhere around 200 items seems to be the optimum number of interrelated things we can deal with at one time, when dealing with complex systems. Specifically, that the human mind coupled with external aids is capable of dealing with several hundred items simultaneously in its "near-term" memory. Beyond that is there anything more scientific involving 7 and 200?   The so-called microwave hydrogen line (1420.40575 MHz) is the precession frequency of neutral hydrogen atoms (para-ortho) the most abundant "visible" substance in the universe. The lifetime in our 3-space of "real" ortho-Ps has been found to be about 141.88 ns (Nico et al. 1990) over a thousand times longer than para. However, it is possible that the effective mass in the "invisible universe, of Ps is about 7x that of Hydrogen - based on the suspected connection of Ps to "dark matter" although admittedly this is not comparing apples to apples.  A frequency of about 7 (7.05) MHz which is related to the ortho-Ps lifetime, might figure into that overall picture somewhere (10^9/141.88) but is it related to hydrogen ? Hmm....within the margin of error the ratio is surprisingly close to 200... which is just another round number and a coincidence, right?   You can see how easy it is easy to blow these numerology things out of all proportion... matter of fact, that is almost biblical, no?   (is that "proportion" comment scroll-worthy  ;-) www.doobybrain.com/history/sidescroll/bigroll.jpg Jones Oh yeah, About the seven days. The first thing to understand is that a week of seven days is a fairly recent cultural invention and did not originate in the Bible, despite what some pulpit thumpers want to tell you. In pre-literate societies weeks were typically the interval from one market day to the next. Four to 10 days gave farmers and herders enough time to accumulate and transport goods to sell. The *market day* is the basic need being met by the entire original concept of the "week." There is nothing there related to divinity (at least not on the surface).   The Bible story begins with the creation of the universe: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" but the first account of "Seven Days Of Creation," was written by the Hebrews when they were in present day Iraq - there is no written account of it before that. This idea, like much of the Old Testament was "borrowed" from the where else - what is today Iraq. Is that irony lost in today's geopolitics, or not? At least 700 years before Moses - around 2350 BC the famous king Sargon I, King of Akkad, having conquered Ur and the other cities of Sumeria (later Babylon, later Iraq), instituted a seven-day week, the first to be recorded in human history, although in India and China there is evidence of coincidental synchronicity. The Jewish calendar, and much of biblical mythology, began following the Babylonian captivity, even if it was attributed to Moses earlier. At any rate there is no possible way that the idea originated with the Hebrews - chosen or not - they were not yet even a tribe when the 7-day week was invented. The 7-day week was later introduced to Rome in the first century A.D. by Persian astrology gurus, not by Christians or Jews. The astrological need for it was that there would be a day for the five known planets plus the sun and the moon, making seven; but this was an ancient idea from the East, based on a recurring market-day. However, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire in the time of Constantine (~ 325 A.D.), the familiar Hebrew-Christian week of 7 days, beginning on Sunday, became conflated with the pagan week and took its place in the Julian calendar.  Thereafter, it seemed to Christians that the week Rome now observed was seamless with the 7-day week of the Bible and ever since it has been linked, incorrectly, to the Genesis myth. The pagan roots are obvious in the English names of the days: Saturn's day, Sun's day, Moon's day and the pagan names which somehow incorporate Norse mythology.   Demonstrating once again that all of history, and some of science, is written by the winners (of real wars and culture wars)....