As though the "non-dimensional" fruit constant would be arise from a quantity of apple as measured by a unit defined as the average weight of a sample of oranges. If the orange average yields a Real number, small changes in either quantity have random effects and probably makes the comparison of apples and oranges appear chaotic, and some derivative in the relationship between them could yield an irrational constant.
Their example of R0 for viral spread and Mach2 always being twice the speed of sound are ways of enumerating a phenomenon based on some consistent physically observed measure (e.g. speed of sound in our atmosphere), and then applying an abstraction or counterfactual to the number (2x, half, etc), and you get irrational artifacts as a result. That is, you can use these non-dimensional numbers to reason effectively about physical phenomena, but not to compute precise simulations of them them in reasonable resource/timeframes.
I'd wonder if the precision of a given non-dimensional measurement and the complexity class of the algorithm required to compute it past a certain point of precision have a fast heuristic for determining it. Again, layman with language and not the tools or background, but coupled with an emerging popular interest in analog computing (optical chips, AI, fractals, synthesis, quantum etc) it just piques the imagination about what in math is signal, and what may be noise.
"Two competing effects determine the vertical motion and concentration of particles in this region—gravity pulling them down to the ground and turbulent air that generates drag forces that can lift them up. Researchers often quantify these competing effects by a non-dimensional settling number, Sv, which is the ratio between how fast the particles settle in the absence of turbulence and the characteristic speed of the turbulent air flow near the surface. The conventional wisdom is that when Sv is very large, the effects of turbulent winds on the particle motion can be ignored, while when Sv is very small, the effects of gravitational settling can be ignored."
"our numerical simulations revealed something very surprising; gravitational settling strongly affected the particle concentration profiles in a turbulent boundary layer even when Sv was very small."