h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In Sagan's book "Contact" he fictionalized that the digits of Pi contained a secret mystery in binary code (or something like that).
I'm moving and the book is packed up in my attic!
Can somebody check this out and refresh my memory??

I may be wrong about this, but since Pi is infintely long, it must logically contain every possible piece of text ever, in code. The works of shakespeare, complete, are in there somewhere...

Nearly right!

Contact presents the idea that the universe was manufactured by a race of (presumably highly intelligent) alien beings. Being quite conceited, they decide to leave clues to their accomplishment at odd places, including within Pi. At the end of the book, given a clue by another race of (highly intelligent) alien beings (but crucially not the same ones who created the universe!) to search deep into Pi, the heroine of the book delves deeper into Pi than anyone else has ever done, encoding the numbers into binary and presenting them as a raster of a fixed width & height (I can't quite remember how she decided on the width & height to use). After processing for hours & hours, she eventually discovers that at a fixed number of digits into Pi, her raster representation produces a perfect circle on her VDU. This was supposed to 'prove' that Pi had been manufactured and was not 'natural' after all.

Thanks!
I knew it was something like that...

Hmmm... well, there's going to be a picture of a perfect circle in there somewhere... the downside is, the number of digits you'll probably have to look to is going to be pretty massive... in fact, it's likely to take up pretty much the same amount of space to write as it would to store the picture of the circle in the first place.

Still, this's got me thinking... I'm off the find where my phone number can be is in Pi...

*sigh* That should have been "Can be found in Pi", of course...

However, the internet, as always, proves its use as a source of useless information... my phone number (minus area code) can be found in Pi from digit 3040745 to digit 3040751. With area code - no matches are turned up in the first ten million digits.

Go to gryphon.ccs.brandeis.edu/~grath/attractions/gpi/ and try it for yourself!

That is insane!!

I saw a poster today for an aftershave called Pi, with the tag line "Pi - beyond infinity". What's that supposed to mean?

I suspect - the copywriter never did math(s) beyond 1+1=10, but read Hawking's book one page further than his boss - but then I'm a cynic.

I think this is not true. Pi could go like 3.1415... and could go on
5x1,5x0,6x1,6x0,7x1,7x0,.... where 5x1 means 11111 and so on.

This would not be periodic but e.g. would not reach the sequence 22.

Infinity is really mysterious !

I guess the aftershave-people had the one-point-compactivication of the complex-numbers in mind.
Here all complex numbers are beeing projected to a ball with radius one. The north-pole of the ball is
infinity. Pi is on the south-half of the ball, what means that pi is beyond the horizon of infinity.

I think you're giving way too much credit to advertising copywriters!!

I managed to get in trouble at school because of Pi.

My maths teacher was explaining how you can't write down Pi exactly in a numerical form, because you would need an infinite number of digits.

I said "I can!"

After a little argument, she gave me the chalk, pointed me to the blackboard, and said "Go on then."

I wrote "10" on the board.

She said "That's not Pi. That's 10!"

I replied "Not in base Pi it ain't!"

Her reply included the words "arse", "smart", and "detention".

Mmm... maybe she had a point...

The numbers could stand for a Binary code, this may be the binary code for the genetic sequence that we have to understand, before leaving the largest playground of all, the earth.