Is this story really ??
Where is going our society ?? :-)
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On
Behalf Of Blu
Sent: Friday, February 04, 2000 12:44 PM
To: Protected Mode List
Subject: OT: what do you think about the authenticity of this?
> HUNTSVILLE, Ala.-NASA engineers and mathematicians in this high-tech
> city are stunned and infuriated after the Alabama state legislature
> narrowly passed a law Monday redefining pi, a mathematical constant
> used widely in the aerospace industry. The bill to change the value of pi
> to exactly three was introduced without fanfare by Leonard Lee
> Lawson (R, Crossville), and rapidly gained support after a letter-writing
> campaign by members of the Solomon Society, a traditional values group.
> Governor Fob James says he will sign it into law on Wednesday.
>
> The law took the state's engineering community by surprise. "It would
> have been nice if they had consulted with someone who actually uses
> pi," said Dr. Marshall Bergman, a manager at the Ballistic Missile Defense
> Organization. According to Bergman, pi is a Greek letter used to signify
> the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is often
used
> by engineers to calculate missile trajectories.
>
> Prof. Kim Johanson, a mathematician from University of Alabama, said
> that pi is a universal constant, and cannot arbitrarily be changed by
> lawmakers. Johanson explained that pi is an irrational number, which
> means that it has an infinite number of digits after the decimal point and
> can never be known exactly. Nevertheless, she said, pi is precisely
> defined by mathematics to be "3.14159, plus as many more digits as you
> have time to calculate."
>
> "I think that it is the mathematicians that are being irrational, and it
is time
> for them to admit it," said Lawson. "The Bible very clearly says in I
Kings
> 7:23 that the altar font in Solomon's Temple was ten cubits across and
> thirty cubits in diameter, and that it was round in compass." Lawson
> also called into question the usefulness of any number that cannot be
> calculated exactly, and suggested that never knowing the exact answer
> could harm students' self-esteem. "We need to return to some absolutes
> in our society," he said. "The Bible does not say that the font was
> thirty-something cubits. Plain reading says thirty cubits. Period."
>
> Science actually supports Lawson, explained Russell Humbleys, a
> propulsion technician at the Marshall Spaceflight Center who testified in
> support of the bill before the legislature in Montgomery last week. "Pi
is
> merely an artifact of Euclidean geometry." Humbleys is working on a
> theory which he says will prove that pi is determined by the geometry of
> three-dimensional space, which is assumed by physicists to be
> "isotropic," or the same in all directions.
>
> "There are other geometries, and pi is different in every one of them,"
> said Humbleys. "Scientists have arbitrarily assumed that space is
> Euclidean. A circle drawn on a spherical surface has a different value
> for the ratio of circumference to diameter. Anyone with a compass,
> flexible ruler, and globe can see this for themselves. It's not exactly
> rocket science."
>
> Roger Learned, a Solomon Society member who was in Montgomery to
> support the bill, agrees. He said that pi is nothing more than an
> assumption by the mathematicians and engineers who were there to
> argue against the bill. "Those nabobs waltzed into the capital with an
> arrogance that was breathtaking," Learned said. "Their predatorial
> deficit resulted in a polemical stance at absolute contraposition to the
> legislature's puissance."
>
> Some education experts believe that the legislation will affect the way
> math is taught to Alabama's children. One member of the state school
> board, Lily Ponja, is anxious to get the new value of pi into the state's
> math textbooks, but thinks that the old value should be retained as an
> alternative. "As far as I am concerned, the value of pi is only a theory,
> and we should be open to all interpretations." She looks forward to the
> day when students will have the freedom to decide for themselves what
> value pi should have.
>
> Dr. Robert S. Dietz, a professor at Arizona State University who has
> followed the controversy, wrote that this is not the first time a state
> legislature has attempted to redefine the value of pi. A legislator in
the
> state of Indiana unsuccessfully attempted to have that state set the value
> of pi to three. According to Dietz, the lawmaker was exasperated by the
> calculations of a mathematician who carried pi to four hundred decimal
> places and still could not achieve a rational number.
>
> Many experts are warning that this is just the beginning of a national
> battle over pi between traditional values supporters and the technical
> elite. Solomon Society member Lawson agrees. "We just want to return
> pi to its traditional value," he said, "which, according to the Bible, is
> three."
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