A Surprising Side of Carl Sagan
nautil.us
A Surprising Side of Carl Sagan
1–10 of 31 posts
Re: A Surprising Side of Carl Sagan
#2I loved that part at the end of the book! It's the sort of thing that makes me love sci-fi: A "What-the-hell-if?" question to ponder and toy with. And to spark the reglious part of our brains; even (especially?) in non-religious people. In his books, Sagan encourages people to feel as in awe of the natural world as some do with religion. With that in mind, it fits. And, as little mysticism can be fun in a world with rules. Stephenson includes a (somewhat) similar mysticism in Cryptonomicon (And in a few of his books that followed it)
Re: A Surprising Side of Carl Sagan
#3That part of the book (Contact) really bugged me.
The definition of pi is what determines the digits of pi, FULL STOP. There's no room whatsoever, for any sort of agent to 'leave a message' in those digits. I would think even a full-on theist would be embarrassed to suggest otherwise.
Re: A Surprising Side of Carl Sagan
#4That part of the book ( Contact ) really bugged me. The definition of pi is what determines the digits of pi, FULL STOP. There's no room whatsoever, for any sort of agent to 'leave a message' in those digits. I would think even a full-on theist would be embarrassed to suggest otherwise.
> The definition of pi is what determines the digits of pi, FULL STOP. There's no room whatsoever, for any sort of agent to 'leave a message' in those digits.
All the agent needs to do is design or adjust the life forms it wants to find the message so that they are inclined to choose a numeric base in which the right sequence appears in the digits of π. The definition of π defines it's value, but the sequence of digits doesn't just depend on the value, but also the choice of base.
Re: A Surprising Side of Carl Sagan
#5The VLA is still there in New Mexico and impressive. As of 4/22 they have not reopened the visitors center. But you can see the miles long rows of them from the road. And if you lucky you may see all of them change pointing in unison to another part of the sky.
Re: A Surprising Side of Carl Sagan
#6That part of the book ( Contact ) really bugged me. The definition of pi is what determines the digits of pi, FULL STOP. There's no room whatsoever, for any sort of agent to 'leave a message' in those digits. I would think even a full-on theist would be embarrassed to suggest otherwise.
> The definition of pi is what determines the digits of pi, FULL STOP. There's no room whatsoever, for any sort of agent to 'leave a message' in those digits. All the agent needs to do is design or adjust the life forms it wants to find the message so that they are inclined to choose a numeric base in which the right sequence appears in the digits of π. The definition of π defines it's value , but the sequence of dig…
The Babylonians used based 60 for at least some things, but even that seems unwieldy, and even taking everything in between as equally useful provides only 58 distinct sequences of digits in pi.
The control implied is basically the power to create all the universes laws (and the math we can learn in it) from scratch.
Re: A Surprising Side of Carl Sagan
#7That part of the book ( Contact ) really bugged me. The definition of pi is what determines the digits of pi, FULL STOP. There's no room whatsoever, for any sort of agent to 'leave a message' in those digits. I would think even a full-on theist would be embarrassed to suggest otherwise.
I haven't read the book, but...
Aren't the digits of pi randomly distributed? So then, you can encode literally any message you want by picking an offset into them. Could even design a "compression" algorithm where a message is designated by its offset, though I'm guessing it won't be very efficient in practice.
Re: A Surprising Side of Carl Sagan
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The definition of pi is what determines the digits of pi, FULL STOP. There's no room whatsoever, for any sort of agent to 'leave a message' in those digits. All the agent needs to do is design or adjust the life forms it wants to find the message so that they are inclined to choose a numeric base in which the right sequence appears in the digits of π. The definition of π defines it's value , but the sequence of dig…
The Babylonians used based 60 for at least some things, but even that seems unwieldy, and even taking everything in between as equally useful provides only 58 distinct sequences of digits in pi. The control implied is basically the power to create all the universes laws (and the math we can learn in it) from scratch.
It has been a very long time since I read the book, but if I remember correctly the first message was actually found in base 11 (a picture of a circle).
Back then it hadn't been decided yet if the distribution of the digits of pi are such that all finite numbers can be found in it or not. Some years ago I read about some proof that they can. That means that "Carl Sagan was right!" in whatever encoding you like can be found in pi is you look deep enough.
The thing is what does "deep enough" mean? If we consider some two digit decimal number, like 27, then the chance that it isn't the first two digits is 99%. The chance that it isn't the first two nor the second and third digits is 98.01% and so on. The chance of not finding it among the first 500 digits is less than 0.6%. But unlikely things can still happen, so finding a message "too near the start" might convince some people that pi was created by an intelligence but wouldn't really be a good proof.
Re: A Surprising Side of Carl Sagan
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Babylonians used based 60 for at least some things, but even that seems unwieldy, and even taking everything in between as equally useful provides only 58 distinct sequences of digits in pi. The control implied is basically the power to create all the universes laws (and the math we can learn in it) from scratch.
It has been a very long time since I read the book, but if I remember correctly the first message was actually found in base 11 (a picture of a circle). Back then it hadn't been decided yet if the distribution of the digits of pi are such that all finite numbers can be found in it or not. Some years ago I read about some proof that they can. That means that "Carl Sagan was right!" in whatever encoding you like can be…
Yes, your recollection matches mine. Various bases were searched, after being given a hint.
The point was that this is what proof of a Creator would look like (and the aliens suggested there were others).
It was, IMHO, a giant gauntlet thrown down to religious folk. And elegantly done, too.
Re: A Surprising Side of Carl Sagan
#10I thought this article was going to be about Sagan's notorious ego[1] and lack of expertise and mathematical chops as an astronomer (Sagan was noted to have often asked for help from colleagues to do simple calculus).
Alas, it's just another puff piece.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_7100#Codename_...