It's a Battlefield Out There, Culturally Speaking (by Edward Rothstein - NY Times)

Enzo Michelangeli em at who.net
Tue Dec 8 17:39:50 PST 1998


-----Original Message----- From: Raju Rajan <raju at watson.ibm.com> Date: Wednesday, December 09, 1998 1:54 AM


>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



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