Physicists Prove Surprising Rule of Threes
simonsfoundation.org
simonsfoundation.org
Section 3 of this paper talks about the actual transcendental equation that provides the constant.
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1946/2679...
> It's not repeating digits I'm talking about, though, it's termination.
227/10 will not terminate in any numerical base which isn't a multiple of ten. Combining this with the idea that no numerical base should be privileged over another, we can rephrase this to say that it's surprising for a physical constant to be a rational (but not integral) number.
It's not surprising for a physical constant to be an integer because we really believe that integers have special qualities. It's not surprising for a physical constant to be irrational because that's just the way numbers are. If it's rational but not integral, you want to justify the denominator somehow.
That one is a nice case where not only is the number clean and simple, but we have a solid theoretical basis for why it's 2 and not some other number.
(Technical note: though the figures of 0% and 100% are correct and exact, they actually do not mean that selecting a rational number is impossible. For a similar idea, note that if I select a number uniformly from the interval [0,1], the prior odds of choosing whatever number I did choose were also zero, but by the construction of the problem I had to end up with something.)
This means that if you find a rational number, you should immediately suspect that it's like that for a good reason. You're much more likely to win the jackpot of every lottery you ever enter, even if you buy a ticket every day, than to encounter a rational number by coincidence.
Or using a different analogy, the world population is roughly 7 billion. It would be extremely unlikely, so unlikely that we can essentially rule it out beforehand on theoretical grounds, for any of them to be a rational number of centimeters tall, or to mass a rational number of grams. That sort of thing can't happen.
I haven't argued that a physical constant which terminates in base 10 implies that 10 is more special than other bases. I've argued to support the idea that a physical constant terminating in base 10 is surprising. It is, superlatively so. In the words of the OP, the question you need to answer, if you think you have a constant exactly equal to 227/10, is "why is the denominator 10?". It could be that 10 is a holy number, or it could be that the 10 represents some other physical quantity that you weren't paying attention to before. But assuming it's a coincidence is a strange thing to do, and in fact it is not natural to think that if you just looked at enough numbers of course you'd eventually see a rational one. Unless you're choosing numbers by a process that biases you heavily towards getting rationals, you are not likely to see a rational until long after you've chosen an infinite number of irrationals.
The whole genesis of string theory was, first, observing that a sequence generated by a badly-understood phenomenon was the same sequence given by a mathematical result about strings; and then, second, concluding "aha! There must be strings involved in this!" Plenty of people argue that string theory isn't going anywhere, but nobody says the conclusion "there must be some strings around here somewhere" was unjustified. The "it's a coincidence" theory persuades no one.
Further there are strict levels of granularity on a number of measurements, for example you run against the plancks constant when measuring a number of things. So this argument for looking at all of [0,N] falls apart if we aren't dealing with measurements that are continuous.
I stress that this is an approximation only! I had to explain about PI being irrational rather than exactly equal to the shortcut approximation to a couple co-workers, explaining some poor behaviors in their rotation function.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ellipse+1%2F2%2C+cos%28...
“What you see is three groups, in three different countries, reporting these multiple Efimov states all within about one month,” said Chin, who led one of the groups. “It’s totally amazing.”
Mathematician: "We should use proof by induction, I can show 3 is a prime number by listing all of it's factors, and then from there I can show that 2n + 1 is prime ..."
Scientist: "What? that doesn't make any sense. What we need is experimental data. Let's collect enough points, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13. Six points should do, now look, the general trend is that all of them are prime. We have one anomaly, but it's probably just caused by a random fluctuation in..."
Engineer: "Nah, all this theory is pointless, we only need to know if they are prime in the real world. Let's just take a few and see if they work for our purposes. 3 - prime, 5 - prime, 7 - prime, 9 - nearly prime, 11 - prime, surely that's good enough."
Computer scientist: "While you lot have been wasting your time arguing I have been writing a program that will do all the work for us"
All of the students gather around the CS's computer and watch as he presses go.
Computer: 3 is prime 3 is prime 3 is prime 3 is prime 3 is prime 3 is prime 3 is prime 3 is prime 3 is prime 3 is prime 3 is prime 3 is prime 3 is prime 3 is prime 3 is prime 3 is prime
At any rate, these depths of physics are quite complex and not very intuitive, and this kind of discovery shows it is very easy to overlook things. A giant discovery could be looming in the horizon...
Sadly, the Efimov effect has nothing to do with the proton size puzzle.
Source: IAANuclearPhysicist.
I think it's quite awesome that Vitaly Efimov lived to see his theory being proved (or, at least, to see strong evidence in its favor).
It always makes me sad when I read about scientists who made great discoveries just to be laughed at until their days end, and then their theories are proved after they are dead.
A classic example is Alfred Wegener, who postulated continental drift just to be ridiculed., but of course there are many, many others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener
Another, even more tragic story is that of Ignaz Semmelweis, who not only pioneered antiseptic procedures in hospitals, but, to my mind, proved their effectiveness beyond any reasonable doubt, was rejected, and died tragically.