Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science by Richard Preston Page B
Authors: Richard Preston
Tags: Richard Preston
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Finnegans Wake. You would find the collected transcripts of Saturday Night Live rendered into Etruscan. You would find a Google-searchable version of the entire Internet with every page on it exactly as it existed at midnight on July 1, 2007, and another version of the Internet from thirty seconds later. Each occurrence of an apparently ordered string in pi, such as the words “Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, / That Time will come and take my love away,” is followed by unimaginable deserts of babble. No book and none but the shortest poems will ever actually be seen in pi, for it is infinitesimally unlikely that even as brief a text as an English sonnet will appear in the first 10 77 digits of pi, which is the longest piece of pi that can be calculated in this universe.
Anything that can be produced by a simple method is orderly. Pi can be produced by very simple methods; it is orderly, for sure. Yet the distinction between chance and fixity dissolves in pi. The deep connection between order and disorder, between cacophony and harmony, seems to be tantalizingly almost visible in pi, but not quite. “We are looking for some rules that will distinguish the digits of pi from other numbers,” Gregory said. “Think of games for children. If I give you the sequence one, two, three, four, five, can you tell me what the next digit is? A child can do it: the next digit is six. What if I gave you a sequence of a million digits from pi? Could you tell me the next digit just by looking at it? Why does pi look totally unpredictable, with the highest complexity? For all we know, we may never find out the rule in pi.”
H ERBERT R OBBINS , the coauthor of What Is Mathematics?, the book that had turned the Chudnovsky brothers on to math, was an emeritus professor of mathematical statistics at Columbia University and had become friends with the Chudnovskys. He lived in a rectilinear house with a lot of glass in it, in the woods near Princeton, New Jersey. Robbins was a tall, restless man in his seventies, with a loud voice, furrowed cheeks, and penetrating eyes. One day, he stretched himself out on a daybed in a garden room in his house and played with a rubber band, making a harp across his fingertips.
“It is a very difficult philosophical question, the question of what ‘random’ is,” Robbins said. He plucked the rubber band with his thumb, boink, boink. “Everyone knows the famous remark of Albert Einstein, that God does not throw dice. Einstein just would not believe that there is an element of randomness in the construction of the world. The question of whether the universe is a random process or is determined in some way is a basic philosophical question that has nothing to do with mathematics. The question is important. People consider it when they decide what to do with their lives. It concerns religion. It is the question of whether our fate will be revealed or whether we live by blind chance. My God, how many people have been murdered over an answer to that question! Mathematics is a lesser activity than religion in the sense that we’ve agreed not to kill each other but to discuss things.”
Robbins got up from the daybed and sat in an armchair. Then he stood up and paced the room, and sat at a table, and moved himself to a couch, and went back to the table, and finally returned to the daybed. The man was in constant motion.
“Mathematics is broken into tiny specialties today, but Gregory Chudnovsky is a generalist who knows the whole of mathematics as well as anyone,” he said as he moved around. “He’s like Mozart. I happen to think that his and David’s pi project is a will-o’-the-wisp, but what do I know? Gregory seems to be asking questions that can’t be answered. To ask for the system in pi is like asking, ‘Is there life after death?’ When you die, you’ll find out. Most mathematicians are not interested in the digits of pi. In order for a mathematician to become interested in a
Anything that can be produced by a simple method is orderly. Pi can be produced by very simple methods; it is orderly, for sure. Yet the distinction between chance and fixity dissolves in pi. The deep connection between order and disorder, between cacophony and harmony, seems to be tantalizingly almost visible in pi, but not quite. “We are looking for some rules that will distinguish the digits of pi from other numbers,” Gregory said. “Think of games for children. If I give you the sequence one, two, three, four, five, can you tell me what the next digit is? A child can do it: the next digit is six. What if I gave you a sequence of a million digits from pi? Could you tell me the next digit just by looking at it? Why does pi look totally unpredictable, with the highest complexity? For all we know, we may never find out the rule in pi.”
H ERBERT R OBBINS , the coauthor of What Is Mathematics?, the book that had turned the Chudnovsky brothers on to math, was an emeritus professor of mathematical statistics at Columbia University and had become friends with the Chudnovskys. He lived in a rectilinear house with a lot of glass in it, in the woods near Princeton, New Jersey. Robbins was a tall, restless man in his seventies, with a loud voice, furrowed cheeks, and penetrating eyes. One day, he stretched himself out on a daybed in a garden room in his house and played with a rubber band, making a harp across his fingertips.
“It is a very difficult philosophical question, the question of what ‘random’ is,” Robbins said. He plucked the rubber band with his thumb, boink, boink. “Everyone knows the famous remark of Albert Einstein, that God does not throw dice. Einstein just would not believe that there is an element of randomness in the construction of the world. The question of whether the universe is a random process or is determined in some way is a basic philosophical question that has nothing to do with mathematics. The question is important. People consider it when they decide what to do with their lives. It concerns religion. It is the question of whether our fate will be revealed or whether we live by blind chance. My God, how many people have been murdered over an answer to that question! Mathematics is a lesser activity than religion in the sense that we’ve agreed not to kill each other but to discuss things.”
Robbins got up from the daybed and sat in an armchair. Then he stood up and paced the room, and sat at a table, and moved himself to a couch, and went back to the table, and finally returned to the daybed. The man was in constant motion.
“Mathematics is broken into tiny specialties today, but Gregory Chudnovsky is a generalist who knows the whole of mathematics as well as anyone,” he said as he moved around. “He’s like Mozart. I happen to think that his and David’s pi project is a will-o’-the-wisp, but what do I know? Gregory seems to be asking questions that can’t be answered. To ask for the system in pi is like asking, ‘Is there life after death?’ When you die, you’ll find out. Most mathematicians are not interested in the digits of pi. In order for a mathematician to become interested in a
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