Nautilus shells

Are you ready for the answer Here is the list of terms sorted in order of beauty as determined by my little survey of scientists and colleagues. The numbers in parentheses indicate the number of times the term was an individual s first choice dancing flames (31), snow crystal (20), mist-covered swamp (17), spiral nautilus shell (10), mossy cavern (5), kaleidoscope image (5), avalanche (4), computer chip (3), seagull s cry (3), tears on a little girl (3), trilobite fossil (2), glimmer of mercury (2), wine (2), asphalt (1). 

Heating experiments on Nautilus shell material (see page 10) indicates a retardation in the rates of thermal decomposition of mineral and organic phase. This has been attributed to the development of a topochemical boundary at the contact protein-mineral. X-ray diffraction analysis gives no evidence for structural alteration of the original aragonite during the thermal treatment up to 200 °C. 

Now I look at the saber-tooth tiger s skull, so massive, so deadly. Without stars, the tiger racing across the savanna fades away, ghostlike. There are no iron atoms for its blood, no oxygen for it to breathe, no carbon for its proteins and DNA. There are no mossy caverns, mist-covered swamps, black vipers, retinas, spiral nautilus shells. Our existence requires stars to forge the heavy ele-... 

F ure 10.9 Nautilus shells natural and polished, ctoss-secdon, dices and coque-de-perle. 

As an inlay, pieces of thin nacreous shell are used, for example fiom nautilus shells. They may be etched and stained to enhance the pattern, or to give the impression that the inlay is made up of more pieces and therefore mote innicate (Fig. 10.17). 

The grey-blue nacreous centre of the whorl of nautilus shell is used as a natural cabochon. It is called the coque-de-perle . It is cut out and backed to give it body (Fig. 10.8). 

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the Dutch brought nautilus shells back from the Dutch East Indies and perfected the art of cutting and carving these in delicate and ornate designs, sometimes with pictures added that were etched into the shell and dyed with... 

For several centuries mother-of-pearl has been used as an inlay material. This was particularly popular in the Far East, where items of lacquer or tortoiseshell, as well as wood, were inlayed with mother-of-pearl, often using nautilus shell. In India mother-of-pearl has been used as inlay on large pieces of wooden furniture and caskets, and as an overlay on brass items such as jugs and basins. 

Conformal symmetry is very common in nature e.g. we can find it in the nautilus shell and the sunflower. These structures are clearly ordered, even if they do not give sharp diffraction patterns. Here the repetition is non-Euclidean, on a logarithmic spiral (nautilus), or on a torus (sunflower). We are inclined to say that any kind of repetition, conformal or isometric, even in non-Euclidean space, is ordered. However, classification of these more chaotic structures, as for liquids, is less certain. It may be that a liquid can be described as a structure with some of the characteristics of conformal symmetry or perhaps by a representation even more exotic, like a manifold of constant negative curvature. 

Observing the Trend Many natural phenomena, such as the increasing spiral of a Nautilus shell and, as you ll see in this chapter, the arrangement of electrons in atoms, recur with such periodic regularity that they allow us to predict properties and behavior. 

Until the parallel between number and cosmos is demonstrated to be an illusion we shall use this idea to model the universe. The power of this approach lies therein that all regularities in the physical world can be reduced to the same mathematical rules as the commensurable relationships in the solar system. The same mathematics that optimizes the distribution of matter in spiral galaxies and solar systems, shapes the growth of nautilus shells and sunflower heads. This ubiquitous symmetry, known as self-similarity is... 

All available evidence points at projective topology. According to a modern encyclopaedic compendium of mathematics (Gowers, 2008), which features a nautilus shell on the dust cover, ... 

GrEgoire, C., 2010. Ultrastructure of the nautilus shell. In Nautilus, Springer, Netherlands,... 

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