Philosophy: the truth of science

[iago]

I sort of said that wrong. I meant, every time we use pi, we use an approximation of it. I realize that pi is a proven value.

That's patently untrue.

I just checked, and it doesn't look like my calculator has an infinite amount of memory. Neither does my computer, or anything else..

It's irrelevant that it's often good enough.  Engineering is not on the frontier of science; in fact, it can't really do what it aims to do if it is.  Engineering, almost out of necessity, applies knowledge acquired by scientists where approximations are almost never "close enough."

Please don't equate science and engineering.  They're closely related, but they are not interchangeable.

I like how a statement I made that was totally besides the point and was supposed to be in agreement with something you said ("Not to say some conclusions within science are a little bit off, but it's the best thing we have, and I think it's actually quite good."). I wasn't trying to equate them, I said that your statement reminded me of what engineers say (at least the engineers I know) :)

[Joe]

I'm going to laugh in a few years when we find the end of pi. Then it'll get posted on the pirate bay and people will download it, causing the internet to go down.

This is an interesting thread. Unfortunately, I don't have anything to add.

[iago]

I'm going to laugh in a few years when we find the end of pi. Then it'll get posted on the pirate bay and people will download it, causing the internet to go down.

There is no end of pi, it can be mathematically proven that pi goes forever with no pattern.

[dark_drake]

Pft... you're a good engineer if you can get within 10%. :P So, having pi to 20 digits is really unnecessary; pi is probably going to be the least of an engineer's worries. I can actually recall unit conversions in a few of my courses used 1 ft = 0.3m. It's a bit off, but as a first guess, it works.

[Newby]

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1777#comic



In my five quarters of honors physics, I don't think we used more than 3 digits past the decimal. And I'll say 3 to be safe, we usually just used 3.14.

[iago]

PI IS EXACTLY THREE!!!!! (*gasp*)

(-Simpsons)

[Sidoh]

I sort of said that wrong. I meant, every time we use pi, we use an approximation of it. I realize that pi is a proven value.

That's patently untrue.

I just checked, and it doesn't look like my calculator has an infinite amount of memory. Neither does my computer, or anything else..

"Use" does not mean represent in memory...

Talk to anyone who works on theory.

It's irrelevant that it's often good enough.  Engineering is not on the frontier of science; in fact, it can't really do what it aims to do if it is.  Engineering, almost out of necessity, applies knowledge acquired by scientists where approximations are almost never "close enough."

Please don't equate science and engineering.  They're closely related, but they are not interchangeable.

I like how a statement I made that was totally besides the point and was supposed to be in agreement with something you said ("Not to say some conclusions within science are a little bit off, but it's the best thing we have, and I think it's actually quite good."). I wasn't trying to equate them, I said that your statement reminded me of what engineers say (at least the engineers I know) :)

That's fine, but that's not what I was talking about.