OPH · 64k
V07·Act II · Space centrepiece

The damping race, and why three survives

Twelve points drift in a scattered cloud. Two mode-clouds dim and die, the third brightens, and the points lock into an exact icosahedron.

The relation on screen

Every mode decays geometrically at its own eigenvalue, so the surviving subspace is the slowest one, and its multiplicity is three.

Symbols

repair Laplacian on the port space
eigenvalue of mode k, its damping per step
amplitude remaining in mode k
preparing the damping race

what to look for · Three dimensions arrive as the multiplicity of the slowest mode. Watch the 3 curve stay above the others by a widening margin.

Consensus to physics

  1. 01repair is the smoothing operator T = I - L/60
  2. 02each A5 block is damped at its own rate: 1, 0.953934, 0.900000, 0.879399
  3. 03iterate and every non-constant block dies except the slowest
  4. 04the surviving block is three-dimensional, so distinguishable directions number exactly three

In standard physics

The derivation of three spatial dimensions

Repair is a low-pass filter on symmetry blocks and the survivor is the standard 3-dimensional representation, the one under which the icosahedron sits in ordinary Euclidean space. Nothing here was tuned to make three come out on top; it follows from the symmetry of the carrier.

boundary · Not a spectral-dimension measurement and not a fit. At finite n the kernel rank is 11; three appears only in the normalised limit.