In soccer a coin toss is used to decide who goes first in a
penalty shootout and similarly in American football a coin
decides who plays offence in overtime. But is this really fair?
This article explores an alternative. Space is the stage on
which physics happens. It's unaffected what happens it and it
would still be there if everything in it disappeared. This is
how we learn to think about space at school. But the idea is as
novel as it is out-dated. The number pi can be expressed
beautifully in terms of infinite sums. For practical purposes
though, these sums are rather disappointing: they converge
slowly, so you need to sum a large number of terms to get
accurate estimates of pi. Here's a clever way to make them
converge faster. Would you stake your fortune on a 100 to 1
outsider? Probably not. But what if, somewhere in a parallel
universe, the straggling nag does come in first? Would the
pleasure you feel in that universe outweigh the pain you feel in
the one in which you've lost? Questions not dissimila