It is not a coincidence that there are seven notes in a diatonic music scale.
Yes, because it’s dividing the interval between the sound you get from a vibrating string of a given length and that of a string half/double its length into eight tones, with the octave being where the circle is completed and the beginning of a new circle. It’s also ultimately just a very old convention.
There are seven colors in a rainbow.
Image search “rainbow”. It becomes apparent instantly that the colour bands that appear distinct varies between rainbows. Newton simply declared there to be seven colours, based on his preconceptions, from Christian and Greek nathematical mysticism, even shoehorning in indigo (which to me is a very strange choice to pick over teal). In reality, the colours are a spectrum without sharp distinctions.
There are seven days in a week.
Which comes from Mesopotamian astrology (note that the seven day creation myth is the one that is very obviously constructed post-Babylonian one), based on the seven “moving stars” - the Sun, the Moon and the five planets visible to the naked eye. That’s even still visible in the week names in English and many other languages. And this, even more so than the others, is completely arbitrary - indeed, Ancient Egypt used ten day weeks.
By the way, if the week is a central part of God’s creation, why is the Earth year not neat and tidy fifty-two weeks, but fifty-two weeks plus one-and-ever-so-slightly-less-than-a-quarter day?
The mathematician Alex Bellos asked 44,000 people to name their favorite number and over 4,000 of them named the number 7, far more than any other number. Indeed, ask people to name a number from one to ten and many will name the number seven—as many magicians know. Seven is God's number, and therefore also my favorite number.
Even if this is true, there are two very easy alternative explanations:
1. Seven is particularly prominent and favoured by many people of in Western civilisation due to its ancient positive association from Mesopotamia by the way of Greek philosophy and the Bible.
2. The Hebrews (and other peoples) assigned such a high meaning to seven because it is a number that is prominent to the human mind.
@mithras #87229
Actually, the error is well within the error margin of the measurements described, i.e. imprecise manifacturing compounded due to using multiple strings and Pi being very close to 3, anyways.
Now, as for why the Bible only has a mortal attempt to determine Pi experimentally, rather than God revealing that it is a number slightly below 22⁄7 but impossible to express as a fraction…