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The Second Law of Thermodynamics (2011)
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Re: The Second Law of Thermodynamics (2011)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
That makes much more sense than my flash, which had been following a spark in the other direction: Delimited continuations are functions, and as such (in a world of algebraic types where we can take sums and products of types) exponentials of types, ran^dom. [in particular, with the substitution of isomorphism for equality they follow the normal K-12 rules: C^(A+B) ~= C^A * C^B, etc.] I'd just been glancing at https:…
:) I'm guessing you might have wanted to sloganize that as: "DC's are algebraic" https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/42431/how-to-te... This reverse flash might be what could motivate me to make the connection useful.. an exercise in geometric vengeance (and intuition building) for me to use backtracking DCs in optimization problems (engineering => SDP/IPs)? now to find a plug-and-chug example.. A bunch of t…
> picking the "most representative", not necessarily the most optimal path.
My impression was that stationary/coherent action picks out inflection points, which happen to be optimal in many cases, but are not necessarily?
Re: The Second Law of Thermodynamics (2011)
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
:) I'm guessing you might have wanted to sloganize that as: "DC's are algebraic" https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/42431/how-to-te... This reverse flash might be what could motivate me to make the connection useful.. an exercise in geometric vengeance (and intuition building) for me to use backtracking DCs in optimization problems (engineering => SDP/IPs)? now to find a plug-and-chug example.. A bunch of t…
> picking the "most representative", not necessarily the most optimal path. My impression was that stationary/coherent action picks out inflection points, which happen to be optimal in many cases, but are not necessarily?
I don't know if this counts as an indecent flash, because.. well it is a half-formed opinion (malformed intuition?) born of recent experience..
It's hard to describe this personal experience succinctly, nevertheless I can relate it to wizened physicists often marvelling at having terms miraculously cancel when they engage in the voudou popularly known as path integration
Re: The Second Law of Thermodynamics (2011)
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
>merely called a "principle" Merely a principle? In science principles are what mathematicians call Axioms. Not proven but taken as true because you have to start somewhere, and it is the only thing that makes sense. The cosmological principle is the philosophical position that physics works the same everywhere. We haven't done physics experiments across the universe, so we can't call it a law because there is not en…
You are confusing the cosmological principle with the uniformitarian principle [1]. The cosmological principle concerns the large-scale distribution of matter (not of laws) in the universe, and that is something we arrived at empirically, through observations with large telescopes (galaxies are approximately equally distributed in all directions) and the measurement of the cosmic microwave background. It doesn't get…
Considering I quoted the Wikipedia page on the Cosmological principle, I disagree but IDK maybe Wikipedia is wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle
As far as I am aware Uniformitarianism is basically the same thing but covers a bit more since it includes "natural processes" like the results of erosion and is used by Earth science types. Cosmological principle is used at the cosmological scale so they don't bother including planetary natural processes in their axioms.