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Change the units to any other system and it's not even roughly true.
Edit: Now that i have read the article i see that it is no coincidence at all that it is close the pi squared. very interesting.
Sorry to ruin the party, but g is a quite random number, on other planets the corresponding acceleration is different. So π^2~g is a pure coincidence and not relevant. The Newtonian gravitational constant G is a real constant btw.
> was actually proposed back in the 17th century Pretty sure it was done back in Sumer first.
A standard free measure for distance? Sounds dubious.
(One meter is thus two Sumerian cubits, but that's an artifact due to us still using Sumerian time measurements.)
P.S. I don't know why Sumerians used a factor of two. Americans still divide the day into two 12 hour spans, according to Sumerian fashion.
P.P.S. One second is 1/(2*12*60*60) of a solar day. 12 and 60 were "round numbers" in Sumer; they used sexagesimal counting.
This is interesting, but I have to quibble with this: > If you express this value in any other units, the magic immediately disappears. So, this is no coincidence Ordinarily, this would be extremely indicative of a coincidence. If you’re looking for a heuristic for non-coincidences, “sticks around when you change units” is the one you want. This is just an unusual case where that heuristic fails.
Changing units in Electrodynamics for instance comes with unexpected factors in formulas though, indeed containing π. (CGS SI)
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As a physicist, this makes sense. Pi = 3, pi^2 = 10, which is g Not sure why everyone is surprised. Ah, and a year is pi*10e9 seconds (IIRC)
As a physicist? When we did physics at school, and we were solving problems, the answer was always a number together with its unit . pi² might be 10 because it is a pure number, but g can never be 10, because it is an acceleration, a physical quantity, so it must be 10 of some unit.
In middle school physics lessons this makes teachers to hate you (it's their job to ensure that you do not do this), but after that, this has advantages time to time.
.. I remember hearing an anecdote that ancient Greeks did not know that numbers can be dimensionless, and when they tried to solve cubic equations, they always made sure that they add and substract cubic things. E.g. they didn't do x^3 - x, but only things like x^3 - 2*3*x. I don't think this is true (especially since terms can be padded with a bunch of 1s), but maybe it has some truth in it. It is plausible that they thought about numbers different ways than we do now, and they had different soft rules that what they can do with them.