Peeved πper Pipes Up Peevedly

You need to lighten up a bit there or you'll bust a gusset.  And you need to know that I'm not going to post any more comments written in the style of an angry, enraged 13-year-old.   You've got 98% of the comment taking internet for that, I figure there should be at least a few adults-only zones in imaginary life.

I have no idea how you can possibly hold that pi is separable from the figure in plane geometry that its value is derived from (approximate value, at that) to maintain that it has some independent existence since it is used in so many formulas.  Are you claiming there is some other definition of pi? I have yet to see one.  Are you claiming there is one available in the physical universe?  Where is it? You seem to want to give it some mystical significance, for which the observations about the seeming fact that perfect circles, if they exist at all, seem to elude detection by the most exquisite of measurement made by human beings, the only known animals to have ever talked about the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.  I thought you guys were opposed to giving things mystical significance or taking that category of thought seriously.  A bit of consistency on your parts would at least remove that venue of doubting your ideology was anything other than the mode of thinking common to angry, enraged 13-year-olds.

Perhaps it does have some transcendent quality that accounts for why it comes up so often, in so many, varied formulas, perhaps it is something of a key to the secrets of the structure of the universe. Transcendence, by the way, NOT a quality that is compatible with your ideology, so you can't really be true to materialism and assign transcendence to your favorite number that you feel so groovy talking about once a year.  However, it if has such power and is so ubiquitous, the rarity if not total absence of perfect circles is an even greater mystery.  If that number is that kind of a key to the universe you'd expect the very thing that defines pi to be kind of freakin' ubiquitous.   I think sometimes people just throw it in there because it sounds good, though not so much in the physical sciences.   Other than that, I've got no problem with it being essentially mysterious.  I figure if someone doesn't like mystery they should stick with the banal and not challenging, like most of what's left when you sciency atheist materialists reject the entire range of human intellectual history that doesn't fit into your radically reduced and dogmatically defined so-called reality.

I have absolutely no idea why any of the things I said might be true or even if some of them are wrong but, then, I don't ascribe mystical significance to numbers.  Not even the prime numbers, not even composite numbers like 51.   One of my 13-year-old charges seemed to think it was unfair that 51 wasn't a prime number.  Well, it just isn't one.  If you don't like things like that, tough.  I wonder why you left out all those other numbers I mentioned in that post you hate on so much, the square roots of numbers like two, infinite repeating and non-repeating decimals.  Those are numbers too. We just don't have any way to write them or get at them as an absolute value.

As to how pi, a figure of idealized, flat geometry, can exist in curved space,  I only raised that as a question.  It would seem to me either space is, actually, curved, dimpled, or whatever, or that's an imaginary construct as the flat space of euclidean geometry was from time immemorial, or at least 1962 when I first read that statement when I read the first chapter of my Geometry textbook.  I believe the fact had occurred to people long before that.   If reality is founded on space that really is curved, that makes the existence of pi and its utility even more complicated and, so, mysterious.  Maybe it all has to do with human minds and isn't an attribute of external reality?  Maybe its "reality" is a shared property of the human mind interacting with some external reality and beings which have other means of interacting with external reality would find the idea and all of those formulas and laws incorporating it naive.  I don't know the answers to any of those questions but I don't see how modern physics can really, ultimately, ABSOLUTELY, be true and the naive definition and character of pi AS WE DEFINE IT to not be less than absolutely true.   I would welcome some explanation that the naive, such as myself, could fathom and check for coherence.

None of this says the slightest thing I can fathom about "the existence of God".  It does, though, have a lot to do with the claims of materialist fundamentalists, their arrogance, their conceit, their claims to have found the frame in which all of reality must fit or it can't possibly be real, and, wouldn't you know it, that universal frame happens to be the materialism they find so emotionally satisfying and the denial of which makes them go all puberty-flooded with hormones-"That's not FAIR!" rage.  I'm not required to come up with an alternative that is fully and absolutely closed, materialists certainly haven't.   You don't have to be able to lay an egg to know a bad one and materialism stinks.

As to the value of pi, I mean in human life and activity as opposed to an absolute mathematical value, I certainly don't intend to give it up just because it might be imaginary, all in our heads.  That's more your way of thinking than mine.  Every single thing we think in our minds is imagined, even all of the science and, beyond any questioning, all of the math. including geometry, including perfect circles and the ratio of their circumference to their diameters.