Pi in the Bible?

Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences,University of Wisconsin - Green Bay

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Created 3 February 1998, Last Update 3 February 1998

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CHAPTER 16 IS THERE REALITY? Chances are, every reader of this book has heard of theTitanic, which hit an iceberg in 1912and sank with the loss of1500 lives. It is equally certain that very few readers know oftheEmpress of Ireland, which collided with another ship in theGulf of Saint Lawrence in 1914 andwent down with 1050 people.Here are two great ship disasters in two years, both claimingover athousand lives each, yet one is forgotten while the otheris famous. Why? The answer almost certainly is that the Titanic was asymbol. She was reputed to beunsinkable, though in fact she wasneither watertight nor especially strong. (If hercompartmentshad been watertight at the top, and the ship double-hulled asmany others of the timewere, she might well have survived untilrescue ships had arrived) The Titanic was claimed to bethemost luxurious ship afloat. In short, she represented the bestthat technology had to offer, andthe shock at the loss of theTitanic was incalculable. In many ways, the sinking of theTitanicmarked the end of the 19th century. There's anotherfactor, too. The captain of the Titanic isreputed to have said"God Himself could not sink this ship". There is a word forarrogance thatliterally seems to cry out for a thrashing:hubris. In common language, we would say "he wasasking forit". Science has encountered many unexpected findings, but we canidentify a few events thatshocked science as thoroughly as theloss of the Titanic shocked the world, and for many of thesamereasons. One after another, assumptions that science hadconsidered unsinkable ran intoicebergs and went down. The firstshock was not only metaphysical, but seismic as well. In the18thcentury, scientific optimism was perhaps at its all-time peak. Itwas a time when philosopherscould speak of the Universe as aclock, and God as the Clockmaker, or physicists could claimthatit was possible in principle to use the laws of physics tocalculate the history of the universe inabsolute detail. Thissort of overconfidence was ripe for a blow, and it came onNovember 1, 1755,when the first great earthquake to strikeEurope in 300 years wrecked the city of Lisbon, Portugal.Theinability for the philosophy of the time to accomodate such anirrational event was a profoundshock. Worse yet was the factthat November 1 was a holy day in Portugal and that many ofthefirst victims were killed by collapsing churches, while otherswere killed when they soughtrefuge in the churches stillstanding, only to have the roofs cave in during aftershocks. Itseemed asif God Himself was out to prove a point. Pessimisticphilosophers of the times repeatedly pointedto the Lisbon quakeas an insurmountable problem in philosophy, as indeed it was.Never againwould there be quite such a self-confident blendingof science, rationalism, and theology. The major blows to scientific complacency came during the19th and early 20th centuries. Thefirst one was struck byDarwin, who showed that not only was man not the center of theuniverse,but was possibly not even the product of consciousdesign. The last major link between scienceand traditionaltheology was broken. At about the same time, mathematicians foundto theiramazement that the rules of geometry were not unique. Itwas possible to replace certain rules andstill come up withgeometries that were every bit as self-consistent as theEuclidean geometry thathad been known since antiquity. This wasa deeply unsettling finding; some mathematicians hadsaid that ifman could have absolute knowledge anywhere, it was in geometry.Just as the Titanicwasn't just any ship, discovering the new,or non-Euclidean, geometries, wasn't just anymodification of therules. In the late 19th century, experimenters named Michelson andMorley discovered that the speedof light was invariant, and didnot depend on the speed of the observer. Albert Einstein showedthatthe only way these results made sense was if time and spacethemselves were mutable, dependingon the observer's viewpoint.Interestingly, Einstein found that non-Euclidean geometry,hithertoonly a mathematical curiosity, was exactly what heneeded to describe his new physical concepts.Soon after,physicists, led by Walther Heisenberg, discovered that events onthe atomic scale couldnot be predicted or described withabsolute precision. This concept is the so-calledUncertaintyPrinciple. It is possible to make statistical predictions such assaying that half the atomsin a sample of radioactive materialwill decay in a certain time, but predicting when aparticularatom would decay is impossible even in principle. Science and philosophy constantly affect one another's worldview. Isaac Newton came closeto discovering that light had bothparticle and wave properties, but his concept of the worldsimplydid not permit there to be two equally valid but different waysof describing light. A Jesuitmathematician named Saccheri cameclose to discovering non-Euclidean geometry in 1733, overacentury before other mathematicians developed it, but such adiscovery was simply incompatiblewith the prevailing world-view.Science also impacted on philosophy; the success of theNewtonianscientific world-view heightened the concept of God theClockmaker. It is doubtful that evolution, non-Euclidean geometry,relativity, or the Uncertainty Principlecould have beendeveloped in a world that did not tolerate philosophicalskepticism anduncertainty. At the same time, the unsettlingdiscoveries of science have further encouraged somephilosophersto question whether any knowledge at all is certain, and evenwhether there is anysuch thing as objective reality. A cartoonby Sidney Harris, who has made a career out of theunlikelypastime of drawing scientific cartoons, shows a scientist on apsychiatrist's couch. Thepsychiatrist is saying: "But you can'tgo through life applying Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principletoeverything! Unfortunately, some thinkers attempt to do justthat. Philosophical extrapolations from modern science seem tofall into three categories. On thehighest intellectual level,some philosophers are deeply concerned with the problems andparadoxesthat any theory of knowledge raises. Others use suchconcepts as relativity or uncertainty asmodels for their ownphilosophies, or as evidence that existing concepts of objectiveknowledge arefaulty. Jeremy Rifkin, whom we met in the lastchapter, justifies his unorthodox interpretationofthermodynamics with such quotes as this: If the people knew what the physicists now know, the bottom would fall out from the mechanical world paradigm. The assumptions of classical physics upon which we have confidently erected our entire way of organizing life turn out to be largely fallacious, say today's scientists ...Theodore Roszak sees in the developmentsof modern physicsencouragement for his own mystical views: There are the frontier theoretical physicists and mathematicians who deal in paradoxes of time, space, mass and perception that often lead them back to insights derived from mystical and Oriental traditions, all of which propose images of nature that are spiritual- mental-organismic rather than materialistic-mechanistic.At the lowest level of intellectualrespectability, we findabusers of science who use developments in modern science as adhoc"proof" that some inconvenient idea can be ignored.