Physicists looked into how whirling dervishes' skirts make such "hypnotic" patterns.
Whirling dervishes are members of a Turkish religious group that pays homage to the 13th-century Persian poet, Rumi, by spinning in place and creating intriguing patterns with their skirts, an Institute of Physics news release reported.
"The dancers don't do much but spin around at a fixed speed, but their skirts show these very striking, long-lived patterns with sharp cusp-like features which seem rather counterintuitive," Co-author of the study James Hanna, from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, said.
Researchers believe the patterns may be linked to a force that ties together the rotation of the Earth and the direction of weather patterns.
The team believes the Coriolis force is essential in the hypnotic patterns made by the Whirling Dervishes' skirts. The team used equations that dictates how "free-flowing cone-shaped structures behave when rotating" to make their finding.
Through these equations the researchers were also able to recreate the "sharp peaks and gentle troughs" that can be seen on the surface of the Dervishes' skirts, and the generated images were surprisingly close to the real thing.
The team concluded the Coriolis force was essential in the appearance of these patterns.
"Because the sheet is conically symmetric, material can flow along its surface without stretching or deforming. You can think of the rotating Earth, for example, with the air of the atmosphere free to flow around it," Hanna said.
"The flow of a sheet of material is much more restrictive than the flow of the atmosphere, but nonetheless it results in Coriolis forces. What we found was that this flow, and the associated Coriolis forces, plays a crucial role in forming the dervish-like patterns," He said.
The researcher was published in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society's New Journal of Physics.
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