Oh, my - why pi??

Post audio files & youtube videos.
Post Reply
User avatar
sasha
Posts: 2061
Joined: April 12th, 2016, 12:01 pm
Location: New Hampshire
Contact:

Oh, my - why pi??

Post by sasha » January 20th, 2019, 12:19 pm

This animation is an idealized representation of the energy and momentum conservation laws, with an amazing, unexpected, mind-blowingly non-intuitive result. The basic physics is actually quite simple - I can almost do the math in my head - and now I want to write a program to do this. It won't be as slick as the presentation here, but it seems like a fun way to spend a few dangerously cold days holed up inside!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEfHFsfGXjs
.
"Falsehood flies, the Truth comes limping after it." - Jonathan Swift, ca. 1710

User avatar
mnaz
Posts: 7672
Joined: August 15th, 2004, 10:02 pm
Location: north of south

Re: Oh, my - why pi??

Post by mnaz » January 26th, 2019, 3:18 am

Pi is just such a weird ratio, thing, whatever it is. Almost like humans discovered math and suddenly everything was completely calculable and figured out, and the universe said "uh uh, not so fast"...

User avatar
sasha
Posts: 2061
Joined: April 12th, 2016, 12:01 pm
Location: New Hampshire
Contact:

Re: Oh, my - why pi??

Post by sasha » January 26th, 2019, 1:54 pm

The motions of the planets, nuclear decay, gravitational attraction - it crops up everywhere, peeking around the most unexpected of corners. It even shows up in the statistics describing random processes, in tandem with another mysterious universal constant, e, approx. 2.71828... the distribution of heights of 1st-graders... the weights of apples... the length of bolts off an assembly line... Deep Magick.

Here's another one that blew my mind. The Fibonacci numbers form a sequence in which each member is the sum of the previous two, starting with zero and one: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,... etc. The ratio of any two consecutive members of the series approaches a constant, around 1.618034... Interesting enough, but what blew my mind was that it doesn't matter which two numbers you use to start the series. You can start with 12 and -374 - and you'll eventually get the ratio between two consecutive elements converging to 1.618034... You can check this yourself easily enough in Excel.

I've dug a little deeper and now I understand why this is so - but it's still pretty remarkable on the surface.

Deep Magick.
.
"Falsehood flies, the Truth comes limping after it." - Jonathan Swift, ca. 1710

User avatar
gypsyjoker
Posts: 1458
Joined: May 26th, 2005, 9:01 am
Location: stilltrucking's vanity
Contact:

Re: Oh, my - why pi??

Post by gypsyjoker » February 3rd, 2019, 10:36 pm

"a change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points" 8)
I liked this comment on the third video:
Minstorm
7 hours ago
I'm continually impressed on how this channel can make me feel completely lost in the first 5 minutes but completely enlightened in the last 5
Free Rice
Avatar Courtesy of the Baron de Hirsch Fund

'Blessed is he who was not born, Or he, who having been born, has died. But as for us who live, woe unto us, Because we see the afflictions of Zion, And what has befallen Jerusalem." Pseudepigrapha

User avatar
sasha
Posts: 2061
Joined: April 12th, 2016, 12:01 pm
Location: New Hampshire
Contact:

Re: Oh, my - why pi??

Post by sasha » February 4th, 2019, 11:40 am

gypsyjoker wrote:
February 3rd, 2019, 10:36 pm
"a change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points" 8)
I liked this comment on the third video:
Minstorm
7 hours ago
I'm continually impressed on how this channel can make me feel completely lost in the first 5 minutes but completely enlightened in the last 5
That was how I felt watching his video on Fourier transforms. "What the hell is he doing??" Then it all suddenly fell into place... an "oh, wow" moment...
.
"Falsehood flies, the Truth comes limping after it." - Jonathan Swift, ca. 1710

User avatar
mnaz
Posts: 7672
Joined: August 15th, 2004, 10:02 pm
Location: north of south

Re: Oh, my - why pi??

Post by mnaz » February 5th, 2019, 9:10 am

Fibonacci? Yeah, consecutives eventually converging on 1.618 is a mind blower, but at least it wasn't 1.5708! (Half of pi...) That would've been downright scary...

User avatar
sasha
Posts: 2061
Joined: April 12th, 2016, 12:01 pm
Location: New Hampshire
Contact:

Re: Oh, my - why pi??

Post by sasha » February 5th, 2019, 2:04 pm

Don't let your guard down just yet! The total area under the bell curve is... (drum roll please) ... the square root of pi! (1.7724539 etc etc)

This was important to us for designing laser marking systems because energy within an ideal laser beam is normally distributed around the beam axis, following a statistical bell curve. I wrote a shitload of Fortran code exploiting that equivalence.
.
"Falsehood flies, the Truth comes limping after it." - Jonathan Swift, ca. 1710

Post Reply

Return to “Music, Spoken Word & Video”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 6 guests