What if you create interference patterns with two coherent lasers that have a wavelength exactly one meter apart? Then, you spin the target, and your interference patterns will sweep out a perfect circle? The accuracy would be seem to be achievable, on the grounds that the meter is an arbitrarily, but finitely defined unit.

JohDHJ: Theaetetus: What if you create interference patterns with two coherent lasers that have a wavelength exactly one meter apart? Then, you spin the target, and your interference patterns will sweep out a perfect circle? The accuracy would be seem to be achievable, on the grounds that the meter is an arbitrarily, but finitely defined unit.

Accurate to infinite digits?

The circle? Quite possibly.
The wavelength being equal to one meter? As accurate as the definition of a meter is: distance traveled by light in absolute vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

Like pi, crop circles are irrational.

Coincidence? . . .

JohDHJ: Theaetetus: What if you create interference patterns with two coherent lasers that have a wavelength exactly one meter apart? Then, you spin the target, and your interference patterns will sweep out a perfect circle? The accuracy would be seem to be achievable, on the grounds that the meter is an arbitrarily, but finitely defined unit.

Accurate to infinite digits?

Accurate to with in the wavelength of the light, the accuracy of your measuring equipment, and quantum probability. The more accurate your measurement, those closer to perfect you will find it.

overlord_mike, that's how much I can recite off the top of my head too.

They did a good job on the circle.

Theaetetus: What if you create interference patterns with two coherent lasers that have a wavelength exactly one meter apart? Then, you spin the target, and your interference patterns will sweep out a perfect circle? The accuracy would be seem to be achievable, on the grounds that the meter is an arbitrarily, but finitely defined unit.

I think that it would only be as accurate as how precisely you could spin the target, and the light would be affected by any mass that surround it as well.

How many "partial" circles have been found?
Are there circles where a clear pattern was "intended" but was interrupted?

If crop circles were 100% made by pranksters, odds are *some* of them would have been discovered in creation, photographed and halted by angry farmers. Some would have simply failed to complete due to poor preparation, weather, etc.

How many of these have been found in comparison to "completed" circles?

I fully understand that the plank and rope technique can account for some circles.

I also understand that this technology is not sufficient to explain the complexity, ground and stem conditions, and time constraints of all circles to date.

ninjakirby: bolzy: They do NOT find centerpost markings in genuine crop circles. Also the crop stalks are NOT crushed, they are burnt and bent. Below is a closeup image of how a crop stalk looks in a real crop circle.

Things You'll Need
* A light plank (4-6 feet in length) with a rope (10-12 feet) knotted through holes in each end. Alternatively, you may prefer to buy a light garden roller from a garden centre.
* A big ball of rope or nylon string (pre-stretched)
* Marking pole
* Protractor for measuring angles
* Measuring tape (100 ft)
* Night-vision goggles (optional)
* Laser-pointer to assist placing markers (optional)

Instructions:
1: Plan your crop circle using a large scale map, to ensure access for both you and your audience.
Plot your straight-line or circular design. Mark on the map the directions you will be flattening, to avoid visible signs of passage (inexperienced circle makers can spoil a design by leaving stripes like a lawnmower would).
Initial access is normally through existing farm tracks and trails, so note the position of them before you start.

2: Create your design on computer, and make amendments until you have the design you can be proud of. Use inspiration from state-of-the-art designs as seen on the internet (see External Links). Practicing shape-making in the field will only result in people seeing your mistakes.

3: Once in the field, use measurements to place markers exactly. Your friends can help you place markers, make line-of-sight calculations, and lay the rope to mark areas for flattening.

4: Make construction lines by laying rope outlines to shapes. Then flatten circles at the intersection points. To make the shown example formation, create a rope outline of a equilateral triangle, and create flattened circles at the triangle corners. Avoid flattening over the rope, to create an implied triangle.

There are two methods commonly used to flatten:

* Plank Flattening - use a roped plank (see Things You'll Need) to flatten by holding the rope or looping it over your shoulders. Press forwards and down by keeping one foot on the plank. Advance using a shuffling gait.
* Using a roller - some circlemakers prefer using a light roller (available from garden centres) to speed up flattening.

4: Keep on flattening until you have completed your design and have a really nice, well-made complex formation.

5: Wait for the media to spot the new formation. This may take several days, or you can speed the process by making an anonymous call. A good design will provide local newspapers with many column-inches of speculation.

Tips:

* For best results you should probably spend more time planning the crop circle than actually making it. By carefully planning the design, working out what equipment is needed, and discarding ideas that will be difficult or impossible to achieve, you can reduce the scope for embarrassing errors.
* Flatten during a dry period, to avoid churning up mud.
* Try to use the cover of night. Remember that ideally you should be finished by dawn, when you can take a picture of the pristine design before swarms of "croppies" come and trample all over it.
* To leave a 'weird' crop circle of cosmic origins:

o Bend some stalks around by exposing them to a blue light source for a few hours. Applying small amounts of natural gum or plaster will lock their new shape. Sadly this approach may not satisfy a detailed or scientific inspection.
o Create swirled nests in the flattened areas by your clever weaving of stalks.
o Also, melt some iron filings into droplets on site and sprinkle them around the flattened area to leave 'meteorite particles' and magnetized stalks.

