Today I happened to look at the clock and noticed it was 3:14. And my first thought was that this was a Pi moment.
By that I mean something very specific: At some point during that minute, the time was exactly 3:14:15.92653589793… In other words, at some infinitely tiny moment, the time on the clock was exactly Pi.
What’s the big deal? you might well ask. After all, isn’t that true of lots of other numbers? There is a moment when the time on the clock is exactly two, and another when it’s exactly the square root of ten.
But Pi is special. There is even a day of the year — March 14 — devoted to Pi, and a moment of that day — a little before four in the afternoon — when all the infinite digits of Pi line up on both the calendar and the clock.
I have lots of friends who celebrate Pi Day, and I think that’s wonderful. But hey, why should we have to wait?
Why enjoy Pi only one day a year when we can have Pi every day?
“[A]t some infinitely tiny moment, the time on the clock was exactly Pi.”
Was it though? Digital clocks are discrete, counting whole oscillations of a crystal tuning fork or the sinusoidal cycles of the mains power. In some sense, the clock “ticked” from one rational number to another, skipping over Pi (and an infinite number of other values).
And then there’s the question of whether Pi exists in any physical sense or is only a mathematical abstraction. Here’s a fun video exploring that idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gf4yejFNe4