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izakayawadoko · 2 months

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(Update, 2024: Another year, another Pi Day reblog. Time erodes my hope and gives perspective. I wish that against all odds, I could have made a difference. It seems increasingly likely that this wasn't it. Still think of it occasionally.)

The Pi Spiral

Happy Pi Day.

This is the Pi Spiral:

(Picture: A representation of Pi, 816 of its decimals wrapped around itself on a hexagonal grid.)

I'd like to explain what it is, in length. I feel like I need to, since this thing's been haunting me for literal years. I hope that this post is an exorcism.

I will write not only of Pi, quantum mechanics and the Simulation Argument, but also of obsession and desperation. I will lay out an elaborate construct with an outlandish premise, I will concede its bewildering nature and yet, still, ask for your attention and honest consideration, as they are essential if I'm going to conquer this opponent I've created. I ask you to read on...

(TW: There will be mentions of mental health issues.)

I came up with the Pi Spiral in 2017, though my fascination with similar pseudo-scientific concepts had began years earlier.

I'm not okay in the head, never have been. The slew of abbreviations I'm afflicted with is extensive, but they're the kind that people tend to easily dismiss, if it doesn't affect ones productivity. They had started to affect mine and I lost my value to society. It seemed, as a worthless human being, that I was a ghost, an apparition, something that seemed to exist only to haunt people. I tried to live with it, with the loneliness of being unwanted. Even when I had loved ones around me, the sickness of this age had so molded me that it didn't matter. If I weren't exceptional, truly, profoundly, historically exceptional, it would be a crime for me to wish eye-contact, let alone a smile, from another person ever again.

So I just had to find something exceptional. I obsessed countless hours on the nature of black holes and dark matter. I have digital and actual folders full of papers and scribbles, ideas that only made sense in the late hours of night. My actual scientific education is a bunch of middling grades during the worst time of my life. That didn't stop me. After all, this was all just about a choice. If I chose to apply myself, I could achieve anything. Stopping or taking a break was a choice to die alone, to be a worthless sack of shit. This was what I was taught and on that, I had been a good student. In my desperation, I finally convinced myself that I'd found something.

The Pi Spiral is a mental construct, built on a belief that the decimals of Pi contain a pattern or a message, intentionally put there to be found. This idea came from Carl Sagan's book Contact, in which the aliens, presumably the ones who had created the universe, had hidden a perfect circle in the digits of pi. This idea was so attractive to me that I started to look for a similar, hidden message in Pi.

I learned of a concept called Ulams Spiral, where prime numbers are coiled around a center. I learned of the Feynman point, a set of six nines (999999), starting at the 762nd decimal point of Pi, which is notable because a set like that "shouldn't" appear in Pi so "early" (a chance of 0.0686%), if we consider it like we would consider a string of random numbers in succession. Before the Feynman point, there's also a set of three ones (111), a set of three fives (555) and a set of three zeroes (000). I fixated on these, coiled the decimals of Pi around itself on a hexagonal grid and started to look for patterns.

I'm going to post the picture of the spiral again, along with other pictures to help explain it. For a moment, I'm going to go into excruciating detail on what the details are that, in my mind, made this a discovery worthy of attention, instead of a probable case of number pareidolia from a desperate mind.

I hope you will forgive me this, since, ultimately this is the exorcism I'm here to do. This mental construct still holds power over me and it is telling me that it is important, that if I just present it to the world, as clearly and completely as I can, someone who matters will notice it and understand its meaning.

(Picture: A representation of Pi, 816 of its decimals wrapped around itself on a hexagonal grid.)

(Picture: A representation of the Pi, tilted on its axis, 1386 of its decimals wrapped around itself on a hexagonal grid. The actual decimals of Pi in this picture, excepting the highlighted sets, have been replaced with running numbers.)

(Picture: A closeup of the legend that clarifies the ring numbers, half rings and hex counts.)

The premise is that when Pi is presented in this manner, a pattern of coincidences emerge and make it statistically impossible that they're only coincidences. When we count the rings "highlighted" by the previously mentioned sets, their distance from the center and amount of hexes they hold, we notice that numbers 1, 5, 0 and 9 shown by the sets correlate with the data (distance from the center and amount of hexes), which should be almost impossible considering the odds of random numbers "just" forming sets on a string of digits.

These are some of the points of interest:

The ring highlighted by Feynman Point (a set of six 9's) contains 96 hexes.

The rings highlighted by the sets represent two “boxes”, the "inner box" (on the 7th and 8th rings) marked by the 111 and 555 sets and the "outer box" (on the 14th and the 16th rings), marked by the 000 set and the Feynman point set.

