11–20 of 103 posts
In my Lovecraftian phase I imagined an infinite winding black pagoda with brail inscriptions on its walls. If you're very lucky you would wander up or down until you died of thirst reading nothing but nonsense. If you weren't you'd find the necronomicon or worse. Unlike the library the text would not be finite and there would be no limit to the eldritch horrors you could find within.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose#:~:text=T....
It's been said that the maze-like library in "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco was inspired by the Library of Babel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose#:~:text=T... .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
https://utopiaordystopia.com/tag/claude-shannon-a-mathematic...
I really like this story. The idea that everything is written inside one of the books of this library is mind blowing!
More perplexing to me is the notion that such a library contains no information, owing to this description: > each book is unique and irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles - books that differ by no more than a single letter, or comma If one were to try and distinguish one book of Shakespeare from another, they would need the full text they are l…
But the library also contains an infinite number of flawed attempted proofs.
My favorite is "The Immortal": https://matiane.wordpress.com/2019/10/11/immortal-by-jorge-l...
I emerged into a kind of small plaza — a courtyard might better describe it. It was surrounded by a single building, of irregular angles and varying heights. It was to this heterogeneous building that the many cupolas and columns belonged. More than any other feature of that incredible monument, I was arrested by the great antiquity of its construction. I felt that it had existed before humankind, before the world it…
Unfortunatelly, that translation failed to capture at least two keywords in the original: "patio" (courtyard) and "obreros" (artificers). Both terms have many overtones in the borgean vocabulary, both have heavy loaded connotations in his literature and in the Buenos Aires language.
"Humankind" for "hombres" is strange as well: I don't think "humanidad" was a borgean term; I do not know if there's a better way to translate "los hombres" though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More perplexing to me is the notion that such a library contains no information, owing to this description: > each book is unique and irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles - books that differ by no more than a single letter, or comma If one were to try and distinguish one book of Shakespeare from another, they would need the full text they are l…
Riemann's hypothesis, if true, is proven in an infinite number of ways in the library. But the library also contains an infinite number of flawed attempted proofs.
Any Fermi Problem-like answers to how large the library would be, based on how the number of permutations of the books and the size of each room? Is it an easy guess to say larger than the size of the universe?
* 410 pages
* 40 lines per page
* 80 characters per line
* Not included: The characters on the front cover, maybe 15 on average?
There are 25 symbols.
So there are 25^(410*40*80) possible books, which comes out to ~10^1834097 books. Sufficed to say, the library could hold numerous universes.