Olego ([info]olego) wrote,
@ 2008-11-25 13:43:00
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Current mood: amused

π, e
Reading Wikipedia has reminded me of a couple of things from my college years. I present them here with a form of a poll. If you could request a historical do-over:

(1) Would you change the value of π to be 6.28, i.e. double the current value of π?
(2) Would you change e (the charge of an electron) to be +1.602 × 10-19, i.e. positive?


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match0ormoreofanycharactertrons
(Anonymous)
2008-11-25 10:05 pm UTC (link)
(2), mainly because I don't consider (1) to be a big problem.
Also, if pi was doubled, then the formula for the area of a circle would become 0.5*pi*r^2, and that's just silly.

I don't deal enough with electronics or physics to say much with certainty about the sign of e. But, based on what I do know and my own experience thus far, e being positive would have definitely saved me a few headaches a while back. However, it seems it could be mere chance as I understand it that our world is populated with electrons and not positrons. If we happened to be in a universe filled with mostly antimatter, then a negative charge for the most common *tron would be fine. Of course, if that were the case but all else was equal, then we would have ended up with a positive charge for what we call a positron and thus would be no better off :>

-Somnivore

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Re: match0ormoreofanycharactertrons
[info]firstashore
2008-12-03 11:19 pm UTC (link)
Actually I think 1/2 pi r^2 makes perfect sense for the area of a circle, because the area of a circle should be defined as the circumference integrated along the radius of the circle (ie the summation of the areas of a series of infinitesimally thin shells).

If we go with the radius definition for pi, you just integrate from 0 to r and get 1/2 pi r^2, which is about the easiest integral imaginable. It's actually MORE complex if you have an extra factor of 2 in there to clutter things up.

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[info]boggyb
2008-11-25 10:58 pm UTC (link)
1: There's not really any particular reason for one over the other. I'd stick with 3.14, as comparing it to the diameter seems more intuitive than to the radius.

2: I would change this, or rather I would flip the current definitions of positive and negative as applied to voltage. It always confused me having electrons flow in the opposite direction to what you'd expect.

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[info]olego
2008-11-25 11:31 pm UTC (link)
Commented... below. :)

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[info]olego
2008-11-25 11:31 pm UTC (link)
The reason I ask (1) is tricky: as the math gets increasingly advanced, so does the relationship between 2 and Pi. Take any angular velocity; take Cauchy's Integral Formula (when I first began to wonder about this issue); take even a simple Fourier transform: all those contain 2*Pi--formulae that would have been simplified by doubling Pi's definition.

Even physics is suffering: h-bar is officially defined as... *drumroll* h divided by 2*Pi. I'd love to have all these to have never come up.

(2) Is as most people guessed: negative flowing towards the positive throws most people off when they first hear it, especially since all the equations are defined the other way. Once again, the world would not be any different, only our understandings of it.

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