Free Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science by Richard Preston Page B

into order.” But as he gazed into the nature beyond nature, he wondered if he stood close to a revelation about the circle and its diameter. “Any very high hill in this picture, or any flat plateau, or deep valley would be a sign of something in pi,” he said. “There seem to be, perhaps, slight variations from randomness in this landscape. There are, perhaps, fewer peaks and valleys than you would expect if pi were truly random, and the peaks and valleys tend to stay high or low a little longer than you’d expect.” In a manner of speaking, the mountains of pi looked to him as if they’d been molded by the hand of the Nameless One, Deus absconditus (the hidden God). Yet he couldn’t really express in words what he thought he saw. To his great frustration, he couldn’t express it in the language of mathematics, either. “Exploring pi is like exploring the universe,” David remarked.
    “It’s more like exploring underwater,” Gregory said. “You are in the mud, and everything looks the same. You need a flashlight to see anything. Our computer is a flashlight.”
    David said, “Gregory—I think, really—you are getting tired.”
    A fax machine in a corner beeped and emitted paper. It was a message from a hardware dealer in Atlanta. David tore off the paper and stared at it. “They didn’t ship it! I’m going to kill them! This is a service economy. Of course, you know what that means—the service is terrible.”
    “We collect price quotes by fax,” Gregory said.
    “It’s a horrible thing. Window-shopping in computerland. We can’t buy everything—”
    “Because everything won’t exist, ” Gregory broke in, and cackled.
    “We only want to build a machine to compute a few transcendental numbers—”
    “Because we are not licensed for transcendental meditation,” Gregory said.
    “Look, we are getting nutty,” David said.
    “We are not the only ones,” Gregory said. “We are getting an average of one letter a month from someone or other who is trying to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem.”
    I asked the brothers if they had published any of their digits of pi in a book.
    Gregory said that he didn’t know how many trees you would have to grind up to publish a billion digits of pi in a book. The brothers’ pi had been published on fifteen hundred microfiche cards stored somewhere in Gregory’s apartment. The cards held three hundred thousand pages of data, a slug of information much bigger than the Encyclopaedia Britannica and containing but one entry, “Pi.” David offered to find the cards for me. They had to be around here somewhere. He switched on the lights in the hallway and began rifling through boxes. Gregory got up and began fishing through bookshelves.
    “Please sit down, Gregory,” David said. Finally the brothers confessed that they had temporarily lost their billion digits of pi. “Look, it’s not a problem,” David said. “We keep it in different places.” He reached inside m zero and pulled out a metal box. It was a naked hard drive, studded with chips. He handed me the object. It hummed gently. “There’s pi stored on it. You are holding some pi in your hand.”

     

    M ONTHS PASSED before I visited the Chudnovskys again. They had been tinkering with their machine and getting it ready to go after two billion digits of pi when Gregory developed an abnormality related to one of his kidneys. He went to the hospital and had some CAT scans made of his torso, to see what things looked like in there. The brothers were disappointed in the quality of the pictures, and they persuaded the doctors to give them the CAT scan data. They processed it in m zero and got detailed color images of Gregory’s insides, far more detailed than any image from a CAT scanner. Gregory wrote the imaging software; it took him a few weeks. “There’s a lot of interesting mathematics in the problem of making an image of a body,” he remarked. It delayed the brothers’ probe into the Ludolphian