Reminds me of a funny (probably merely legendary) story about Congress attempting to define the value of pi, to make it a rational number with fewer digits after the decimal point ... so students wouldn't have such a hard time remembering it.

But of course, the world and mathematics are what they are, and they're not subject to definition by any politician.

And then there's Galileo, who knew a thing or two about the dangers of observing and reporting reality.