Dust theory is cool, but I really, really wish someone could simplify and explain the world of Egan's Dichronauts to me.
A Brief Explanation of Greg Egan’s Dust Theory
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Re: A Brief Explanation of Greg Egan’s Dust Theory
#132Greg Egan is my favorite author. My favorite book of his is Diaspora. If you loved Permutation City you may also love Diaspora. The first chapter of Diaspora is brilliant, if you try reading it, and find that you enjoy it, you will then like the whole book.
The first chapter is on Egan's site: https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html
Re: A Brief Explanation of Greg Egan’s Dust Theory
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Surely you would not call a differential equation with a given initial condition describing a simple harmonic oscillator along with an initial condition “inconsistent”. No, certainly not. > Would you call it incomplete? Yes, absolutely. There is no such thing as a harmonic oscillator that exactly follows an equation like that. Show me one. Either the formal system has nothing to do with the real world, or it is an…
> Either the formal system has nothing to do with the real world, or it is an incomplete approximation of it. Ok, but this is a totally separate meaning of “incomplete” than what the incompleteness theorems are talking about. So, if that is what you meant by “incomplete” in your original comment, you should know that your comment looked like it was appealing to Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, which do not deal with…
Added some clarification - Yes, the incompleteness theorems only concern the behavior of mathematical/formal systems themselves. But to me it seems perfectly reasonable that correspondingly, there may be features of the universe ("true statements") that cannot be modeled ("proven") by any given physical theory ("formal system"). I cannot prove this, but nobody can prove the opposite belief, either.