From: erxleben@ece.arizona.edu (Wayne Erxleben)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.northern-exp
Subject: 1/25 Rerun
Date: 28 Jan 93 18:18:24 GMT
Reply-To: erxleben@ece.arizona.edu (Wayne Erxleben)
Distribution: world,local
Organization: University of Arizona Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering

OK, I know this was a rerun, but I didn't see it the first
time around, and I wasn't reading the net back then either.
So I apologize in advance if this discussion has made the
rounds already, but....

I was really angry at the scientific illiteracy displayed by
the writers on this episode.  On most shows I would expect
this, but for a show that usually seems so intelligently
written to spout off such ridiculous and misleading BS is a
real shame.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about:
   1.  Amy is doing her Ph.D. on a decimal expansion of pi?!?
       C'mon!  There's nothing either mathematical or magical
       about this.  The method of generating it might be an
       interesting senior project for a computer science major,
       but certainly nothing a mathematician would be interested
       in.  We all know pi is an irrational number.  (BTW, this
       was proved by Lindemann in 1882.)  Writing out the first
       few billion digits of its representation in our rather
       arbitrarily chosen base-10 numeral system is not going to
       provide any cosmic insights, anymore than, say, expanding
       e, or the square root of 2, or any other element of the
       noncountably infinite set of irrational numbers.

       Of course, there are areas of research that could lead
       a philosophically inclined mathematician to such cosmic
       planes, but making a computer write out a simple irrational
       number surely isn't one of them.

   2.  Even worse, Chris in his closing monologue seemed to
       suggest that Einstein's discovery of relativity made
       Newton's laws invalid, and that relativity meant the
       universe didn't follow physical laws.  There's no excuse
       for perpetuating this kind of ignorance.  The whole idea
       of science is to find physical laws that explain what is
       observed.  Thus the validity of a theory depends only on
       how well it fits observations made in the appropriate
       domain.  Newton's laws are 100% correct within the arena
       of our everyday experience.  They are, however, just a
       special case of Einstein's laws, which hold in a more
       general setting in which objects can move at speeds
       approaching that of light.  If someday a more general
       situation is found in which Einstein's laws no longer hold,
       that will not make them any less correct, in their domain.

Now that I've got all that off my chest, I would like to add that
I didn't think the episode was very good, even apart from the
above complaints.  I think the intended theme had to do with
inadequate attempts to make things (time, numbers, injustices)
balance out, but I don't think the writers pulled this together
very well.  And I really cringed at Chris' stupidity and Amy's
pettiness in the "motorcycle equals bird plus dog" exchange.  On
the positive side, though, some of Maurice's musings about time
and immortality were interesting.


Wayne Erxleben
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Arizona
"I'm not a mathematician but I play one on the net."