The Making of a Prophet
lareviewofbooks.org
lareviewofbooks.org
> he found the number pi distasteful. “I’d learned at school that in order to make a sphere, which is what a bubble is, you employ pi, and I’d also learned that pi is an irrational number. To how many places, I wondered, did frustrated nature factor pi? And I reached the decision right at that moment that nature didn’t use pi,” reads his objection in a New Yorker profile.
A crank turns that useful but possibly misleading thing into a crusade where truth is being suppressed by the establishment.
/s
b^0 = 1
Not every step of math has to be mapped to something physically real in order to math to be useful to describe the real world.
Imaginary numbers per se may not have a direct mapping to any physical magnitude, but complex numbers nevertheless are very useful to accurately describe real world phenomena. You just don't need to focus in the wrong detail and lose the bigger picture off sight.
"For JPL's highest accuracy calculations, which are for interplanetary navigation, we use 3.141592653589793. Let's look at this a little more closely to understand why we don't use more decimal places. I think we can even see that there are no physically realistic calculations scientists ever perform for which it is necessary to include nearly as many decimal points as you present."
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many-decimal...
This only makes sense if you assume nature must be a digital computer.
Does that mean that it is a digital computer? No. But it's reminiscent of it.
On a human scale, a soap bubble may look perfectly spherical.
But it isn't. The closer you look at it, the lumpier it gets.
Certainly just about everything appears to be quantized at some level.
Clearly, yes, the author is driven by resentment and is a terrible writer
> but
There's your mistake!
To expand a bit:
Yeah, on a human scale, the bubble looks spherical, but when you look at it on a small enough scale, you start to see behaviors that are far removed from the continuous functions that one would expect from Newtonian mechanics.
The unary base is only good for natural numbers (and isomorphic sets), right?
pi is not irrational in base pi
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/never-meet-your...
"being capable of rape can make a person better qualified for greatness"
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/manliness...
> The term synergy was refined by R. Buckminster Fuller, who analyzed some of its implications more fully[9] and coined the term synergetics.[9]
> * A dynamic state in which combined action is favored over the difference of individual component actions.
> * Behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately, known as emergent behavior.
> * The cooperative action of two or more stimuli (or drugs), resulting in a different or greater response than that of the individual stimuli.
There are numerous other egregious errors.
Coming from a rich family helps, but today in tech and finance we see tons of successfull people from more modest means. i think times have changed and family wealth not as important.