CROP CIRCLES

Typographical error in Euler crop glyph?

Transcrib the binary digits, each byte (8 bits) into its corresponding ASCII character, starting from the direction of the windmill and working clockwise around the circle and out from the centre. The result is: e^(hi)pi)1=0

In Google the top result was Euler's identity: e^iπ+1=0. "The most beautiful theorem in mathematics". Euler's formula demonstrates the deep relationship between the trigonometric functions and the complex exponential function.

An anomalous 'h' in the glyph and an absent '+'

Perhaps significantly, the 'h', with the adjacent 'i', reads 'hi' but 'h' could be a reference to the Planck constant, taking us from the world of maths into the world of physics.

Could the makers have left a 'Planck' in the design as a subtle joke on all the croppies who might pronounce this a 'genuine' crop circle as opposed to a circle made with a plank?

Maybe the circle-makers made a mistake. The binary encoding for 'h' - 01101000 is just one binary digit different to that for '(' - 00101000. The extra opening bracket would pair up with the otherwise unpaired closing bracket in the message to give us e^((i)pi)1=0.

But then, The ASCII code for right parentheses ')' differs by just one digit from '+' so that is possibly what was meant.

Euler Identity - e^(i)pi+1=0
Crop ASCII - e^(hi)pi)1=0
Crop ASCII corrected - e^(hi)pi+1=0

wilton windmill crop circle may 2010

Going Around in (Crop) Circles

Over the past fortnight, legendary paranormal researcher Jacques Vallee has posted two guest-blogs on (the insanely popular website) Boing Boing, on the topic of crop circles. In the first, "In Search of Alien Glyphs", he details his own alternative theory for their construction (first set out in "Crop Circles: 'Signs from Above' or Human Artifacts?":

"In Sept. 1991, I published in a New Age magazine my own hypothesis about the Crop Circles phenomenon. I speculated they involved a military aerial device (not a space-based instrument) for generating such designs using focused microwave beams, such as a "maser." At the time nobody wanted to hear that the beautiful pictures in English corn fields might be crafted by a technical team inside some lab, bouncing signals from a hovering platform and using individual corn stalks as simple pixels to calibrate a lethal device. So my paper was met with dead silence."

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