Little prince, circles and the euler flask

May 26, 2025

I really strongly believe there are no digital circles. You might be able to draw a circle on an IPhone and look at it and it seems round, but the concept of an inherently binary system comes down to the last bit which will either be 1 or 0. Don't get me wrong, there is software that is used by physicists and engineers to apply to the world, and since a long time they dont't have encountered problems facing rounding errors, because they are just not that grave anymore because 64 bit systems get down to a very precise measurement. Let's look at a floating point measurement. If you are a machine supplier maybe for medicinal purposes you get your hands down and dirty down to nano particles which would be 0.00000000001. You can calculate such values with consumer hardware since the 80s probably. So why would it ever come to question what happens if the ciphers on the right to the point are infinetely many? To this day no digital system can do this. Not even digital supercomputers can do that. Quantum computers can, but that's another topic which we might come back to later. Whatever method you will use to draw the circle you need a irrational number to construct it. You can't describe the circle fully but you can describe its bounds with integer numbers. Like the planets in the little prince every inhabitant lives in his own box bound to it, not able to come out of it. Only the little prince himself is able to travel between the planets. While every inhabitant of the planet he inhabits is the mirror image of the planet, the little prince gets lost while traveling not finding his spot to be. Saint-Exupery uses the little prince in combination with his love for and to his rose as a symbol for finding love in a diverse world. While the places all follow their principles to which their inhabitant is bound you can get lost and the little prince slowly fades away into nonexistence. Like the euler flask the inner principles of our egocentristic lifes we need to follow to sustain ourselves can get a hold of us to much unfolding to an outside which we might feel does not represent our real selves to the outside world while our inner selves become more and more shallow, fading away like the little prince.