On Fire
Plants are astounding creations, bountiful and amazingly diverse, tenacious and adaptive. In a sense, Botany is the study of the diversity of plants, the divergence in nature and their interrelationships.
For the pursuit of Thermodynamics, plants are remarkably fascinating not because of their differences but rather because of the commonalities of patterns that all plants express. Most specifically, plants seem to express the same logic and pattern of assembly, through the variations of how these patterns are expressed. These patterns would appear to be expressed as the Generalized Fibonacci - or Gibonacci Sequences.
Take the following discussion of plants from http://goldennumber.net:
Plants illustrate the Fibonacci series in the numbers and arrangements of petals, leaves, sections and seeds.
Plants that are formed in spirals, such as pinecones, pineapples and sunflowers, illustrate Fibonacci numbers. Many plants produce new branches in quantities that are based on Fibonacci numbers.
Fibonacci numbers
in plant spiralsFibonacci numbers
in plant branching
Here a sunflower seed illustrates this principal as the number of clockwise spirals is 55 (marked in red, with every tenth one in white) and the number of counterclockwise spirals is 89 (marked in green, with every tenth one in white.)
Here a plant illustrates that each successive level of branches is often based on a progression through the Fibonacci series.
You might expect symmetry in plants, but if you cut a fruit or vegetable you will often find that the number of sections is a Fibonacci number:
Fibonacci numbers in plant sections
Bananas have 3
Apples have 5
Many flowers have petals that total a number in, or very close to, the Fibonacci series:
Fibonacci numbers in flower petals
3 Lilies 5 Buttercups, Roses 8 Delphinium 13 Marigolds 21 Black-eyed susans 34 Pyrethrum 55/89 Daisies
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So with the spiral as an algorithm for assembly, plants are composed. This unto itself is a profound statement, but the real value to our understanding of the cosmos is made far more clear when we do something entirely destructive; part of a greater process of creation, destruction allows the old to make way for the new, catalyzing change.
A tree grows and articulates the Golden Spiral in ways that are specific to its genetics. We cut the tree down and start a fire, and as the flames begin to dance, we see the spiral once again.
The flames in the above pictures were indeed very large, roughly 40 feet, so this particular bonfire provided a very clearly defined, clockwise spiraling as wave of heat undulated through the wood set blaze and escaped into the atmosphere.
This forces a rather intuitive conclusion; the Gibonacci sequences are expressed by patterns everywhere in nature in both the assembly of creation and the complimentary process of disassembly.
What follows is the discourse of how these pattterns intertwine with thermodynamics and heat, and of how matter is put together and taken apart in the crucible of the Universe.
