General > RANT
Continuance of the INfinity Proposal
Numsgil:
Yes, the speed of gravity is generally assumed to equal the speed of light.
You should also check out Zeno's Paradoxes. The arrow paradox in particular seems interestingly close to what you're talking about.
Remember that once you get down to the quantum level, there's a great deal of randomness anyway. Meaning that even if you understood every state of every thing in the universe all at once, it would still be impossible to predict the fate of Shrodinger's cat. So the future will always have an element of uncertainty. That uncertainty can be understood through statistics, which is really a form of lossy compression.
So yes, if I want to exactly predict the flight of an arrow I would need to know the states of every atom in the universe at a time relative to its distance from the arrow. But in practice I can determine the flight of the arrow well enough to kill a man at 50 paces (I did get my Archery merit badge after all ). This is because I'm not really interested in the exact flight of the arrow, just it's probably path to N degrees of certainty. Thought of this way, we should take heart of this fact. There will always be an element of risk involved in every endeavor from unlikely events. Man kind is sure to never become soft.
gymsum:
--- Quote from: Numsgil ---Yes, the speed of gravity is generally assumed to equal the speed of light.
You should also check out Zeno's Paradoxes. The arrow paradox in particular seems interestingly close to what you're talking about.
Remember that once you get down to the quantum level, there's a great deal of randomness anyway. Meaning that even if you understood every state of every thing in the universe all at once, it would still be impossible to predict the fate of Shrodinger's cat. So the future will always have an element of uncertainty. That uncertainty can be understood through statistics, which is really a form of lossy compression.
So yes, if I want to exactly predict the flight of an arrow I would need to know the states of every atom in the universe at a time relative to its distance from the arrow. But in practice I can determine the flight of the arrow well enough to kill a man at 50 paces (I did get my Archery merit badge after all ). This is because I'm not really interested in the exact flight of the arrow, just it's probably path to N degrees of certainty. Thought of this way, we should take heart of this fact. There will always be an element of risk involved in every endeavor from unlikely events. Man kind is sure to never become soft.
--- End quote ---
You seem to be taking examples as the entire idea, but really they are just part of the concept. Its that everything is infinite. Yes there is uncertainty, and Im not talking about predictions, Im talking about universal summation of all knowledge. And I didn't mean to come to the point that everything is one....
Numsgil:
If you're not talking about predictions, then your definition of knowledge is too narrow. The only reason we even evolved the ability to store information is to be able to make predictions about the future. There's been a water hole over there since before I was born, so it's probably still there. The only reason to care about the past is that it has a tendency of repeating itself in the future. I do not care about the current state of the electrons in the atoms in my body, let alone their past state. I care about their aggregate, and what that means for my future. Meaning most "knowledge" or information is useless or at the very least easily compressible.
So yes, it is impossible to know all of everything across all time for the simple fact that it probably doesn't compress very well, so you're storage device would be larger than the universe. That's lossless compression though. Just like the WAV format, most of the information stored in the universe is bulky and not of interest. A clever lossy compression algorithm can take our vast universe and maybe compress it down to just the bits that humans care about. An MP3 of our universe. This lossy compression algorithm is what we know of as science.
gymsum:
I've already discussed what you just said in previous posts, and I believe the original post explained how compression played into the calculations.. And I have no idea what you're talking about when you mention an MP3 formated Universe.... This rant isn't even on topic anymore, its all about perspective now apparently.... I'm not discussing careing or higher archy of importance and memory storage within humans, and I'm not trying to convence you that you can know anything at all. So because you've ran in circles around nothing, I ask this topic close.
Numsgil:
Ha! Only I have the power to close topics. And they just never get closed
I did a text search for "compression". I only find things I've said, so you've never responded to the idea that I can see. Maybe you did and I just didn't understand, you sometimes drift into incoherence.
MP3 compresses raw sound files by removing all the frequencies humans can't hear anyway. And then taking what's left over and doing some compressions on it based on the fact that from millisecond to millisecond, the sound probably changes very little. Compare an MP3 and a WAV of the same sound file to see how much that can make a difference. Then listen to the two sound files and compare their audio quality. So when I say MP3 of the universe, I'm suggesting that the uninteresting bits can be removed from our understanding of it, and we're left with an understanding that is much simpler but retains all the important bits.
While I am at it, do you know what I mean when I say a lossy compression algorithm? As compared with a lossless compression algorithm?
So basically your position is that it's impossible to know everything because the universe at time t + 1 contains all the information at time t and lots of new information. And that we can move that +1 all the way down to some infinitesimal value and then we see that the universe contains infinite information. Am I correct in my understanding of what you're saying?
I am saying two points: 1. It's probably not infinite. There is a finite universe lifetime (maybe), and a finite mass/energy value in the universe. There is a huge, but finite, number of configurations that the mass/energy in our universe can do in a finite period of time. There is one exception: perhaps if the universe collapses on itself, in a big crunch, time dilation and heat would allow a period of essentially infinite data production. Maybe. 2. Even if the data in the universe is infinite, from a strictly practical point of view all the information worth knowing can be known. So even if you're right, it's a rather pathological correctness, since it has absolutely no practical relevance.
Oh, and 3. You do not have the mathematical background necessary to really approach your idea scientifically.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version