to stand for "periphery." It is hard to ignore the ubiquity of pi in nature. Pi is obvious in the disks of the moon and the sun. The double helix of DNA revolves around pi. Pi hides in the rainbow and sits in the pupil of the eye, and when a raindrop falls into water, pi emerges in the spreading rings. Pi can be found in waves and spectra of all kinds, and therefore pi occurs in colors and music, in earthquakes, in surf. Pi is everywhere in superstrings, the hypothetical loops of energy that may vibrate in many dimensions, forming the essence of matter. Pi occurs naturally in tables of death, in what is known as a Gaussian distribution of deaths in a population. That is, when a person dies, the event "feels" the Ludolphian number. It is one of the great mysteries why nature seems to know mathematics.
( Richard Preston )
[ Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, ]
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