!

is wrong challenging mainstream science

Should we ignore opposition to our most accepted science?
- At rst glance, yes: we wouldnt have enough time and money to check all oppositions
(Wertheim)
- At second glance, no: the ! is wrong argument and maybe another from recent history
(Galileo?)
- How does mainstream science choose what theories to consider and what theories to
discount? Is there some kind of a method in place to consider such oppositions? If there
isnt, perhaps there should be.

One must always be cautious with claims such as the one above. It only takes a quick
google search to verify that there are many people out there who suggest alternative
theories to the mainstream sciences, and in the vast majority of cases these challenges turn
out to be inaccurate, fallacious or riddled with crackpot nonsense. In general, the scientic
community ignores them altogether. But, for science a discipline of which the focus is on
evidence and falsiability over your status and how wacky your theory sounds, and a
discipline which constantly overturns its most stable and well-accepted theories is such
discrimination dangerous? Are we potentially missing out on important scientic ideas,
just because they are different from the accepted norm?

I was at a talk recently at the University of Sydney by Margaret Wertheim on Outsider
Science, a broad term referring to alternative theories of reality deduced by

On the other hand, some unofcial scientists have pointed out some clear aws in our
most accepted and well known scientic theories. One such example of this is Michael
Hartls challenge to the number !, the famous ratio between the radius and circumference
of a circle, with a value of roughly 3.14. ! is one of the most ubiquitous numbers in
mathematics and physics, and for that matter all of the sciences; furthermore, it pops up in
strange and unexpected places. Not simply useful for determining circular distances based
on a radius, it also appears in trigonometry (the study of triangles and triangular ratios),
and even in the theory of imaginary numbers (numbers with the value of #-1). In short, !
pervades all of mathematics and the sciences with remarkable consistency; so how could it
be wrong?

Hartls criticism isnt that the number ! is necessarily calculated incorrectly, but rather that
it has been interpreted in the wrong way. Instead of calculating the ratio between the
radius and the circumference of a circle, he says, we should be focusing on the relationship
between the diameter and the circumference. Its a small detail, but it ends up solving a lot
of inconsistencies and problems with the way such a circular ratio is used, and most
notably it gives this new number a symmetry throughout mathematics. Given that the
diameter of a circle is double its radius, the new number is 2!, and Hartl has dubbed it
$ (pronounced tau).

$-ism has still not been accepted by mainstream science, despite its overwhelming
benets, and little reason to disregard it apart from the fact that the general community
has used ! for so long. This, I believe, is a mistake.