8/11/2019 Why Pi Is Wrong
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!is wrong challenging mainstream science
Should we ignore opposition to our most accepted science?
- At first glance, yes: we wouldnt have enough time and money to
check all oppositions
(Wertheim)
- At second glance, no:the !is wrong argument and maybe another
from recent history(Galileo?)
- How does mainstream science choose what theories to consider
and what theories to
discount? Is there some kind of a method in place to consider
such oppositions? If there
isnt, perhaps there should be.
One must always be cautious with claims such as the one above.
It only takes a quick
google search to verify that there are many people out there who
suggest alternative
theories to the mainstream sciences, and in the vast majority of
cases these challenges turn
out to be inaccurate, fallacious or riddled with crackpot
nonsense. In general, the scientific
community ignores them altogether. But, for science a discipline
of which the focus is on
evidence and falsifiability over your status and how wacky your
theory sounds, and a
discipline which constantly overturns its most stable and
well-accepted theories is such
discrimination dangerous? Are we potentially missing out on
important scientific ideas,
just because they are different from the accepted norm?
I was at a talk recently at the University of Sydney by Margaret
Wertheim on Outsider
Science, a broad term referring to alternative theories of
reality deduced by
On the other hand, some unofficial scientists have pointed out
some clear flaws in ourmost accepted and well known scientific
theories. One such example of this is Michael
Hartls challenge to the number !, the famous ratio between the
radius and circumference
of a circle, with a value of roughly 3.14. !is one of the most
ubiquitous numbers in
mathematics and physics, and for that matter all of the
sciences; furthermore, it pops up in
strange and unexpected places. Not simply useful for determining
circular distances based
on a radius, it also appears in trigonometry (the study of
triangles and triangular ratios),
and even in the theory of imaginary numbers (numbers with the
value of #-1). In short, !
pervades all of mathematics and the sciences with remarkable
consistency; so how could it
be wrong?
Hartls criticism isnt that the number !is necessarily calculated
incorrectly, but rather that
it has been interpreted in the wrong way. Instead of calculating
the ratio between the
radius and the circumference of a circle, he says, we should be
focusing on the relationship
between the diameterand the circumference. Its a small detail,
but it ends up solving a lot
of inconsistencies and problems with the way such a circular
ratio is used, and most
notably it gives this new number a symmetry throughout
mathematics. Given that the
diameter of a circle is double its radius, the new number is 2!,
and Hartl has dubbed it
$(pronounced tau).
