My young nephew, Ernst Bienek, is torn between his passion for arachnids and his fanatical devotion to mountain biking, enthusiasms that no doubt explain his extraordinary new theory whose working title is Spiderivable Radials for optimised tensegrity of structures. I understand he is still perfecting the proofs of his discoveries yet he’s also keen to invite other theoreticians to share their thoughts on his propositions.
So here you are first to read of his arachnoid derivations.
Or perhaps you already know the premise of his findings?
Ernst sketches it out like this . . .
In sum, the Spider’s Web and, essentially, its Radial Angles yield an Optimal Correlation of
Number, Structural Economy and Tensile Strength
Significant Median Angle of Cobweb Radials is ≈12.7°
a division, which, within 360°, equals 28 Radials.
Consider then the Spokes of a Mountain Bike Wheel (Optimum Lightweight/Strength/Spokes Correlation)
Number of Spokes = Median between 24 and 32 = 28
The Significant Number is 28 radials
Spider and Man are in perfect accord ?
 |
The dome of the Pantheon, Roman 2nd Century Temple, has 28 Radials. Some two thousand years after it was built, the Pantheon is still the world’s largest unreinforced dome. Photo credit: Mohammad Reza Domiri Ganji Wikimedia Commons |
Can we then assume the ‘lacing’ of a cobweb and the lacing of a mountainbike’s wheel spokes have a preordained correlation identified some two thousand years ago, when considerations of strength and economy of means were formulated for the dome of the Pantheon — the temple dedicated to ‘All the Gods’ — now one of the best-preserved of all Ancient Roman buildings?
 |
29 Radials (near mean-optimum)
Photo credit: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos
|
 |
|
Ernst asks: What did the Ancients know? What does the spider know? |
You are reading it here first.
A recent study of cobwebs (2021)* shows that extracted geometrical numeric values can elucidate how spider web utilisation has the potential to guide development of optimised fibre oriented reinforced composite structures for constructing such figurations as shell structures, pressure vessels and fuselage cones for the aviation industry. The statistical results depict the opening angle utilisation by the spider for web construction, and the cumulative mean of all collected samples shows that the favourable angle of the spider for orientation in web construction is ≈12.7°.
* Journal of Composite Science
