Page 129 - The Miracle in the Ant

dle touches the ground like a pencil drawing a thin line. Thus, it leaves
a trace behind it that leads to the food. 85

Ants Who Serve As Compasses
Food-seeking ants carry out a task in a manner which is very hard to
explain. They go to the food source following a wiggly path, but when
they return home, it is via a short and straight line. Then, how is it that
ants that can see only a few centimetres ahead of themselves, march in
such a straight line?
To find an answer to this question, a researcher called Richard
Feynman placed a clump of sugar at one end of the bathtub, then wait-
ed for an ant to come and find it. As this pioneer ant returned home with
news of the feast, Feynman followed the wiggly path it followed. He
then traced the path of each successive ant to follow the trail. The suc-
cessive ants, he found, did not stick exactly to the trail; they did better,
cutting corners until the trail became a straight line.
Later on, inspired by Feynman, a computer scientist, Alfred
Bruckstein, proved mathematically that successive followers really do
make a wiggly line straight. The conclusion he arrived at was the same:
after a certain number of ants, the path length shrinks to some minimum
value: to the shortest possible distance between two points - namely, a
straight line. 86
What we talked about above is of course, something which would
require great skill on the part of a human being because he would cer-
tainly need to use a compass, a watch and at times much more complex
instruments for any distance relative to his own dimensions and would
have to have a perfect knowledge of mathematics. In contrast to this, the
guide an ant has in exploring on its own is the sun, while its compass
is the position of branches and other natural landmarks. Later on, ants
remember their shapes and can thus find the shortest route to their nests
although they have never had any prior knowledge of it.
This is very easy to say but very hard to explain! How can these tiny
living beings do such calculations when they have neither a brain nor
the capacity to think and judge?
Imagine that you leave a man in an unfamiliar forest. Even if he
knows the direction to go, he will have a hard time finding his way and

Harun Yahya 129