The aliens would not have used Pi. It's a human convention.

Obviously, the audience may have actually heard of Pi, and not Tau. As far as a fictional story goes, it's pretty much the only thing they could do.

I guess I'm just making a point about the cultural momentum Pi has gotten for the past 300 years. Kinda makes you wonder what else might be staring us in the face because no one ever bothered to question it. It's nice to think about these kinds of things from an alien's viewpoint.

How would a higher intelligence than humans solve the same problems we've solved since evolving from apes? I think we give ourselves too much credit, intellectually.


Mirror inspector is a job I could really see myself doing.

Thanks for your excellent comments. I've memorized many digits of Pi, like any good math nerd, but my mind was blown when I read those articles. The more I try to re-derive geometry from the ground up, it seems more and more likely that one rotation should be the standard unit, not half a rotation. I'd really love to meet some aliens and see what they would use.

Regarding comment 2, the nice thing about this form is you can tell it's derived as an integral, and it tells you a bit more about what's going on. The tauday article explains it better.

I'd be curious to hear your opinions on the articles.


Mirror inspector is a job I could really see myself doing.

Yes, it's for a human audience... I addressed this in another response to this post. Thanks for the reply.

Mirror inspector is a job I could really see myself doing.

Exactly. We are trained to just trust everything we are taught, as if there is some all-knowing human at the top of the food chain who knows what's best for us.

The great thing about having a brain is we can question the things that have been culturally embedded in us, and we can try to see if there are new and better ways to do things.

Sometimes they're not so easy to find, and sometimes they're just staring us in the face for centuries, like Pi. It really makes you wonder what else we've been taught that may not be true.


Mirror inspector is a job I could really see myself doing.

This is actually one of the strongest points in favor of Tau. Using Pi, you have to add 1 on the left side to make it balance to 0. I guess people don't like e^(i*Pi) = -1. The reason this comes out this way is because Pi only takes you halfway around.

Here it is using Tau:

e^(i*Tau) = 1

In other words, when you use Tau, you go all the way around, and it equals unity. I find this form much more elegant and beautiful.

This video is one of my favorites, and it explains this much better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG7vhMMXagQ

The fact that you rewrote the original Pi version using Tau says a lot about how much Pi has a hold on us culturally. Of course it looks dumb when you just stick 1/2 Tau in place of Pi. That's because Pi obscures the beauty of the equation. But when you re-derive it in terms of Tau, suddenly it makes sense what the equation is trying to tell us.


Mirror inspector is a job I could really see myself doing.

[deleted]

Sure it's well defined. That's not the question. The question is whether, if we rebuilt math from the ground up using everything we know now, would we still define Pi the same way. Just because someone defined a convention 300 years, it doesn't mean it's the best one. Pi is half a circle. Tau is a full circle. It simplifies things...and I'd like to think that the aliens who are vastly more intelligent than us, would have chosen... Just my opinion. And that of many others who are willing to challenge dogma.

Mirror inspector is a job I could really see myself doing.

I may be mistaken, but I don't think the book ending identified the number with the hidden message as Pi. It was specified only as some transcendental number, possibly Pi, or possibly another number.