• Donkter@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I mean, you only need 39 digits of pi to calculate the circumference of a circle with a diameter the size of the universe to the width of a hydrogen atom. So no matter how detailed you get it’s impossible to determine if a circles circumference is anywhere close to exactly pi.

    To ops point, you could set up your thing theoretically and we can math out that it should be pi. But we could not make that object.

    • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Right, by my point is that your accuracy and precision are the same whether you are making a 1 meter length object or a π meter length object. Your meter stick is not accurate to the width of a hydrogen atom, either.

      But if we accept the precision of our manufacturing capabilities as “close enough,” then it is equally as close to exactly π as it is to exactly 1.

      In other words, to say we cannot make an object that is π meters is to say we cannot make an object that is any specific length.

      • Donkter@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Not to reiterate what other people have said here. But you can make an object 1 meter long by defining that object as 1 meter (hell, you don’t have to, but you can define 1 meter as the length that light travels in a specific amount of time or something silly). Then, to create something two meters long, you can have two of those one-meter lengths. To make something π meters long, you would need infinite precision, that is not true for 1 meter or even 1/3 as you mention later in this thread.

        There is no way to divide anything into exactly π length. There is an easy way to divide something into a number that can be expressed as a fraction, such as 1/3, or any fraction you care to come up with, even if it can be represented as .3 repeating.