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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Perhaps these theories only seem "bizarre" to us because we're used to
> things which aren't exceptionally small or large? ;-)
I saw an interesting lecture (Carl Sagan, I think?) who pointed out that
if we were the size of insects, we'd barely notice gravity and we'd be
much more concerned about surface tension, for example.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
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Darren New wrote:
> I saw an interesting lecture (Carl Sagan, I think?) who pointed out that
> if we were the size of insects, we'd barely notice gravity and we'd be
> much more concerned about surface tension, for example.
Or if we were radically larger/smaller, the concept of a "fixed point in
space" would seem incongruous.
(On a large scale, planets, stars and galaxies wander round all over the
place Similarly on a sufficiently small scale.)
Why no SciFi writers have caught on to this idea I don't know...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Why no SciFi writers have caught on to this idea I don't know...
Greg Egan does a wonderful job with all these kinds of oddities. I'm
sure I've mentioned him before.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Or if we were radically larger/smaller, the concept of a "fixed point in
> space" would seem incongruous.
>
> (On a large scale, planets, stars and galaxies wander round all over the
> place Similarly on a sufficiently small scale.)
That's a problem for time traveling. You have to travel in time yet stay in
the same point in space. Oh wait, that would leave you in the middle of
nowhere without an atmosphere. You have to stay in the same point in space
*relative to your planet*!
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> This is Wolfram's turing-complete 1-dimensional CA, in case you didn't
>> recognise it.
>
> Yes, I *own* the book. ;-)
Where I come from, it'd be embarrassing to admit to that.<G> I read
perhaps 30-40 pages before I tired of the Mathematica evangelism and
megalomania. Sure glad libraries exist.
--
Psychoceramics: The study of crackpots.
/\ /\ /\ /
/ \/ \ u e e n / \/ a w a z
>>>>>>mue### [at] nawaz org<<<<<<
anl
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Darren New wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> More specifically, I would imagine this is Wolfram's assertion that
>> the universe might be a giant CA, which would explain why certain
>> physical quantities have a discrete, "quantum" nature.
>
> There are a number of people who assert such a thing, actually. Wolfram
> was more summarizing there than inventing, methinks.
If I recall correctly, the specifics of the possibilities he suggest for
how the current laws of physics can be computed by a CA are also
provably wrong under a rather reasonable set of assumptions. (note that
I might be getting the details on this wrong, since it was a while back
that I read about it). I can try to find the link again if anyone's
interested.
When I get some free time I'll still read the book though, since I'm
curious about it and I'm sure that it will still be interesting, I'm
just highly skeptical of his main thesis.
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Kevin Wampler wrote:
> If I recall correctly, the specifics of the possibilities he suggest for
> how the current laws of physics can be computed by a CA are also
> provably wrong under a rather reasonable set of assumptions.
I'd like to see that link. Sounds interesting.
But, yeah, I think the ones I've seen that are close to right are
networks with the distance between nodes being roughly plank length, and
the only important thing is the number of links coming from each node
and where they go. Not quite "cellular" as such, but similar.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Orchid XP v8 [mailto:voi### [at] devnull]
> Perhaps these theories only seem "bizarre" to us because we're used to
> things which aren't exceptionally small or large? ;-)
Or it could be that things get more and more complex to explain what
we're seeing, since you need all the rules we're familiar with to
explain things at our level, *plus* additional rules to explain things
at other levels.
...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com
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Chambers wrote:
> Or it could be that things get more and more complex to explain what
> we're seeing, since you need all the rules we're familiar with to
> explain things at our level, *plus* additional rules to explain things
> at other levels.
The rules at other levels are actually pretty simple. It's understanding
1) how to actually calculate the values, and
2) what it means statistically when you add up huge numbers of
almost-zero values
that it gets tricky.
E=mc^2 - That's pretty much it. :-)
There's only something like ten numbers plugged into something like four
or five equations that essentially describe the entire universe (as far
as people understand it).
The problem is that the equations are an infinite number of
successively-smaller values for even something as simple as "an electron
goes from here to there", let alone to the complexity of the cultural
interactions between clusters of neurons leading to "some people believe
in a god."
And of course, there's *just* enough weird stuff going on that people
aren't quite sure what's happening. QED is pretty well figured out, and
relativity certainly seems to check out, but gravity is incompatible
with QED and every time someone figures out something cosmological,
something else crops up to add another free variable (hence, dark
matter, dark energy, dark force, dark gravity, etc).
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
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> I saw an interesting lecture (Carl Sagan, I think?) who pointed out that
> if we were the size of insects, we'd barely notice gravity and we'd be
> much more concerned about surface tension, for example.
Yeh, this comes about because gravity forces, mass and inertia etc all scale
with length cubed, but surface tension scales with length squared. This is
an important concept in Engineering when making very small things.
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