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John Wheeler saw the tear in reality
11–20 of 203 posts
Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality
#12Quanta is such a great resource! High value spend from Jim Simons vast pool of dollars. I came across MTW’s “Gravitation” as a student in the 70’s and it inspired a positively unreasonable desire to own a copy just because it looked so beautiful. Couldn’t afford the doorstop of a book at that time but happily it is still in print 50 years later.
They are good at framing advanced science as intuitive and engaging stories, context is always appreciated.
Although, frankly, whenever I see the Quanta URL I tend to skip straight to the comments. It's too verbose to my taste, I just want to understand what the discovery is about, get an understanding of the substantive details without too much prerequisite knowledge, and understand the impact on other research and possibly on applications. But I start reading the article, and it always reads like a biography. The writing is excellent, but I'm afraid I don't always have the time for the literary angle. I am willing to spend a while understanding it but focusing on the meat of the science, the peripheral story comes after if I'm curious.
Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality
#13“Hope produces space and time?” The longer I live the more I appreciate Kurt Gödel’s proof that we can never know everything about the universe. https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-godels-proof-works-202007...
You’d need something bigger than the universe to represent everything in the universe.
It would be funny to find this out empirically. Like in the tower of Babel?
Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality
#14Seriously, this article brings to mind the classic short story about a simulated universe: https://qntm.org/responsibility
And also the wildly speculative conjecture that our universe will be retroactively created by a super intelligent AI in the precise manner necessary to facilitate its own existence, from which it follows that we exist for the express purpose of creating it. (If anybody knows the source I might have stolen this one from please let me know.)
Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality
#15Seriously, this article brings to mind the classic short story about a simulated universe: https://qntm.org/responsibility And also the wildly speculative conjecture that our universe will be retroactively created by a super intelligent AI in the precise manner necessary to facilitate its own existence, from which it follows that we exist for the express purpose of creating it. (If anybody knows the source I might ha…
There is a dark version of this (with some pascal's wager thrown in) called Roko's basilisk. Maybe that's what you're thinking of?
Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality
#16“Hope produces space and time?” The longer I live the more I appreciate Kurt Gödel’s proof that we can never know everything about the universe. https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-godels-proof-works-202007...
You’d need something bigger than the universe to represent everything in the universe.
Not if compression is involved.
Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality
#17“Hope produces space and time?” The longer I live the more I appreciate Kurt Gödel’s proof that we can never know everything about the universe. https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-godels-proof-works-202007...
You’d need something bigger than the universe to represent everything in the universe.
Is that necessarily true for all universes?
I suppose an empty universe represents itself. Or you could have a universe with matter distributed in the shape of https://xkcd.com/688/
Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality
#18“Hope produces space and time?” The longer I live the more I appreciate Kurt Gödel’s proof that we can never know everything about the universe. https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-godels-proof-works-202007...
Obligatory: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/real-3
Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality
#19Seriously, this article brings to mind the classic short story about a simulated universe: https://qntm.org/responsibility And also the wildly speculative conjecture that our universe will be retroactively created by a super intelligent AI in the precise manner necessary to facilitate its own existence, from which it follows that we exist for the express purpose of creating it. (If anybody knows the source I might ha…
Maybe "the last question"?
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
Re: John Wheeler saw the tear in reality
#20Seriously, this article brings to mind the classic short story about a simulated universe: https://qntm.org/responsibility And also the wildly speculative conjecture that our universe will be retroactively created by a super intelligent AI in the precise manner necessary to facilitate its own existence, from which it follows that we exist for the express purpose of creating it. (If anybody knows the source I might ha…
Stanislaw Lem, The Star Diaries, where Tichy at the same time apologizes and brags about how he retroactively tried to create/fix the world and how he failed.