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Coming Soon to a Presidential Address Near You

By drorzel on February 23, 2007.

Two American physicists are reporting the discovery of nearly perfect quasicrystal patterns in the decorative tiles of a certain type of Islamic art:

Penrose tiling is very reminiscent of "girih" - the elaborate patterns used in Islamic architecture. While travelling in Uzbekistan, [Harvard physicist Peter] Lu noticed motifs with 10-fold rotational symmetry, which is a hallmark of some Penrose tiling. This inspired him to search through thousands of photographs of Islamic patterns to try to find a quasi-crystalline pattern - and this led him to a wall of the Darb-i Imam shrine in Iran.

It's not quite clear to me why this is worth publishing in Science, but surely it's only a matter of time before we add infringing on Roger Penrose's intellectual property to the list of reasons why we have to bomb Iran right now...

OK, fine, there's the tiny little detail that the Darb-i Imam shrine was built in 1453, 500 years before Roger Penrose tiled anything... But that just shows how clever the Iranians are-- clearly, they used a time machine to go back and build a mosque using Penrose tiles, just to thumb their noses at the West. Or something.

Why do they hate our freedom and complex mathematical structures?

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