
N.B.: I did not draw this brain - I probably stole it from the Wikipedia.
Obsession is an ever present theme in art and literature. Science's major (perhaps only) outstanding literary archetype, the Mad Scientist (ubiquitous from pulp fiction all the way up into works like Gravity's Rainbow) is defined chiefly in terms of obsession.
Even gentle portrayals of scientists frequently dwell upon their monomania, which they may enter only in fits, as though possessed, while retaining enough humanity the rest of the time to get the girl (or guy) in the end.
Perhaps the only concession to the scientist's valuable social role in modern literature is that sometimes, in his monomaniacal monotone, the scientist becomes sibyl: the mouthpiece for the implacable forces of nature. Think, for instance, of Ian Malcom1, who delivers in quiet monotone, tiny lectures on the futility of trying to control nature while the camera hangs in the air and silence, or low, tense tones, fill his words with ominous portent. Of course Jurrasic Park, apart from the dinosaurs, is really a story about bad mad scientists vs good ones. We will have to settle for that as progress.
Science Journalism, tasked with the often difficult role of interpreter of science for non-scientists, falls into the trap of occasionally portraying scientists as hopelessly obsessed with their fields. Of course, this may have something to do with the fact that many scientists do have an obsessive streak. Never the less, some subjects present the journalist with irresistible temptation towards this end, and one such subject is the drift in the standard kilogram.
The story is this: the International Prototype Kilogram was produced in 1879, a time when positivism had an almost suffocating grasp on reality. It's a little platinum iridium cylinder whose whole purpose can be summed up in two bullet points:
Thenceforth, more or less, the world has been weighed relative to this unit, which due to its obsession with consistency, convalesces, much like Proust, in a dark room somewhere in France.
Of course, the IPK does not take visitors very often and so, like most other interesting things, it's become a meme. Periodically, copies of the cylinder are made and then carried by the metrologists of the world to their own climate controlled basements. Presumably somewhere along the way, these International Instance Kilograms are used to calibrate measuring devices which eventually measure everything in the world, instilling all of Western Civilization with a soothing sense of the consistency of the Universe, which may be godless, but at least is
not without measure.
Unfortunately, in accord with the progress of man since the turn of the last century, wherein the positivism of the late 1800's has been re-arranged into countless post-isms, this family of identical kilograms has begun to drift apart.
A quick google search reveals that this story has made the rounds. The article in the LA Times, though, is typical. In it, Scientists are portrayed as brittle, near mad, obsessives, desperately trying to re-establish a certainty which is drifting away. The portrayal is not negative, but it is perhaps a bit too dramatic. Not much effort is put towards explaining the real practical and scientific issues associated with errors in the measure of the kilogram (of which there are many). I wonder what this kind of media coverage does for science at large.
Ian Malcom, it should be noted, in the first and most popular Jurassic Park films, is a bit out of place as a lead character. He is not set up against a love interest and there is very little to humanize him as a regular movie archetype. I wonder if this kind of reporting leaves scientists seeming more alien to the average person, even if it does not consciously demonize them.
1 Ian Malcom, Jeff Goldblum, Howie Mandell, Bobby's
World...
(defun car (x) (car x))
: what? progn
is a function which takes no arguments?
In less metaphorical terms, pi is disturbing because it relates which ought to be two simple things, the radius of a circle, easily perceived, with its circumference, also simple enough to see, but it does so in a way which requires kinds of numbers well beyond the ken of day to day life.Upon ejecting Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, God said to the Angels, all perfect in proportion and hence identical, that a boundary must be made around the Garden so that Mankind might never enter the garden again. He instructed Michael to grasp with one hand the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which would form the center of the forbidden Garden, and in his other grasp one of the thousand archangels, each grasping another until a chain of 100 archangels was formed. The last angel, Chamuel, grasping the Sword of Damocles, would then proceed to trace with its burning tip, a line in the lush undergrowth of the Garden, walking constrained by the angels, until he returned to his starting point, tracing out a circle around the Garden. God then instructed the archangels to guard this boundary by joining hands as before, along the line of
demarcation, so that no point of the boundary could be crossed by Mankind ever again. To their dismay, no number of archangels, hands joined thusly, could form such a circle, for when 628 angels joined hands they found that there was not sufficient space for the final angel. Seeing this, God was silent, the angels dismayed, and Mankind, watching huddled from the wilderness, was filled with dread, for it now understood the world it had been expelled into.
But a search for Muhammed, the Prophet of Islam, yields
search string = "jesus"
25-bit binary equivalent = 0101000101100111010110011
search string found at binary index = 514534284
binary pi : 1110001001010001011001110101100110000000000000101011110110000011
binary string: 0101000101100111010110011
character pi : sxgepajxpkkt;gbjesus__bwvawwmn;n:,tyjj
character string: jesus
search string = "muhammed"Which might disturb any Muslims reading except that a search for Islam gives a result at 758395516 digits but a search for Christianity fails.
40-bit binary equivalent = 0110110101010000000101101011010010100100
string does not occur in first 4 billion binary digits of pi
Our model for the digits of pi is a discreet probability distribution which produces one of ten results with equal probability. A standard test for whether certain data are drawn for a hypothetical distribution is the Pearson's Chi Squared test. This is given by
0 119999636735
1 120000035569
2 120000620567
3 119999716885
4 120000114112
5 119999710206
6 119999941333
7 119999740505
8 120000830484
9 119999653604