Bevets: Video Proof Crop Circles are created by Natural Causes!

You forgot the really important parts:

■First make sure you can pass college level math exam on Julia and Mandelbrot sets (Link-new window). Needless to say only math majors are into crop circle pranks. Others have no need for such time wasting antics.
■Make them in pitch darkness in a desolate farm.
Complete them in short enough time so that NO ONE sees you making them.
■Make sure no one sees you coming and going. Meaning, there should be no tell tale car tire imprints. Fly using whatever means to and from the crop circle site. This is crucial.
■Do not disturb tram lines by jumping using 15 foot long poles.
■For really complicated designs such as these:

Bring huge templates so that the job can be finished in short enough time before anyone finds out.
■ Do not crush or flatten the stalks but bend them stalk by stalk using a portable propane torch.
■Disturb the magnetic field of the crop circle area

π = 3!

/teach the controversy

bolzy:

You forgot:
■ Watch out that you don't get your chicken caught in a tractor's nuts.

Altourus: lincolncounty: nobodys_goose: Well, the ones that said they did all those old ones, obviously haven't been around for the 300 odd years that crop circles have been documented. But everything before those guys was OBVIOUSLY natural phenoms.

And these sure travel, since America, New Zealand, the Asiatics, Africa, they all have circles too. Yep. All the work of two old farts with a stick, rope, and a loop on a baseball cap.

Oh, and for some reason, with some of the circles, they manage to sprinkle magnetized buckyballs and iron all over the place, using the very soil under them.


It's a toss up between some really weird, secret society, some unusual phenom, or aliens. At least the Vatican says aliens could exist. Not that they'd know anything about secret societies or unusual phenoms that we can't explain, right God?

Praytell...what is a BUCKYBALL?

Its the tiniest theoretical construct, essentially the smallest nanomaterial we have theorized, granted we haven't actually created. Nor seen as far As I've heard, so how the original poster came to the conculsion that they were sprinkled over crop circles we may never know.



What do you mean, there's no buckyball? Spherical Fullerene is too real! You're lying! I'm telling mom! (Runs weeping to mother) Mommy he said there's no Buckyball make him stop!

yohohogreengiant: How many "partial" circles have been found?
Are there circles where a clear pattern was "intended" but was interrupted?

Oddly enough 'slightly squashed field' doesn't tend to make the news in the same way as the more elaborate designs, but an interrupted one sat adjacent to the M1 motorway in Nottinghamshire, England.

bolzy: ■Make them in pitch darkness in a desolate farm.
Complete them in short enough time so that NO ONE sees you making them.

This contention fails only slightly on farmers reporting lights and noises in fields where circles have appeared.

■Make sure no one sees you coming and going. Meaning, there should be no tell tale car tire imprints. Fly using whatever means to and from the crop circle site. This is crucial.

Have you ever been to a farm ? For what I would hope were obvious reasons, it's not difficult to access farm land in vehicles. Where the land is less accessible, the portability of planks, ropes, and GPS seems to have been underestimated.

■Do not disturb tram lines by jumping using 15 foot long poles.

???

■For really complicated designs such as these:
www.aliencrossing.com
Bring huge templates so that the job can be finished in short enough time before anyone finds out.

The fact that you don't have a basic knowledge of surveying doesn't preclude crop circle makers from possessing such knowledge. Ironically, the fourth of your pictures is a well known demonstration of a man-made circle, which was filmed during its creation.

■ Do not crush or flatten the stalks but bend them stalk by stalk using a portable propane torch.
■Disturb the magnetic field of the crop circle area

Neither of these claims has been demonstrated in a repeatable manner.

Huck Chaser
"cannot be created or measured by human beings using current mathematical and/or technological resources."

Wrong. It can be created. It is trivial to create a circle.

Why can't you people understand this? The limitation is with numbering systems. Theaetetus's string is **exactly** pi units long. The only limitation here is that the numbering system you learned in 1st grade cannot express that length precisely. You guys make the irrational mental leap from "my number system cannot express this" to "therefore it doesn't exist."


JohDHJ
What I am saying is that because objects that exist in the real world has dimension that have a terminating decimal point, a pi stick that accurately measures "pi" in any unit cannot exist.

1/3 doesn't have a terminating decimal point. It is impossible to represent 1/3 in our base-10 numbering system. Therefore, by your logic, it is possible for anything to be exactly 1/3rd of a whole. So if three people are in a room and two leave, then 33.33333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333 333333333333333333333333..% of the people remain, but we can *never* measure that - according to you - because that decimal never ends.

What can exist are extremely close approximations.

In our numbering systems, we use extremely close approximations. But the string is exactly pi.

bolzy: First make sure you can pass college level math exam on Julia and Mandelbrot sets (Link-new window). Needless to say only math majors are into crop circle pranks. Others have no need for such time wasting antics.

