Phyllotaxis
the spirals are counted, not admired
Concept

Confounding — where it appears

Two properties that vary together across every case available, so that no measurement can say which of them is acting. The branch a band sits on decides its divergence, its counted pairs and its rung spacing at once, so a result that follows the branch follows all of them and the design cannot separate them.

Named by 2 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

How far each rearrangement is from closing, against the lag it kept. One bar per excluded cut, its length the distance from the displacements summing to nothing, ordered smallest first, and each labelled with the lag the cut left standing. The seven shortest bars are the cuts that kept a lag of 7 or 8 and the six longest are the cuts that kept 4 or 5, with a gap of 6.3 degrees between the two groups and no row in it. The rule sorts every one of them.

The lag decides whether it closes

Seven of the thirteen excluded rows have displacements that cancel and six do not. Every row that closes kept a lag of seven or eight and every row that does not kept four or five, thirteen times out of thirteen — and then a lattice nobody had cut broke it.

mechanism · Damage shape Four accounts of which bands speckle, scored on the three cut whole. Each candidate explanation of why one band's cuts change the family they keep and another's do not, against what the three bands cut whole actually do. A tick is an account that puts that band on the side the sweep does. The branch the band sits on is right on all three; the size of the counted pair, the number of wrecking offsets and how much of its rung the band spans are each wrong on two. Three bands can eliminate and cannot confirm, and this eliminates three of the four.

The branch is what is left

Four accounts of why one band's cuts change what they keep and another's do not were written down before a third band was cut. Three of them are now wrong on a band each, and the survivor is the one with no mechanism behind it.

cylinder · Rung interior

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Claim testingContact familyHonest limitsBranchCensus designDamage profileDescription versus mechanismExceptional chainExchangeFalsifiabilityHandoverNegative result

All concepts