NATURE and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night:
God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.
Alexander Pope
Back in my mispent high school days I got extra credit in one of my math classes by giving presentations on Friday each week on the lives of famous mathemeticians, my way of compensating for the fact that math and I have always had a tortured relationship. However, even though higher math will always remain a closed book to me, the history of math is not, and it reminds me that exploration in the realm of pure knowledge can be just as exciting as the exploration of the earth and the stars. Faith and Reason allow us to explore the glory of God’s creation and what we do with the knowledge we gain thereby makes all the difference, both in time and in eternity.
Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau:
Mock on, mock on: ‘tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
And every sand becomes a Gem,
Reflected in the beam divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking Eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.
The Atoms of Democritus
And the Newton’s Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.
William Blake
Pi is wrong though. See tauday.com for the better circle ratio.
Tau is 2 * pi ? Oh my! https://tauday.com/tau-manifesto
In Naval Nuclear Power School we learned that tau = half life / natural log of 2. It has nothing to do with pi. It’s used in radioactive equations to determine how much of a radioactive isotope is left over after a certain period of time.
But I appreciate the humor, Kyle! 😀
Happy Pi Day. No square Pi for me.
Mary-But Pi are squared gives you the area of the [circular] pie. Ooooops- it is “R”, not “are.” May we all have our Pi and eat it too. Guy
I’m paraphrasing from memory, Mortimer Alder “Six Great Ideas”
“..we know things with varying degrees of assurance, some things we know beyond a reasonable doubt -that is in light of evidence and argument from opposing council we know them to be true beyond a reasonable doubt. There are few things we can say We KNOW and these things tend to be abstract.. “
BTW, something just occurred to me:
Today is PI Day (03/14/2019).
Tomorrow is the Ides of March (03/15/2019).
The next day is our Wedding Anniversary (03/16/2019).
Then finally comes St. Patrick’s Day (03/17/2019).
My local supermarket had small pies for sale for $3.14.
I’m puzzled by non math person’s fascination with Pi, but not puzzled by Pi. (A circle is a closed sided figure with an infinite number of sides -of course its constant will be infinite.)
Square-root of 2 or 3, those are a couple of real fascinating ones. Such infinite numbers are quite common actually.
Suppose it’s the non math that makes Pi fascinating.
Probably why you’re a lawyer today Don. I guess you like me have bad math genes. When I was taking a bar review course, one of the instructors asked people how many of them decided to become lawyers because they had trouble with math. Over half the class raised their hand. I’m not sure where those bad math genes come from since my dad used to do calculus for fun and my daughter the statistician felt that it was super easy even though her father came close to flunking statistics.
the most profound statement of pi is Euler’s e^(ipi) = -1
My main academic ability has always been reading comprehension. That, and comprehending and writing the history of anything. As for Math, well my Bride balances our checkbook each month.
It’s always been a day of celebration in the engineering office. Any excuse we can for an office party!
Not a mathematician but always look forward to the bargain pizzas on pi day.
Like you, Donald, my math gene is hiding somewhere under all the other flotsam and jetsam in my brain. But I did decide to pursue a legal career before I knew how awful I am at any math higher on the ladder than geometry, which I always loved, and was the only math class in which I got all A’s.
One thing that fascinates me about math is how it is so perfect. And music is essentially math in sound. That’s rather inelegant, but it makes the point, I think. The two together make, in my mind, a powerful piece of evidence for a Creator, because nothing so perfect and so perfectly interlocked could be an accident. That applies to many things in our physical world, of course, including all the natural sciences, but math and music combine to provide the soundtrack of Heaven, at least in my poor imagination.
I did not learn math until US Naval Nuclear Power School. Doing your math correctly when you’re the reactor operator is pretty important if you want your submarine to surface again.
The very fact that there are important numbers which define our physical reality points out the necessity of a Divine Creator:
Euler’s Number (e): 2.7182 –> exponential growth constant govenring everything from radioactive decay to compound interest.
The Golden Ratio: 1.6180 –> number often encountered when taking the ratios of distances in geometric figures.
Planck’s Constant: 6.626068 x 10^-34 m^2 kg/s –> reflects the size and energy quanta in quantum mechanic used to determine the uncertainty principle.
Avogadro’s Constant: 6.0221515 x 10^23 –> a mole of Carbon contains exactly 6.022 x 1023 atoms of carbon, and if you weigh it, it would weigh 12.011 grams, carbon’s atomic weight.
The Speed of Light: 186,282 miles per second
Gravitational Constant (G): 6.67300 x 10^-11 m^3 kg^-1 s^-2
Boltzmann’s Constant: 1.380650 x 10^23 joule per kelvin –> the proportionality factor that relates the average relative thermal energy of particles in a gas with the thermodynamic temperature of the gas.
There are more such “magic” numbers. The fact that physical reality depends on them being what they are to the last decimal place gives one a sense of awe.
LQC, thanks for that reminder. Fr. Robert Spitzer writes and talks quite often about universal constants as one of the rational proofs for the existence of God, because as you noted the tiniest (and he means REALLY tiny) variation from any of them would preclude the possibility of life as we know it in this universe. I like to point my agnostic and rational atheist* friends toward this:
https://www.magiscenter.com/blog/science-and-the-evidence-for-god
*-I use the term “rational atheist”, without checking to see if it is a term of art in theological/philosophical circles, as my own definition of the professed atheist whose mind is at least partially open to being proven wrong. Many atheists today are as dogmatic about the absence of a God as they criticize believers for being about His existence. More proof that God not only exists, but has a marvelous sense of humor.
Frank and LQC – thanks for sharing this. I recall learning philosophy in high school and being taught that the early philosophers, ie Aristotle, were able to reason the existence of a One, True Creator, just through reason and logic.
I can only add to the math conversation by saying:
1) I like to eat pie.
2) I wasn’t much good at Math at school….although I do wish I could redo Math class again, as I surprise myself how much I have retained, whenever Im helping my kids with Math homework.
SpaceX launched its third test flight of the Starship/Super Heavy booster on Pi day. Scott Manley pointed this out in a YouTube video about the flight. He said:
“Why do people love Pi? I don’t know it’s irrational, it’s also transcendental, and it’s also SpaceX’s 22nd birthday.”
*