- Anything Else -
cherry, or apple?
Posted by: Floyd ( Unmarked Helicopter Pilots' Union, Local Number 23, Peoples' Republic of Deep Space ) on October 18, 1999 at 21:31:53:
In Reply to: Message in Pie posted by Ryan Close on October 17, 1999 at 17:39:00:
(SNIP)
:I am always fasinated by the Atheists who come up with all the good reasons why God should exist and doesn't. Carl Sagan for instance, in his book Contact, he sugested that in numbers with infinitly long decimlals like pie, could actualy have a message encoded with in them. The numbers should be compleatly random, no number should appear any more than another. (SNIP)... Pie is a constant just like 1+1=2 so who ever put the message in pie would have had to have had a hand in the creation of the universe. And we do find a message, the Tao. I know the beginnings arguments do not work, they are intresting, but they are not conveincing. I said all of that before.
: -Ryan-Hi Ryan; I'm sure you mean "pi," and not "pie." Pi, the greek letter "p" is roughly equal to 3.1415927. It is an "irrational" number (it can't be expressed as an integer or a quotient off integers) that represents the mathematical relationship between the circumference of a circle to its diameter (i.e. all circles are just a bit more than three times as far around as they are across). Pie, on the other hand, is a delicious concoction of baked crust and a tasty filling, often of fruit, served as an after-dinner treat. ;-) Sagan's book, Contact is an excellent work of fiction (and now a major motion picture staring Jody Foster...grrrrowwwllll! ;-) but it is not actually a book about science. Certainly any creature who could alter the diameter/circumference ratio of all circles, in order to send a message (directed to mathematicians with too much time on their hands*) would have many of the characteristics often ascribed to deities, but Sagan was being speculative; there is actually no pattern to Pi. However, that is exactly the kind of evidence I'd find convincing.
I'm not sure what you mean about finding the Tao in Pi. The nearest sense I can make of that is that, like the Tao, as described by Lao Tsu, there seems to be no meaning inherent in the succession of numbers, and it's only our interpretation of its relationship to other things (in this case, circles) that contains meaning. Is that the approach you were trying to take? If so, you're starting to sound more like a Sartre-esque existentialist than a Kantian. Careful, "that way be dragons!" (heh heh)
-Floyd
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*Mathematicians with way too much time on their hands are the only people who care about pi to more than maybe ten decimal places. Engineers, flight telemetry specialists, etc. do quite fine with only a few places. I suppose the quest to know as many of the infinite sequence of digits in pi as possible is as good a hobby as any, and it keeps a few math majors off the streets for a while, at least! ;-)
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