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The reason being, that once you go large enough, a multiplier of three is irrelevant, and they only really care about orders of magnitude. You might be tempted to argue that that doesn’t happen inside the solar system, and you’d be right. Mostly.

Except that astronomy doesn’t concern itself with just our system. So yes. Astronomers do frequently round to 1 because it really doesn’t matter that much in the scheme of things. (particularly talking about distances.) it’s even more so for cosmology.

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dmention7@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Sure, I totally agree that when you’re dealing many with orders of magnitude, the factor of 3 is dwarved by the other uncertainties.

But we’re talking about our solar system, and specifically the orbital mechanics of our planets and sun, where the quantities and scales only span a couple orders of magnitude in total. A factor of 3 absolutely makes a difference. That’s the difference between the orbit of Mercury and the orbit of Earth.

Then there’s the practical point that, regardless of scale, rounding a known constant by that much makes no sense at all, unless you’re trying to estimate huge numbers in your head. If you’re using even the simplest of calculator, estimating pi as 1 is a deliberate choice to reduce accuracy.

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- mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  This. Most calculators and programming languages already have pi defined, there is no reason to round it nowadays
  
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  - FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Not when that definition of pi goes to all 300 trillion decimals that we have resolved. (To be fair, I don’t know of any that do… but eh…yeah. And I’m pretty sure it was defined by a masochist if one did.)
    
    That leads to unnecessary time spent calculating even simple equations. That level of precision is almost never actually needed.
    
    With fermi problems, usually that level of precision is moot and potentially a waste of time. (Particularly when the math is requiring some kind network cluster to do.)
    
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    mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Pi has it’s own button on most graphing calculators, and those that don’t usually only requure 2 button presses to get it. Meanwhile, there’s some iteration of ‘pi()’, ‘pi’, etc. in most programming languages
    
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davidagain@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
You’ve got to be a little bit careful, surely, because then one squared is ten.

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