Okay, let's talk about pi for a minute. You remember pi, right - number of times bigger
a circle's circumference is than its diameter? It's a little more than three - we could call
it 3.14 or three and a seventh and be accurate enough for most applications. You could use
thirty nine decimal places and be accurate enough for all applications. But pi's digits
keep on going. Forever. And they're random. So this means you can find your birthday in
pi - mine occurs at the 33,870th decimal place. But what about something longer, like
your phone number? My 7-digit phone number doesn't occur within the first million decimal
digits, but because the digits are random and unending, I'm certain to find it if I
look far enough. In fact, for this reason, you can find any number you look for somewhere in pi.
Let's switch to binary for a bit - pi looks
like this now. The digits are just zeros and ones, but they're still random and unending,
and this means that any given sequence of digits will turn up if you look far enough
down the line. Computer files are just binary strings, so we could find your favorite mp3
somewhere in pi. We could find a picture of you in there, or a picture of what you'll
look like in 10 years. It's not likely that we'll find a particular sequence of digits
quickly, but we can rest assured that it's in there somewhere. There's the sound of your
first words in there, and a video of your 10th birthday party. Your DNA is in pi, along
with the DNA of every other creature. Every YouTube video, every Wikipedia article, every
piece of information that will ever exist is sitting there, already, somewhere in those
digits. So think about that the next time you see a circle.