>Even tho' I sympathize with Sokal, I am often alarmed by his defenders who
sometimes sound
>less science literate than his victims. As when Pi becomes the poster child
for
>trans-cultural reality in the above article. What is that "thing" that Pi
is the name for?
>The formal answer would be the limit of some (infinite) sequence of
operations, like Pi =
>(2 x 2 x 4 x 4 x 6 x 6 x ...)/ (1 x 1 x 3 x 3 x 5 x 5 ...). A "thing", in
this case an
>irrational/transcendental number defined as a limit, that is not palpably
real, but
>requires immense cultural conditioning to be perceived as such; witness the
resistance of
>mathematicians of past centuries that have denied such notions.
Which number is "palpably real"?
> Even in its more intutive
>definition as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter,
Pi does not have
>a referent in a non-Euclidean universe whose geometery is warped by gravity
at every
>scale.
You may make the warp as small as you like by choosing a suitably small portion of space (and staying away from black-hole singularities ;-) ). But in any case, why should that matter? Geometry is no more "concrete" than calculus or algebra.
Enzo