studiot

I take my hat off to this post and your subsequent persistence. +1

Yes I agree there are different view aqbout whqt iw scinece and what is not and this applies to other disciplines as well as maths. As regards 'flat earth' , like so many things in nature, the issue is neither hard and fast nor clear cut. As a rule of thumb in surveying and cartography th flat earth model is adopted for patches of the earth of less than 10km radius. It would also seem that the OP has lost interest.

Firstly I don't understand why you have this in Politics. Are you talking about the scientific method or the relationship between science and politics or what. Please also clarify who the 'known' people are abd what their input to science might be. If you are actuqlly talking about science leaders, then I can't see how you could consider this to be true. Almost every province of science that I can think of is currently developing at pace, and each province boasts competing hypotheses in frontier areas. Only the most non controvertial such as well established bodies of facts such as the structure of the alkanes or the way arithmetic works. Further back in history over the last few hundred years there have been significant arguments over the substance of science, some furious, some even leading to torture or death. However the further you go back the more a complicating factor intervenes. That factor is communication.. Thousands of years ago it took a long time for new discoveries to reach remote lands. For instance the spread of the modern numbering system from india, to europe. Besides the distance separation there was also the fact that many workers worked on their own. The huge collaborative projects are a modern development. But even then 'gurus' sometimes held sway, even when they were wrong.

What point are your trying to make ? Yes I remember the polio vaccines, but the mid 20th century was hardly 'early' ; you have to go back another 150 years for that to Edward Jenner in 1796.

Well even with the crick in my neck I can see that you have mislabled the second digram.

xy/2 is the area of triangle oxy This area depends upon the radius of the circle. So no in general xy/2 is not equal to 1.

I remember asking at school why Cambridge university exam papers were printed black text on light green paper and being told or reading that they had done a study which found that this particular colour resulted in the least number of candidates having some sort of panic/breakdown upon opening the paper in an exam.

Yes you are quite right. Thank you +1 I shall have to check my sources more carefully. Wisconsin professors of mathematics are are evidently unreliable. No it can't be connectivity, though this plays a part in higher carbon counts as the maximum connectivity is 4 for an individual carbon atom.

That is what lounges are for. Thank you for the discussion anyway.

Nature has no requirement for a mathematical formula to describe a sequence. Any such is purely artificial, but is in accord with an ordering of the set of all alkanes. However Nature does present us with conundrums involving sequences such as chicken and egg, non commutativity

The sequence denotes the number of isomers of alkanes, in increasing order of the number of carbon atoms. There is no known single formula for calculating this, but several methods in combinatorics and graph theory are available for high numbers which increase rapidly with carbon count. It does however start off with the first five terms of the fibonacci as noted.

How is this different from Fn = F(n-1) + F(n-2) ? It still leads to the next two numbers being 8 and 13 Anyway, thank you for being the only member interested. Think Methane, ethane, propane, butane, pentane for 1, 1, 2, 3, 5

They are not random numbers, but in my opinion, too many authors especially popsci ones promote fibonacci as the sequence of Nature. And this is Scienceforums not just Physicsforums or Mathforums.

So what other sequence(s) start of like fibonacci but diverge from this pattern further down the line ? This is an exercise in thinking out of the box.

If it were fibonacci the next two numbers would be 8 and 13, swince 8 = 5 + 3 and 13 = 8 + 5