Saturday, March 13, 2010

Pi in the Sky

Thinking about e^(i*pi)+1=0, yes, it could be saying something beautiful and deep about the geometry of the complex number plane, but maybe it's just a long-way-round circular definition. All it's saying is that each of those mathematical identities is defined in terms of the others. Is that unromantic? Was Euler a romantic man?

More romantically, we can assume aliens know pi, so people do things like searching for alien transmissions on a frequency calculated by taking the resonant frequency of the hydrogen atom (1,420,405,752 Hz) and multiplying by pi:

Independent article, 1992

The assumption is that the aliens are as wacky and obsessed by numbers as we are, and moreover want to make contact with equally bent life forms. If they found anything I didn't hear about it, but this subject is close to me because I just started a job at the CSIRO Radiophysics Laboratory, working on a project called ASKAP:

http://www.atnf.csiro.au/SKA/

Once this thing is up and running, we should pick up the nerd aliens. The projected SKA array of thousands of antennas will generate a lot of data that has to be analysed and compressed on the fly, because there's too much to store. Someone said it's the equivalent of 100,000 movies per second. And these would be movies from Alpha Centauri, mind you, probably without subtitles.

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