Or use a vector based computer program to do the work for you. Something like this will do nicely, and it's free to boot. Print it out, make a plan.

Make them in pitch darkness in a desolate farm.
Complete them in short enough time so that NO ONE sees you making them.

If the farm is desolate, chances are I could do it during the day and not be seen. To answer, use a red filter on your flashlight and your light source won't be visible beyond its illumination range. I use this for CTF while camping. Very sneaky, I'm almost never caught while patrolling.

Make sure no one sees you coming and going. Meaning, there should be no tell tale car tire imprints. Fly using whatever means to and from the crop circle site. This is crucial.

Drive up to the field via the road. Get out of car and walk along the hard, rocky, packed dirt road. Enter farm via tractor paths, as illustrated:


Proceed with above tutorial, scare locals and silly internet posters.

Disturb the magnetic field of the crop circle area
From my instructions:
Also, melt some iron filings into droplets on site and sprinkle them around the flattened area to leave 'meteorite particles' and magnetized stalks.

Only 4.99 a bottle from your local hobby retailer!

You'll note I don't have answers for your propane torch problem, because A) I've never heard of that problem before, and I used to be quite interested in Crop Circles, and B) I don't feel like poking through new-age crystal loving hokum to see how people do it. I'm sure you'll just continue to ignore this dissonance causing evidence in favor of more self-justification that there really are aliens visiting us in order to flatten our crops, so whatever floats your boat.

Hee! With the quibbling over the impossibility of constructing perfect circles and the Buckyball references, it's time to make the link: Fuller sides with JohnDHJ: no perfect circles or root 2 lengths actually occur outside of the minds of mathematicians. Nature (and contractors) must use discrete energy events such that "circles" are just highly pimped out polygons.

SteelBeak: There's nothing inhuman about these things. There are actually very simple and ingenious ways to make them perfect circles. here's a hint: a lenght of rope tied to a post at the center of the circle. AMAZING TECHNOLOGY!

That's kind of akin to saying that there's nothing extraordinary about building a super-sonic jet because you can fashion a flying machine out of paper.

Crushing stalks in a circle using a lenth of wood and some rope is a little different from bending stalks in a woven pattern by chemically altering their structure, using said method to create gemometrically complex and accurate patterns, and, in this case, mathematical messages, while also significantly altering the natural magnetic field of the affected area.

Perhaps we simply underestimate the number of people in the world who hold simultaneous PhDs in Math, Chemical Engineering, Structural Engineering, and Physics, who have large amounts of free time, and suffer from insomnia.

I'm certainly not discounting the fact that these things very well could be man-made, but I'm not convinced that a bunch of crop-field taggers are responsible for all of them.

bolzy: You forgot the really important parts:

Done, and done.

(cf. "Crop Circles: Mysteries in the Fields", Discovery Channel, first broadcast 10 October 2002)

Two words: Alien graffiti artists.

They must come from a bad section of the galaxy.

*three*


Talk about a bad thread to make a mistake with numbers.

Huck Chaser: Altourus: lincolncounty: nobodys_goose: Well, the ones that said they did all those old ones, obviously haven't been around for the 300 odd years that crop circles have been documented. But everything before those guys was OBVIOUSLY natural phenoms.

And these sure travel, since America, New Zealand, the Asiatics, Africa, they all have circles too. Yep. All the work of two old farts with a stick, rope, and a loop on a baseball cap.

Oh, and for some reason, with some of the circles, they manage to sprinkle magnetized buckyballs and iron all over the place, using the very soil under them.


It's a toss up between some really weird, secret society, some unusual phenom, or aliens. At least the Vatican says aliens could exist. Not that they'd know anything about secret societies or unusual phenoms that we can't explain, right God?

Praytell...what is a BUCKYBALL?

Its the tiniest theoretical construct, essentially the smallest nanomaterial we have theorized, granted we haven't actually created. Nor seen as far As I've heard, so how the original poster came to the conculsion that they were sprinkled over crop circles we may never know.

Talk about the blind leading the blind... Buckyball was defined correctly earlier in the thread. This poster is confusing a buckyball with the (currently theoretical) "god particle."

Poster is misreading what I said, it is the tiniest theoretical stable construct we can create with nanofabrication. Which granted is incorrect, in reality its the tiniest theorectical stable hollow sphere we can construct. Regardless, I wasn't speaking about the God particle.

KyngNothing: If mathematicians are baffled, who figured out it was pi?

Mathematicians are not difficult to baffle, unless it's about math.

Ed Grubermann: Altourus: lincolncounty: Praytell...what is a BUCKYBALL?

Its the tiniest theoretical construct, essentially the smallest nanomaterial we have theorized, granted we haven't actually created. Nor seen as far As I've heard, so how the original poster came to the conculsion that they were sprinkled over crop circles we may never know.

Oh, for the love of Dog! You are connected to the biggest repository of information humanity has ever seen. Do some damned research before you stuff your foot in your mouth.

Buckyballs (new window)

This person however has an extremely valid point