@article{ijp2014269,
author={Bergstrom, Arne},
title={Carl Sagan¡¯s Conjecture of a Message in ¦Ğ},
journal={International Journal of Physics},
volume={2},
number={6},
pages={264--266},
year={2014},
url={http://pubs.sciepub.com/ijp/2/6/9},
issn={2333-4886},
abstract={In his novel <i>Contact</i>, the astrophysicist Carl Sagan hypothesized an alien message to be buried somewhere deep inside the numerical representation of the transcendental number <span style="font-family:Times New Roman; font-size:16px;">&#960;</span>. The present article looks for markers that might possibly support such a hypothesis, and surprisingly finds a sequence of seven successive zeros (actually seven successive nines rounded off) at a depth of 3256 digits into the representation of 2<span style="font-family:Times New Roman; font-size:16px;">&#960;</span> in the special case of base ten. Finding such a sequence of zeros within the first 1000 digits has a probability of 1 in 10000. No such occurrences happen even remotely for 2<span style="font-family:Times New Roman; font-size:16px;">&#960;</span> at any base other than ten, nor even remotely in corresponding representations of other common transcendental numbers, such as <i>e</i>, which appear in physical applications. In <span style="font-family:Times New Roman; font-size:16px;">&#960;</span>, this occurrence thus also remarkably appears at a depth that is a multiple of the same power of two as bits in a computer byte, which thus makes it even more enigmatic. Still, these effects are most probably just numerical coincidences without physical relevance.},
doi={10.12691/ijp-2-6-9}
publisher={Science and Education Publishing}
}
