Silent Sun: Hard Science Fiction by Brandon Q. Morris

Author:Brandon Q. Morris [Morris, Brandon Q.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hard-SF.com
Published: 2019-04-14T22:00:00+00:00

He simply could not fall asleep right now. Artem tossed back and forth on his reclined seat. Sobachka was snoring but that had never bothered him. There certainly were enough issues to keep him awake. He was racing toward an alien structure that was sending him unintelligible messages. All they had was Pi. Well, something like Pi, a number with an infinite number of decimals that had no repeating pattern.

Pi had fascinated him as a child. He had almost studied mathematics because of this number. Why would the relationship between circumference and diameter of a circle yield such a complicated number?

The fact that there was no systematic repetition, all the way to infinity, had lots of exciting implications. Any tome of global literature, including the Bible and the Quran, could be found coded somewhere in Pi. Dates of birth and death of all mankind were part of Pi, as well as the coordinates of all atoms in the universe or the winning lottery numbers for the next hundred years. One would just need to know where and how to look. Pi was like a synonym for universal knowledge. One would know so much useless information that one would end up knowing nothing. Artem shook his head.

That is a stupid train of thought. Or… maybe not? He let his mind continue to wander—he wasn’t sleeping anyway, so why not?

When his teacher had taught him about the wonders of Pi, Artem had been particularly impressed by one demonstration. The teacher had shown them how to eliminate Pi, at least the complicated version. It was sufficient to redefine distance. Normally we would define the distance between two points, such as the sun and the yacht, or Kiev and Moscow, as the length of the straight line connecting them. But that was just convention. We could also define the distance as the difference of their coordinates.

To illustrate the idea the teacher had sketched x-y coordinates on the board. One point was at the origin, with x and y having zero values. The other was located at x equals 4 and y equals 4. The conventional distance was roughly 5.65, the square root of 32, as given by the length of the hypotenuse. Looking at the same sketch with the new rules the distance was 4 plus 4, the sum of the differences of the coordinates, which was 8. In such a geometry, the unit circle always has a diameter d of 2 and a circumference c of 8, so pi is exactly 4, according to c=pi*d.

Artem had been bitterly disappointed that the omnipotent Pi had been reduced to such a simplistic number with sleight of hand. Why was he remembering all of this now? Because he and the computer had spoken about Pi... and one’s brain took an odd turn at times. It would draw conclusions where there were none. And, sometimes, it would supply a stroke of genius when it was least expected. Could that infinitely non-periodic number be Pi, just in a

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