4 ms·
A bubble factors pi as it moves and deforms and reforms. Not in decimal, not in a numerical base...in unary.
by daniel-cussen 4y ago
A bubble factors pi as it moves and deforms and reforms. Not in decimal, not in a numerical base...in unary.
- dlivingston 4y agoI’m not sure I totally get what you’re saying - can you explain more?
- Rebelgecko 4y agoI think this is roughly equivalent to their point: Pi is a rational number, as long as you're in base-pi
- daniel-cussen 4y agoSo a bubble is unary in that it represents pi with single molecules in a circle. Then, forces tug at it--like gravity a tiny bit, but moreso wind and especially the hyperlocal flow of air driven by eg temperature (and particle concentration) that want it to not be spherical. But the bubble membrane wants to be spherical because that's its most stable shape. Here we're thinking of big huge bubbles, those exemplify this more, bubbles like 20 cm in diameter. So it's a tug of war between the air and the bubble, with the air tending to infinitely deformed and therefore inescapably burst bubble and the bubble tending to pi.
- nsajko 4y agoWhat does "factor" even mean here? The unary base is only good for natural numbers (and isomorphic sets), right?
- daniel-cussen 4y agoIt's an analog approximation of a sphere against the error induced by air motion, and gravity.
- Turing_Machine 4y agoExcept that the molecules that make up the bubble are not infinitely small. 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.