----- Original Message ----- From: "Chuck Grimes" <cgrimes at rawbw.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Sunday, August 18, 2002 12:11 AM Subject: re: the speed of light redux
>
> ``...John Barrow and friends are the one's who've been finding
strange
> anomalies. Whether scientists will be inclined to give up
nomological
> metaphors etc. once some of their cherished *invariants* look
more
> like products of their equations and theories than of the
phenomena
> themselves will be most interesting to watch; how could it be
> otherwise if there is no god...'' Ian Murray
>
> ----------
>
> Pi in the Sky Barrow?
===================
Yup.
> When I first read this passage, I remember thinking about the
moons of
> Jupiter---all utterly unique, bizarre, and curious each in its own
> way. How odd I thought. What if every object in the sky is
completely
> different from every other object, just as the moons of Jupiter,
or
> the planets of the solar system? What if the whole night sky was
> composed of completely unique bodies, each formed in an
un-repeated
> sequence of events that give them all forms, but historical forms
that
> are as different as each person's face, finger print, or life
history?
> If this were so, then it would not be much of a stretch of the
> imagination to consider that we are unique in exactly the same
way,
> and there is nothing like us, except us, anywhere else. This seems
to
> me to be much more difficult to consider than the standard science
> fiction scenario where every other planet in the galaxy has
somebody
> on it.
================
Novelty and redundancy. Picking up where Carrol and Gordon are talking about Milton, Heaven and anarchy, no writer tried harder to conjoin Einstein's revolution with Milton than Whitehead. Thus his constant juxapositioning of chaos, reiteration and harmony; "The right chaos, and the right vagueness, are jointly required for any effective harmony. They produce the massive simplicity [in physics, isotropy-me] which has been expressed by the term 'narrowness.' Thus chaos is not to be identified with evil; for harmony requires the due coordination of chaos, vagueness, narrowness and width....The immanence of God gives reason for the belief that pure chaos is intrinsically impossible. At the other end of the scale the immensity of the world negatives the belief that any state of order can be so established that beyond it there can be no progress." Also central to Whitehead's work is his emphasis on comparison and difference; irreducible otherness as uniqueness showing up somewhere/everywhere in the observer/observed couplet. Choice of scale and comparisons across scales is far more important than searching for the trivial invariants of classical theories of order.
>
> I think it is much more psychologically terrifying and therefore
more
> titillating, if there was no life anywhere else or if it was
> extraordinarily rare, than if it were a completely repeatable and
> predictiable sequence---given some initial conditions, etc.
>
> In other words, we could arrive at a supremely abstract physics or
science,
> only while we were completely unaware of the concrete details. As
long as
> the objects of astronomy (or sub-atomic particles) were remote,
out of
> focus, and mostly guessed at, we could take advantage of that
> non-specificity, and enjoy the luxury of abstraction simply
because of
> our ignorance of the detail. But once that detail and all of its
> variation and history was impressed on us, then suddenly the
> abstractions would seem extremely crude and highly inaccurate
> approximations.
================
The abstractions *filter* and protect us from sheer data overload the complexity boggles and humbles the very brain[s] "it" has brought forth. Infinity hurts especially when we can't tell whether "it's" different from randomness. This is what Chaitin, with his theory of algorithmic information and incompressibility did to Godel. And it's why Whitehead invokes God to "save us" from the chaos; not as evil, but as overload.
>
> What if with sufficient knowledge of the physical world, it
suddenly
> takes on such a unique cast of characters, that it appears to us
much
> like human history---an utterly unique and unpredictable sequence,
> much like the uncompressible sequence that Barrows outlines above.
>
> Chuck Grimes
====================
"In a sense nature has been continually computing the 'next state' of the universe for billions of years; all we have to do - and, actually all we can do - is 'hitch a ride' on this huge ongoing computation, and try to discover which parts of it happen to go near to where we want." [Tommaso Toffoli]
Ian