September 9, 2006: Manmade Crop Circles & Numbers - Simeon Hein with Scott Flansburg
The results proved startling. Digital cameras froze when flown over the formation at altitude. Electrostatic readings inside the circle jumped to ten times normal levels, and a video camera overheated until too hot to touch. Hein explains that these anomalous effects, identical to those found in supposedly authentic crop circles, appeared roughly two days after creation. He theorizes that the layered wheat acts as a natural superconductor.
Flansburg demonstrates his extraordinary abilities live on air, adding three-digit numbers instantly and counting by 42s faster than a calculator. He argues that humanity has been approaching numbers incorrectly by starting at one instead of zero, and that his matrix represents a new foundation for arithmetic education. The program also features Art and his wife Airyn discussing the Filipino legend of the Aswang.
Key Moments
Digital cameras freeze over the math-matrix circle: Hein recounts that flying over the commissioned crop circle at 600 to 1,200 feet froze his digital camera, and the next day a second photographer's digital camera also refused to take pictures, forcing them to use a manual Nikon.
Tenfold electrostatic jump inside the circle: Hein reports the swirled outer rings of the formation produced an electrostatic field roughly ten times higher than outside, jumping from about 20 volts to 200, with two researchers measuring independently.
Crop circles as natural superconductors: Hein proposes that the swirled, layered wheat in mathematically tuned ratios behaves like a Bose-Einstein condensate or room-temperature superconductor, with paired electrons shorting out nearby electronics.
We have been off by one - zero is the first digit: Flansburg argues schools miscount fingers as 1 through 10, but the ten digits are really 0 through 9. Recognizing zero as the first digit, he says, is the power button on the brain's calculator.
Every number in the universe goes back to nine: Flansburg demos his base-nine matrix: subtracting the digit sum of any two-digit number gives nine, walking 10 down to 99 covers every basic addition fact, wiring the brain.