The Golden Ratio and the Quantum World

Looks like God is playing dice with the Universe.

Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie (HZB), in cooperation with colleagues from Oxford and Bristol Universities, as well as the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK, have for the first time observed a nanoscale symmetry hidden in solid state matter. They have measured the signatures of a symmetry showing the same attributes as the golden ratio famous from art and architecture.

And the winning number is:

\varphi = \frac{1+\sqrt{5}}{2}\approx 1.61803\,39887\ldots\,

or

\varphi = [1; 1, 1, 1, \dots] = 1 + \cfrac{1}{1 + \cfrac{1}{1 + \cfrac{1}{1 + \ddots}}}

The proper response to this should go something like “OMG!”