Legislating Science

There have been many recent accusations that policy makers in governments around the world have been ignoring science, resulting in ridiculous and dangerous policies. There is some truth to that. Quite a bit, actually. Biofuel policy is one of my biggest personal pet peeves right now, what with the massive spike in global food prices and the rapid depletion of one of the world's largest aquifers. But hey, at least all that biofuel solved our climate change problem!

Still, at least our current policy makers are only trying to ignore science. Back in 1897, the Indiana legislature went one step further, with Bill 246, also known as the Indiana Pi Bill. The full title of the bill is "A Bill for an act introducing a new mathematical truth and offered as a contribution to education to be used only by the State of Indiana free of cost by paying any royalties whatever on the same, provided it is accepted and adopted by the official action of the Legislature of 1897".

Let's just ignore that part about a mathematical truth to be used ONLY by the state of Indiana for the time being. Let's talk about what the bill actually contains.

There's a common legend surrounding this bill that says that it actually wanted to legislate the value of pi to be equal to 3, to make calculations simpler in Indiana. Sadly, this isn't actually the case, though the bill does use incorrect values for pi (for example, 3.2) a bunch of times. Fortunately, the actual content of the bill isn't any less ridiculous.

The bill contains a method for "squaring the circle", which is a hypothetical process whereby a compass and a straight edge can be used to reliably and precisely draw a square with the same area as a given circle. Sounds useful, I know. I'd want that kind of powerful knowledge exclusively for my state, too. There's just one problem: it's impossible to square a circle with a compass and a straight edge. In fact, it was irrefutably proven to be impossible 15 years earlier, by Ferdinand von Lindemann.


Fig. 1: Ferdinand - "Can't be done."

That didn't stop Edwin J. Goodwin (the architect of Bill 246), though. He bravely stepped outside the bounds of knowledge to show that circles could indeed be squared with a compass and a straight-edge, so long as you make a few minor adjustments to universal constants, and don't mind your answer being off by a factor of π/4.

With Goodwin as a model, all sorts of new possibilities arise. We could start by legislating a mandatory 100 year moratorium on sea levels rising. And, while we're at it, we should tack on a rider to change the properties of CO2 from "greenhouse gas" to "FUNhouse gas", because really, couldn't the world use a little more fun?