From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Mar 08 2002 - 21:16:10 MST
At 10:24 AM 3/8/02 -0800, Hal wrote a great post, but commented in passing:
>It's also hard to see how anyone could put a message into Pi. That
>is such a simply defined number, how could it have a message?
My sense of this was that Sagan was using the child's version of pi: the
ratio of circumference of a circle to its diameter. This is controlled by
the specific and tweakable geometry of spacetime, no? So the Builder
Thingee had a choice of metric, and selected one generating a value of pi
that, when read out into Base 11 arithmetic and then read `kilometers
downstream of the decimal point' in a SETI-message fashion as a
2-dimensional raster square, created a perfect circle of ones on a field of
zeroes. Kinda elegant, in a minimalist and self-recursive way.
Damien Broderick
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