The ring enveloped by the "outer box" has 90 hexes and is the 15th ring from the center, which is identical to the combined data of the "inner box" (90 hexes, ring number of 15).

Doubling the data from the "inner box" produces identical data with the "outer box" and halving the data from the "outer box" produces identical data with the "inner box": in other words, the "outer box" is twice the "size" of the "inner box" and the "inner box" is half the "size" of the "outer box".

The sets of 000 and 111 align perfectly with the axis formed by the center (3 or the 0th running number) and the first decimal – that is to say, they "landed" in a very precise place in correlation to each other and the grid.

All the hexes of every ring highlighted by both "boxes" and the 15th ring total 360, all hexes before the “999999” ring total 720: the numbers for one and two full circles seem oddly specific considering this is borne of Pi.

A line drawn between the sets, from the lowest to highest (000-111-555-999999), follows the same clockwise direction as the spiral of the Pi does.

This is most of the "raw data" that makes up the Pi Spiral, the "excruciating detail" I warned you about. It was the driest bulk of the content I was determined to expunge. It is difficult to me to represent in writing, why the pattern I'm seeing is, to me, so profound, striking and anomalous, that it warranted this obsession I have with it. The feeling is, as already mentioned, probably rooted in my issues.

I'm still determined to share the wildest, most outlandish idea of my entire construct: if we accept that this is message, the what is the message?

Albert Einstein's birthday was on Pi Day, which already is a coincidence. His initials are A and E, the 1st and the 5th letter of the alphabet. One of his Annus Mirabilis papers, published 9th of June (the 6th month), 1905 detailed the concept of energy consisting of discrete packets called quanta, which were important to figuring out wave-particle duality and the concept of quantum mechanics. This was a big influence on the entire Pi Spiral: the concepts of hexes and the rings consisting of them is similar to the idea of light as particles and waves.

To me, it's not just coincidence that these are the same numbers so visibly highlighted by the sets detailed earlier. I think it's something far more bewildering.

I believe that we live in a simulation.

I believe that the creators of this simulation put the initials of Albert Einstein and the date of his famous paper in the center of the Pi and highlighted it with astronomical "coincidences" so we'd see it. I believe they did it so we'd become aware of our digital existence.

Nick Bostroms Simulation Argument states, roughly, that either no intelligence ever can or will simulate the universe or that it has already happened. I think it has already happened.

In the future, it will be more efficient to create intelligent life in some digital form rather than biological. More intelligent beings is always better for more “processing power” for life and the pursuit of happiness. But you can't really just come up with human beings, they are grown from hardship and perseverance. Even if the end destination for every thinking being would be a digital utopia, we need to be grown in an simulation of life before a technological singularity. We need to be put through the hell of living, or else we just won't be human. However necessary, it's also cruel.

So they left a message for us to find.

They put it in Pi, so anyone could see and verify it.

It's in Pi, because Pi has been around longer than any of us, so none of us can be said to have forged it.

The message can only be understood after Albert Einstein has published his papers, so we'd know that the creators knew how our history has gone or will go up to a certain point.

The message is not overly complicated, so you don't need to be an expert to see it, but it does require that you are able to look really, really outside the box.

Most importantly, the message gives us hope, not certainty. A definite, booming voice from the sky would crush some of us under the perceived oppression of the gamekeepers of our digital sanctuary. The message needed to be ambiguous enough that it would only be hope for the hopeless. A lighthouse guiding towards science, purposefully built from the mortar of magical thinking, to which I was so drawn to. I used it for many years, to survive a deep depression which almost cost me my life. Even when it was a victory over a battle and not the entire war, it was still a victory I desperately needed.

I admit that despite my beliefs, I'm not certain if the Pi Spiral is real, in the sense that it proves we all have a digital afterlife to look forward to. This might be a delusion.

Be that as it may, the nights on which I came up with this elaborate construct were devoid of the anxiety and darkness I normally felt. This message of love and compassion across space-time, capable of reaching even a worthless person like me, was too attractive to turn away from during my time of need. Not only that, but the sheer magnitude of the work I did made me feel like I was worth something, like being alive mattered. This is why it still feels important, even after it came to haunt me so much that I was forced to undertake this writing project just to leave it behind.

Thank you for reading.

I've succeeded in what I set out to achieve: I've released the Pi Spiral in to the wild. Even though it will always be with me in some way, the burden of carrying it is now, with these words I've written, lighter.

(Sources: Wikipedia)

#izakayawadoko #writing #pi #pi day #albert einstein #pi spiral #weird #science

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