From the personal finitude of navels to an infinite universal.
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197 and so on, and on, and on.
Pi. The number of times that a circle's diameter will fit around its circumference. Or, in other words, the distance around the outside of a circle divided by the distance across the middle of the circle.
So far as we know, this
ratio cannot be calculated with perfect precision.
So far, no patern
emerges in the endless parade of digits.
Pi, therefore, is a transcentdental
number.
I am not now, nor have
I ever been, a mathematics enthusiat. But give this information in
junior high school, I felt I had been handed the end of the fine thin string
that was attached to infinity. This was not math, it was metaphysics.
In minth grade, I entered
a contest to see who could memorize the longest extension of pi.
I got as far as thirty-nine decimal places. And took third place.
Even now, somewhere in the ffiling cabinets of my head, thirty-nine places
of pi remain--still attached to the inconceivable.
The infinitude of pi has
intrigued students of mathmatics for almost four thousand years.
The earlist written record is on a papyrus scroll from Egypt from about
1650 B.C.
In the seventeenth century,
Ludolph van Culen, a German mathematician, calculated pi to thirty-five
decimal places--a remarkable feat if all you have to work with is your
head and a pencil and paper. Pi absorbed his mental energy for most
of his life, and was so important to him he had it carved on his tombstone.
Though it is suspected that there is no pattern in pi and never will be, the hunt continues now that we have the power of supercomputers at our command. A trillion digits is possible. Working at 100 million operations per second, the lastes achievement is 2 billion 260 million 336 digits, ending in 9893531. Printed in a single line, the number would reach from Seattle to Miami. Looking very carefully, you will still see no patern that suggests an end.
So what? Who cares?
Those who want to know
what's beyond present knowlegde.
Those who wanted to know
what the back side of the moon looked like.
Those who are driven
by the same curiosity that launched the orbiting telescope, the Mars bioshere,
cell engineering, cancer research, and the project to contact intelligent
life in outer space. The same spirit that investigates belief in
an afterlife and the nature of God.
Those who believe there
just must be an explanation.
We are not comfortable
with untidy solutions and loose relationships. We want an existence
built around a binary code. Yes or no. Black or white.
True or false.
Much of the machinery
of our time is binary.
The expression of most
phenomena can be reduced to complex sequences of on-off, open-shut, yes-no
dichotomies. The language of the computer upon which I am writing
at this moment to based on a binary code. In the standard convention,
each letter of the alphabet has an eight-bit code of ones and zeros.
Same as with Morse code
of telegraph days--dot or dash. And now the thick/thin bar codes
for product pricing. Something or nothing. Being or nonbeing.
Yin or yang. Even in Biblical days, decisions were made in the temple
with two stones, the Urim and thummin, cast to determine the will of God.
Pi doesn't fit the program here. It's a tangible star trek--a bridge between the known and the infinite. It is a puzzle that exists anywhere in the universe where round things exist. From the shape of planets to waves of energy in far space to the spiral of living DNA to the circle of the lens of the human eye and the shope of each person--the perfect roundness of the single egg each of us once was--just before the moment of conception. All a matter of pi. The elegant mystery of the relationship between around and across acting in concert.
Will we ever ind a repetitive
pattern to pi?
Will we ever exactly
know the nature of God?
With ultimate questions,
the answers always seem to hang in the balance.
The answer is always
the same.....
(ai... i really hate typing..)