"This ring means that three objects are entangled. If you pick up
any one of them, the other two
will follow. However, if you cut one of them off, the other two
will fall apart," Chin said.
"There is something magic about this number of three."
Ha! In a number of past posts I have tried to wax poetic on the
subject of triad "Form", and in particular the so-called Borromean
structures (three interlocking rings) which are
fascinating in the context of nuclear theory.
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040529/fob7.asp
... but I was not aware of the so-callaed Efimov strucutre.... Are
they related?
....you bet your fur they are, mother nature.
Just after the turn of the century, D'Arcy Thompson wrote a
seminal book about the subject of "form" called simply enough, "On
Growth and Form". For way too long, I have been enchanted by his
major theme that platonic ideals - as 'form' - tend to repeat on
different geometric scales, up and down. This suggests that there
is a two-way mirrored self-symmetry of the kind made famous by
Fractal images, and which seems to be involved in nature's way of
generating form.
Then there is string theory (Fred's favorite subject) ... where
the "strings" are best visualized as loops (the snake eating his
tail) which have the suspected appearance of a stack of three
rings, the center being counter-spin to the other two - but with
an aligned axis of the three. It is also possible to have an
alternative kind of "stack" of three rings where the center ring
is orthogonal to the other two - that is almost the Borromean
model, which is not exactly the three-interlocking-ring model.
The "Olympics" icon has each ring tilted and potentially
orthogonal, like links in a chain... but
there is an alternative kind "stack" but with interlocking
wave-functions. The so-called "Borromean Ring" is visually this
different kind of triad interlocking ring-form - which commonly
adorned Viking art and Renaissance architecture. This structure
has the property that no two rings are interlocking, therefore if
any one of the rings is removed, then all three separate. That
would indicate temporary stability...
It gets curiouser and curiouser....
Jones
