God created the world and Pi is derived from it’s axioms, so God also created Pi…
Well if one believes that the Bible is literal truth, then God did define the value of pi:
[quote]
And he made the molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass, and the height thereof was five cubits; and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about."
[quote]
Petr Beckman follows the early Church’s take on this in “A History of Pi” - since pi was known and defined in the Bible, no scientific work on it was needed or appropriate. Anything that threatened the literal truth of the Bible was heresy. Mathematics flourished in Arab lands but no progress was made on pi in Western lands until Fibonacci in the early 1200’s and no significant progress until the Church’s influence waned in the 15th century.
If God created the universe by creating its rules, then everything that flows from its rules is a result of God (like flonks says), and therefore studying how it really happens and really is (even when such contradicts sacred texts) is beginning to know God. Is, to a believer, a religious experience.
Remember what God answered to Moses when he asked to directly behold God’s presence: (Exodus 34):
If there is a God, then God’s essential nature can be revealed only by studying God’s wake, by studying the world and its rules. For that is more directly God than any text.
Doface, my understanding is that such randomness of its infinite length is implicit in its being a transcendental number. But I am sure that others can explain more succintly than I.
Argh! Make that an “/quote” after the first Bible quote!
(preview is my friend preview is my friend preview is my friend)
Dogface, read Bytegeist’s first post.
(Try again.)
Well if one believes that the Bible is literal truth, then God did define the value of pi:
Petr Beckman follows the early Church’s take on this in “A History of Pi” - since pi was known and defined in the Bible, no scientific work on it was needed or appropriate. Anything that threatened the literal truth of the Bible was heresy. Mathematics flourished in Arab lands but no progress was made on pi in Western lands until Fibonacci in the early 1200’s and no significant progress until the Church’s influence waned in the 15th century.
If God created the universe by creating its rules, then everything that flows from its rules is a result of God (like flonks says), and therefore studying how it really happens and really is (even when such contradicts sacred texts) is beginning to know God. Is, to a believer, a religious experience.
Remember what God answered to Moses when he asked to directly behold God’s presence: (Exodus 34):
If there is a God, then God’s essential nature can be revealed only by studying God’s wake, by studying the world and its rules. For that is more directly God than any text.
Doface, my understanding is that such randomness of its infinite length is implicit in its being a transcendental number. But I am sure that others can explain more succintly than I.
(Better.)
So is the number .001000100000100000001… algebraic?
Dogface, my understanding may be flawed. I can offer up no proof that numbers with predictable patterns are algbraic. Nor can I prove that transcedental numbers cannot ever have predictable patterns, or do not if followed out far enough … my apologies.
What do you consider to be a “predicatable” pattern? The digits of pi are predictable in the sense that they can be determined by a deterministic algorithm.
But they have no identifiable pattern.
There’s an algorithm that can compute the nth hexadecimal digit of [symbol]p[/symbol] without knowing any of the previous ones. Sounds like a pattern to me.
[Weebl]
God, when come back bring Pi.
[/Weebl]
I’d be interested in seeing something about that algorithm. If someone asked me to make such a thing, I’d simply pick a circle of known circumference and radius, and pull whatever digits I needed out of the ratio. But if they have an algorithm that truly calculates pi with a different, non-empirical method, I think that’d be pretty cool.
Can I blow up this argument a little. I have often wondered about the physical constants – charge on an electron, plancks constant, velocity of light etc. Are these constants related to physical axioms in the same way that pi relates to mathematical axioms? That is to say, are their ratios somehow fixed so that it would be impossible (sorry, can’t think of a better word) for there to exist a stable universe with different values.
I don’t know the answers to these questions, nor to Bippy’s original question.
Any thoughts?
Is it even possible to exactly know both the circumference and radius of a circle, considering the relationship between them? If the radius is 1, the circumference is 2*pi… and measuring the circumference exactly will be no easier than calculating all the digits of pi.
Here.
Of course, the real question is: could god create a Pi so big that even he couldn’t eat it?
As far as current physical theories go, there is no way of deriving any of the values you mention from any underlying principle. The string theorists claim that at least some physical constants can, in principle, be derived from string theory, but here we are 30 years later and still no one has succeeded in doing that. And, according to some string theorists, there should exist other universes with different values of these constants.
I don’t understand your thinking here. They follow the pattern that they are all the digits of pi. What do you mean by an identifiable pattern? What determines what is and is not a pattern?
Yeah, just the title of this thread immediately evoked that last chapter of the book – which blew me away the first time I read it. What a fascinating idea – and coming from an atheist to boot.