Gravitational forces pull matter toward the center of mass, making most of the objects in the solar system, like the sun, settle on a spherical plane. As stars, planets and moons spin on their axes, centrifugal force causes these objects to bulge at their equators, making them wider than they are tall. The faster an object spins, the more oblate than truly spherical it becomes. The sun, for example, bulges 10 kilometers at its equator; but when scaled down, this difference is infinitesimal.
You might know if you found one, but if you haven't found one, you haven't proved that they don't exist," said David Kinderlehrer, Alumni Professor of Mathematical Sciences. While nature might be out of our control, shouldn't it at least be possible to draw or make a perfect circle? For a circle to be perfect, we would need to measure an infinite number of points around the circle's circumference to know for sure. Each point would need to be precise from the particle level to the molecular level, whether the circle is stationary or in motion, which makes determining perfection a tricky feat.
Much like Schrodinger's cat's suspended existence, the answer is not clear cut — there are all kinds of possibilities. Together these studies show not only that culture and handwriting shape the way people draws abstract shapes; they also suggest our tendencies get stronger over time.
The more we write, the more our habits become ingrained. Now with 90, circles collected from across the world for the same purpose, we have a far bigger and more consistent dataset that could back up what these studies have each shown on a small scale. If English was your first language, you might have forgotten your early school days, spent precariously gripping a pencil and awkwardly forming huge upper and lower case letters in the recommended formation. In Japanese and Chinese, for example, stroke order is an essential component of writing legibly, and can even signal education level.
The modern Chinese stroke order system evolved from clerical script, a system prevalent in the Han dynasty. According to Huang, the calligrapher, the use of soft brushes to write could have informed some of the contemporary stroke rules. Japanese draws on the same stroke order guidelines as Chinese. Today the rules have been relaxed. Today, American kids are increasingly being taught a method of print and cursive called Handwriting without Tears.
A gesture that American psychologists once assumed was natural and right, it turns out, might look odd, even crass, to a native Japanese speaker. There are countless ways that we subtly, unconsciously carry our cultures with us: the way we draw, count on our fingers , and imitate real-world sounds, to name a few. To test our theories, we approached colleagues, friends, and family who write in Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese, and, feeling a bit silly, asked them to draw circles.
They gladly jumped in, wondering what their fingers would do, and eager to feel part of something larger. Interest in shape-drawing seems to have gone out of style in psychology.
With one exception, all of the research we found on cultural shape-drawing and the torque test was from before By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy. Skip to navigation Skip to content. Discover Membership. Editions Quartz. More from Quartz About Quartz. Follow Quartz.
These are some of our most ambitious editorial projects. From our Obsession. We explore how language helps us make sense of a changing world. They appear suddenly, usually at night. At first they were simple circles of bent-over grain stalks.
Some cerealogists people who study crop circles say that these diagrams must be created by intelligent alien beings from elsewhere. Even though these diagrams must be constructed in a very short timespan, the genuine crop circles never show any serious mistakes or blunders of execution.
Cerealogists see this as evidence that the aliens must be very intelligent and much more advanced than we are. That's mere speculation, of course. Others say the real reason is that there's a worldwide conspiracy to hide the fact that the aliens sometimes do make mistakes. This coverup is carried out by people who want to preserve the myth that the aliens are a perfect race. The fact that you've never heard of such crop circle blunders just shows how effective this coverup is, they say.
Mistakes are repaired at the site, or sometimes photographs of the circles are retouched. This has about as much to recommend it as any of the other conspiracy theories accepted and believed by simple-minded people. Let's look at more plausible explanations. Actually, a few designs do seem at first to have apparent irregularities or flaws. Some of these are surely caused by wind or rain, careless hoaxers or the trampling feet of crop circle buffs.
But let's set those aside and look only at those that are genuine and undisturbed. What appear at first to be iregularities or errors, may only be perfection of a higher and subtler kind, that we do not as yet understand. Crop circles made by aliens? Why should supposedly intelligent aliens travel huge cosmic distances across the galaxy just to doodle in our grain fields? What an absurd idea! Usually there aren't even any ufo sightings associated with the circles, except for those reported after the fact by people with overactive imaginations.
Surely intelligent aliens have better things to do. The true origin of crop circle designs may be nearer to home.
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