Pi is wrong... really.
scientopia.orgEven worse is our definition of temperature... it should really be the reciprocal. The thermodynamic definition is:
1/T = dS/dE where S is entropy and E is energy
dS/dE has a nice intuitive ring to it "if I put a small amount of energy into the system, how will its entropy change", but since we declare that to be 1/T we allow crazy things like negative and infinite temperatures (these actually exist - and the negative temperatures are hotter than the positive ones).
On the other hand, most heat transfer relations are proportional to delta-T, so a T' = 1/T definition would make thing like
q = h (T_2-T_1)
become
q = h( 1/T'_2 - 1/T'_1 )
Perhaps unlike the case for pi, I think there's a good argument here for keeping temperature as-is.
A similar (primary-source) article was posted about 5 months ago, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1449813.
pi = half, 2 pi = the whole...
what's more direct?
Did you read the article? So many fundamental equations become more elegant when pi is redefined in this way. Isn't pi/2 = half, pi=whole more direct?