Meme of two women fighting while a man smokes from a pipe in the background.
The women fighting are labeled "mathematicians defining pi" and "engineers just using 3 because it's within tolerance"
The man smoking is labeled "astrophysicists" and the pipe is labeled "pi = 1"
Electrical engineer. Never used 3. Always 3.14. don't really get the joke.
I just use the pi from my calculator or numpy/matlab. But I'm often too lazy for vacuum speed of light and use 3e8 m/s.
That's close enough for radio. You can't cut an antenna much closer than that precision, and it'll stretch or shrink with temperature anyway. I guess the error could add up enough to be a problem in lengths of fibre optic cables, especially as they run at about c/3
That's kind of the beauty here, you only get a relative error (0.069%) and it's mostly insignificant to the point of being smaller than your fabrication tolerances. This should also be the case for fibre optics. The error can't really add up, you scale everything to a multiple of the wavelength and you calculate the wavelength using the speed of light.
I've seen some blueprints who use 3.5. I guess it's close enough but definitely not too small
Strange. If you're going to use a decimal point, why not the right one?
You are correct, I used the wrong one for my region but according to Swedish Wikipedia (bad source) the US and UK uses a . If that is incorrect I'm happy to be corrected!
https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimaltecken
LOL. That's not what I meant. Unfortunately it is what I said.
What I should have said is, if you are going to use a number after a decimal point (or comma in Europe) then why not use the right number. My bad.
A very good question, I think it was in an old DIY wood crafts book for older kids. I'm gonna dig through my book boxes to see if I find it :) Any excuse to go through them!
Edit: I'm autistic so it's not uncommon to read stuff to literally, so don't worry
Electrician over here is killing the buzz
Electrical engineer. I'm nowhere near as useful as an electrician.