I just saw a post saying NASA had calculated the universe to one hydrogen atom using 40 digits of Pi, I’m aware Pi is a very important number but how does it help us to work out distances etc?
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Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. You can think of it like this: if a circle has a diameter of 1 inch, then what’s the circumference? Turns out, it’s about 3.14 inches. and if the diameter was 2 inches, then it would be 6.28 inches. If the diameter was 3 inches, then you’d get 9.44 inches circumference and so on. What this means is you can now figure out the circumference of any circle as long as you know the diameter, which is pretty useful for a variety of fields.
The funny thing is, you’d expect this ratio of circumference to diameter to be a nice neat thing, but it isn’t. Pi as a number is often approximated to 3.14, but this is only an approximation. The “real” pi actually has infinite digits after the decimal point, and mathematicians have proved that this infinite series of digits. The more digits we use, the more accurate our calculations get. For most everyday use, 3, 3.1, 3.14, 3.141, 3.1415 all work well enough depending on the situation. We’re talking about small scales, a few metres, maybe a kilometre. When it comes to space, well, space is pretty big. You’ll need more digits, maybe you go up to 10 or 15. But as it turns out, you can get really accurate really fast with pi. You could calculate the size of the universe with just 3 digits, but you’d probably be off by a huge amount. You keep adding digits until you’re sufficiently happy with how accurate it is, which in this case is probably 40 digits given it’s accurate to an unimaginably small length.
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