From: M. C. Beutler 
To: skeptichat@lists.sonic.net 
Subject: [SC] (fwd) Pi redefined
Date: Sunday, April 26, 1998 3:19 PM


 Forwarded from another list:

>>
>>  HUNTSVILLE, Ala.-NASA engineers and mathematicians in this high-tech
>>  city are stunned and infuriated after the Alabama state legislature
>>  narrowly passed a law yesterday redefining pi, a mathematical constant
>>  used in the aerospace industry.  The bill to change the value of pi to
>>  exactly three was introduced without fanfare by Leonard Lee Lawson (R,
>>  Crossville), and rapidly gained support after a letter-writing
>>  campaign by members of the Solomon Society, a traditional values
>>  group.  Governor Guy Hunt says he will sign it into law today.
>>
>>  The law took the state's engineering community by surprise.  "It would
>>  have been nice if they had consulted with someone who actually uses
>>  pi," said Marshall Bergman, a manager at the Ballistic Missile Defense
>>  Organization.  According to Bergman, pi is a Greek letter that
>>  signifies the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
>>  It is often used by engineers to calculate missile trajectories.
>>  Prof. Kim Johanson, a mathematician from University of Alabama, said
>>  that pi is a universal constant, and cannot arbitrarily be changed by
>>  lawmakers.  Johanson explained that pi is an irrational number, which
>>  means that it has an infinite number of digits after the decimal point
>>  and can never be known exactly.  Nevertheless, she said, pi is
>>  precisely defined by mathematics to be "3.14159, plus as many more
>>  digits as you have time to calculate".
>>
>>  "I think that it is the mathematicians that are being irrational, and
>>  it is time for them to admit it," said Lawson.  "The Bible very
>>  clearly says in I Kings 7:23 that the altar font of Solomon's Temple
>>  was ten cubits across and thirty cubits in diameter, and that it
>>  was round in compass."
>>
>>  Lawson called into question the usefulness of any number that cannot
>>  be calculated exactly, and suggested that never knowing the exact
>>  answer could harm students' self-esteem.  "We need to return to some
>>  absolutes in our society," he said, "the Bible does not say that the
>>  font was thirty-something cubits.  Plain reading says thirty cubits.
>>  Period."
>>
>>  Science supports Lawson, explains Russell Humbleys, a propulsion
>>  technician at the Marshall Spaceflight Center who testified in support
>>  of the bill before the legislature in Mongtomery on Monday.  "Pi is
>>  merely an artifact of Euclidean geometry."   Humbleys is working on a
>>  theory which he says will prove that pi is determined by the geometry
>>  of three-dimensional space, which is assumed by physicists to be
>>  "isotropic", or the same in all directions.
>>
>>  "There are other geometries, and pi is different in every one of
>>  them," says Humbleys.  Scientists have arbitrarily assumed that space
>>  is Euclidean, he says.  He points out that a circle drawn on a
>>  spherical surface has a different value for the ratio of circumfence
>>  to diameter.  "Anyone with a compass, flexible ruler, and globe can
>>  see for themselves," suggests Humbleys, "its not exactly rocket
>>  science."
>>
>>  Roger Learned, a Solomon Society member who was in Montgomery to
>>  support the bill, agrees.  He said that pi is nothing more than an
>>  assumption by the mathematicians and engineers who were there to argue
>>  against the bill. "These nabobs waltzed into the capital with an
>>  arrogance that was breathtaking," Learned said.  "Their prefatorial
>>  deficit resulted in a polemical stance at absolute contraposition to
>>  the legislature's puissance."
>>
>>  Some education experts believe that the legislation will affect the
>>  way math is taught to Alabama's children. One member of the state
>>  school board, Lily Ponja, is anxious to get the new value of pi into
>>  the state's math textbooks, but thinks that the old value should be
>>  retained as an alternative.  She said, "As far as I am concerned, the
>>  value of pi is only a theory, and we should be open to all
>>  interpretations."  She looks forward to students having the freedom to
>>  decide for themselves what value pi should have.
>>
>>  Robert S. Dietz, a professor at Arizona State University who has
>>  followed the controversy, wrote that this is not the first time a
>>  state legislature has attempted to redifine the value of pi.  A
>>  legislator in the state of Indiana unsuccessfully attempted to have
>>  that state set the value of pi to three.  According to Dietz, the
>>  lawmaker was exasperated by the calculations of a mathematician who
>>  carried pi to four hundred decimal places and still could not achieve
>>  a rational number.
>>
>>  Many experts are warning that this is just the
>>  beginning of a national battle over pi between traditional values
>>  supporters and the technical elite.  Solomon Society member Lawson
>>  agrees. "We just want to return pi to its traditional value," he said,
>>  "which, according to the Bible, is three."
>>
>>
>> ________________________________
>>
>>
>> [Satire alert]
>>
>> -- Bill Schultz          JOIN THE AGNOSTIC CHURCH:
>> |  bill@infidels.org     pope@agnostic.org  http://www.agnostic.org/
>> |  bill@freethought.org  http://www.infidels.org/org/singles/
>> |  Internet Infidel:     http://www.infidels.org/
>>
>>
>>
>>


I would like to believe that this is some sort of hoax....

Anybody able to verify or disprove this story?

-
.
***************************************************************
mark beutler  mycroft_h@bigfoot.com
"If stupidity got us into this mess, why can't it get us out?"
***************************************************************

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