The mark of God's chisel

[jpfed]

Yesterday, I was reading a book on information theory and it gave me goosebumps.

The difference between heat and useful energy is that heat comes from what you don't know about the detailed structure of the system. When you know the detailed structure of a system, you could put machines in all the right places and all the right times to extract

Comments

God's chisel

[llindeman]

At the end of the book, Contact, by Carl Sagan (but not in the movie), Ellie Arroway discovers that somewhere among the long train of numbers in the mathematical figure pi is a string of 1's and 0's in base 11. "It's length is a product of two primes, indicating a two dimensional array. She plots it on her computer screen (each digit representing a pixel) and sees a perfect circle. The constant which describes the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter itself contains a picture of a circle!"

That is Carl Sagan's idea of proof of God. I'm sure if it were true, he would have crapped his scientific pants.

Quote from: http://math.cofc.edu/faculty/kasman/MATHFICT/mf55-spoiler.html

Re: God's chisel

[jpfed]

There is plausible speculation (I don't know if it's been proven) that every finite sequence of digits is found in pi, in every base. If that were true, then yes, there would be an infinity of pictures of circles in the digits of pi. You could also find the same sequence of digits in pi that your computer uses to represent your user icon, sequences identical to JPGs of rioters clashing with police, the notes to every Mozart composition, etc...

Re: God's chisel

[jpfed]

As a side note, a Lindemann (with an extra "n" at the end) was responsible for proving that pi is transcendental.