In 1897 the Indiana House of representatives passed a bill that attempted to regulate an important aspect of scientific research. Which aspect of science was involved?

You may remember the constant π (equal to 3.1415926535...) from school when working with circles and other geometric shapes. However, the same constant also plays an important role in fields of mathematics and science besides trigonometry. These other fields include number theory, statistics, cosmology, mechanics and thermodynamics.

At the end of the nineteenth century a physician, Dr. Edwin J. Goodwin, tried to persuade the Indiana legislature to pass a bill that described a method to square the circle and contained several incorrect values for π, including 3.2. The so-called Indiana Pi Bill became notorious as an attempt to use legislation to set the value of a scientific constant. Indiana House Bill No. 246 (1897) was passed by the Indiana House of Representatives, but then rejected by the Senate.