Pi

I have this vague feeling about pi. I wonder if it is how the world is going to end.

As we learned in high school math (yes, I realize in this wonderful new world that young people now learn about pi as three-year-olds seated at computers), pi is the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle. Pi is a constant – that is, it describes the circumference-diameter relationship in all circles big or small – and most people even years later remember its numerical value: 3.1416.

Many people also remember that the value of pi is infinite. That “1416” keeps going, without end, and the latest supercomputers have computed it out to several million digits and are still going.

Or at least the mathematicians and physicists think pi is infinite, and that is what started to worry me. I was doodling, drawing circles and stars, and finishing a bag of Fritos. With my pencil I was drawing a circle about the size of a dollar pancake, and just as the tip of the pencil reached the point where I had started the circle, it jumped. Or bumped. Like a tiny collision, or the flick of a needle on a seismograph.

I lifted the sheet of paper and underneath was a tiny crumb of Frito stuck to the point where on the other side my circle closed. So that was it. For a second, it had crossed my mind that it might have been the pencil point actually bumping into the graphite end of the circle where I had started, like a train circling around and running into its own caboose.

That’s when this vague thought started to form. There was in fact a collision, too tiny for me to feel, but there truly were bits of graphite, much bigger than molecules, at the place on the paper where I started the circle. Under a powerful microscope, they would appear quite huge, certainly huge enough to be of interest to producers of “The Discovery Channel.” The pencil point, coming around, would have run into them with an impact that would have been significant to me if I were the same size as a graphite particle.

So I had closed the circle and satisfied pi, at least to its crude constant human-circle-drawing value of 3.1416. But if I had left a teeny micron of space between the circle’s starting place and its end, then pi would not be satisfied, and be straining to close, and consummate itself, at least to my romantic way of thinking.

Straining to close. Out there in the elegant world of millions of digits, is pi not infinite after all, but simply straining to close? Are the computers, spewing out their digit torrents, tracing a circular path forward, out at the pencil-point end of the universe toward some place where the circle closes, and pi becomes not infinite after all, but consummated, and the computers slam to a halt, still wanting to run, and glowing and warm to the touch with their effort?

I wonder if pi, before our very eyes, is describing the universe as a circle that one day will close, and pi is screaming through the computers toward that day. The pencil microscope says when it does, there will be a collision. Was that the real Big Bang, where our circle started? The last universe completing itself in its huge collision, and our new universe blasting out on the other side. And now the same thing happening to us. The universe may be only the point of a pencil billions of light years wide, drawn through time and space by God, doodling circles and stars. How cool, on holy Earth at least, if all this importance turned out to be a doodle of God.

In the movie (Fritos will pay oodles for the placement), I will be a scientist unable to convince more than a handful of others of my conviction, and that handful will watch the computers and wait for the vibrations to start. When they do, and we tell world leaders what is causing them, the leaders will ask, “How long?” We will shrug and say, “Don’t know. But you will sure know it when it ha